Shifting the Triangle:
Critical Thinking Through the Mediation of Forensic and Media Discourse

E. Stone Shiflet
University of South Florida

This pedagogy is designed to move composition students beyond the role of passive receiver to the role of active critical thinker. My method requires the student to participate in a journey through mediating two familiar types of discourse--the forensic dialogue of the law and the active, declarative dialogue of the news media. In our society, representations of legal action are delivered to students through the continuously fractured mediums of print, radio, television, and the Internet. I say fractured because the reality of media is that it is increasingly instantaneous; it is interactive, and it is available in, literally, dozens of forms. These mediums are wrought with gerunds to advance the immediacy of the delivered message. The primary danger of this virtual pool of information is the same danger incoming Composition students often combat. Just as a passive media consumer is encouraged to absorb information without a critical filter, so is the Composition student often encouraged to look to the teacher for epistemological and ontological certainties that can be prepackaged and easily absorbed. The problem with these scenarios, of course, is the problem Plato saw with discourse in general. If a student does not develop the power to critically mediate information, can the student really learn?

If this question sounds Freirian, it is meant as such. My methods are informed by Paolo Freire's ideas for countering the "Banking Concept" of education in which "…knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing" (Freire 53). This banking concept no longer works in a media-inundated world because the standardized, three network system has been consumed by and placed in competition with dozens of cable and internet services. News sources are competing for viewers whom media executives convert to ratings numbers, then to advertising dollars that keep the news machine moving. In the media race to be different, interactive elements are being incorporated. For example, what started in the 1980's as viewer telephone polls has now accelerated to interactive news and Internet surveys in which the viewer is presented with immediate results. Our students have grown up with this acceleration. In fact, I repeatedly find that virtual mediations of news events are often more real to the students than the events themselves. Media moguls are offering interaction to the viewer, and ratings prove that viewers are taking the bait.

Now, back to the problem I presented earlier. How much critical thinking does a viewer bestow upon that bait? I fear very little, perhaps partly because the media does not tout mediation, but simply participation. I do not want to be guilty of the same pattern. Therefore, I work to encourage student development of mediation skills for critically examining the media's representation of issues being brought before the American court system. The intended by-product of such a process is to empower learners with the ability to form individual methods of knowing through critical thinking. This method mirrors ancient practices at the Academy and the Lyceum. My adaptation of Ancient ideals is modified to apply to the increasingly virtual world of today's learner.

To explicate my adaptation, I will chart the progress of Nicole, a student I learned with during the Spring 2002 semester. During her second semester Composition course, Nicole was asked to write four papers, all of which had to include research cited in MLA form. In the first paper, Nicole had to locate an issue being debated in her academic discipline, which is International Studies. Nicole chose to write about three specific areas of personal interest within her discipline. To gather information, Nicole approached an expert in the field, a PhD, along with a classmate studying within the same discipline. She left the assignment feeling more confident about her chosen major and more confident in entering academic discourse from the perspective of her chosen field. In her second paper, Nicole was asked to find her issue being debated in America's legal system that pertained to her discipline. She went directly to the study of the conditions of prisoners being held captive by American soldiers at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. Nicole explicated possible legal implications of pending court cases that are addressing the levels of humanity involved in prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay. In the third paper, Nicole examined how media portrays the larger issue of punishment through an examination of an American television show related to the same larger issue. For her final work, the rant on the larger issue uncovered in paper three, Nicole spoke with authority and scholarly understanding in a genre that she, ultimately, defined herself after a semester of research.

Nicole and others learning through this pedagogy are writing while advancing critical thought. For the first assignment, Nicole was asked to talk about one specific item. In the second paper, she was asked to find that item, in a broader sense, as a relevant element of an issue under litigation in the court system. At this point, she was encouraged to look for an event, so she was moving from person/thing to event. In the third paper, Nicole advanced her specific issue to pertain to media representations of legal debates pertaining to her larger issue. Thus, in her third composition, Nicole moved forward by isolating the larger issue being confronted in her discipline and by the court system. Additionally, Nicole was asked to turn to media, to popular, entertainment television to locate an instance in which the larger issue of punishment was debated. This practice is in keeping with the Ancient methods of Isocrates and Plato. While Plato encouraged students to seek absolute truth through practiced discourse and Isocrates worked to create good leaders through repeated practice with commonplace topics of discourse, both educators worked toward critical thinking to advance knowledge. These Ancients were diametrically opposed to Sophistic, circular rhetoric and a blind acceptance of the unmediated commonplace. My method is designed to avoid the same forces inherent in using rhetoric without the mediating powers that come with the personal development of critical thinking through rhetorical explication. For her final work, a rant on the larger issue uncovered in paper three, Nicole spoke with authority and scholarly understanding in a genre that she, ultimately, defined himself after a semester of research.

I would now like to conclude by explicating my process through another filter. This filter is a metaphoric system that I call the Illusorio. In Spanish, Illusorio means, simultaneously, illusive, deceptive, and worthless. This one word, Illusorio, encompasses the three participants in the triangle of student, media message, and legal issue(s). When these adjectives are personified, I attach illusive to the student, deceptive to the media, and worthless to the legal system. In this equation, the student is seeking knowledge that can be expressed through the writing process. This process is a pattern of critical thinking that begins with the examination of a specific issue and advances to an idea or larger concept. The acquisition of this knowledge is illusive for the student because the writer is accustomed to occupying a passive role in the reception of information. Therefore, shifting from receiver to active participant requires a shift in the positioning of the triangle.

In psychoanalytic terms, the learner begins in the role of the child in Freud's Oedipal triangle. The "locus of the law" of information is the news media. In theory, the message is deceptive for the media because the news machine does not interpolate the message-it simply delivers it. This method of delivery is dictated by ratings and remains in constant flux. The information mediated by the media, the "locus of the law," originates in the court system. In this triangle, information is worthless to the various participants in the court system because these messages are filtered by litigators sworn to defend one side of a debate. In the American court system, a descendant of Roman law, the litigator, as Cicero states, is a practitioner of plain style. This practitioner of this style, according to Cicero, "…provided he is elegant and finished, will not be bold in coining words, and in metaphor will be modest, sparing in the use of archaisms, and somewhat subdued in using the other embellishments of language and thought" (Cicero 365). Therefore, the images surrounding the issue at hand are worthless from a perspective of critical interpolation because these members of the triangle are sworn to win the argument, not to determine the meaning of a message in a larger context.

 

 

Working backwards through the triangle, the legal system litigates a case, then the media delivers information about that litigation through the framework of the media machine. Thus, media delivers a message that is mediated through industry standards, not patterns of critical thought. Critical thinking is the responsibility of the student. For the student to move from passive receiver to critical thinker, the triangle must shift. Through researching and composing the four papers that begin with the isolation of a specific event or issue, the student completes the journey through critical thought. At this point, the student is empowered to become the mediator and the locus of his/her own laws of reception. Of course, new issues will always be initially illusive to the student, but the acquired powers of critical thinking will equip the student with the ability to examine issues through individual knowledge. This means that the student can determine personal truth about media messages that re-tell the outcomes of litigation within the American court system. In essence, the learner becomes the locus of personal mediation of the real and of the virtual worlds.

 

 

That, in essence, is the process that Nicole has followed. That, in essence, is the core of my teaching philosophy and of my pedagogy. When all of the theories and all of the grading are set aside, I am left with one thought with which I enter the next semester. Education is meant to teach the student to teach him or herself. The goal is to get away from encouraging the student to memorize the critical thinking patterns of others and instead to develop original and personal ways of knowing. This pedagogy encourages that original thought through the examination of mediums that are both familiar and relevant to Composition students. While the journey I ask them to take is, at times, daunting, the rewards, according to my students, are worth the effort. In fact, during a recent exit survey I conducted among the students in Nicole's class, one hundred percent agreed with my following statement: "Education is not meant to be a comfortable place-that should be comforting."

 

Works Cited

Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1999.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Brutus and Orator. Trans. H.M. Hubbel. London: Harvard UP, 1997.