A Rhetorical Approach to Teaching Shakespeare Draft 1

So I posted this a few days ago, but apparently it didn't actually post. Opps! Here's take number two. Here's what I've got so far. Let me know if you think it has promise. I need to link it to the text a little better, but it is a start. 

A Rhetorical Approach to Teaching Shakespeare

Fish swim in water, people swim in rhetoric. –Grant Boswell

            Last year I took both the first and second half of the course, the History of Rhetoric and I remember my professor, Grant Boswell, saying this to our class. From this I gleaned that rhetoric, whatever it was, was important. What I could not understand though, was that if rhetoric was so prevalent in the everyday facets of the human experience, why then had I never learned what it was until I was a junior in college? It seems to me that if rhetoric is something that humans wade through day in and out, then at least shouldn’t at least a cursory glance at this subject have been attempted in a secondary school setting?

            While I have no major qualms about my education as an adolescent in Portland, Oregon, before I went about criticizing the whole of high school curriculum, I thought it best to at least attempt a cursory survey of other persons experience with rhetoric in the secondary setting. I asked several sources. Some said their teachers had vaguely mentioned the topic of rhetoric in high school, others admitted they had at least learned what ‘logos, pathos and ethos’ meant. However the most common response was something like the one given by a friend of mine who responded to a prompt I posted to my facebook account regarding persons experience in the secondary setting with formal rhetoric instruction. Her response was: I have no idea what you just said (MaryLyn Westenhaver). Yet, many people successfully navigate their lives without a concrete knowledge of what rhetoric is. Is it useful then to spend the time in the classroom to cover the basics of rhetoric?

            Another response to this same Facebook post gives a very practical response to this question. David Carter, general manager of Italian affairs in Italy for Micron writes:

choosing rhetoric as a topic in general for High School has great potential…likely they [the students] will have heard the word used to describe political rhetoric…I would suggest that you be sure to relate it to practical skills usable in the workforce. For example the ability to speak publically and effectively command a room full of people or lead without authority are all very practical skills that can differentiate a person from another and lead to a successful professional career.

Helping students to understand how to function in a business world is critical for success in the world today. Many students often ask: why do I need to know this? When am I ever going to use this in real life? Though they may not know it, the skills they learn from studying rhetoric will help them in every communication they will ever have. I would say that warrants a glance or two.

However, with an increasing emphasis on high stakes testing and nationwide standards that must be met, it is already difficult to squeeze all the required material into a jamb-packed school year, let alone tackle instruction that students ‘should’ know about, but is not actually found in the common core. How then can teachers address the important topic of rhetoric without taking away time from everything else they have to teach? Double dipping.

 While double dipping is frowned upon in the food department, it is fair game in the educational circuit and can even enrich the experience of our students with careful planning. In the new common core there is an increasing emphasis on learning skills that are applicable beyond the literary world and on integrating knowledge and ideas. One of the ways suggested by the core to do this is looking at “how Shakespeare treats a theme or topic from Ovid or the Bible or how a later author draws on a play by Shakespeare” (RL.9-10.8). While teaching Shakespeare itself is not explicitly demanded by the new core, his plays are considered a staple in the secondary canon, and his works are again suggested specifically as literature appropriate for students at a ninth and tenth grade level (CCC 58). Therefore, in this paper, I argue that rhetoric is something secondary teachers should teach to their students and that a good way to do so is through using Shakespeare as a vehicle for instruction. While the ideas in this paper are by no means exhaustive, they are useful for teachers wishing to introduce rhetoric to their secondary students.

According to the Common Core, students who meet the standards set out in the core, “reflexively demonstrate the cogent reasoning and use of evidence that is essential to both private deliberation and responsible citizenship in a democratic republic” (CCC 3). This ability to filter information in private and political affairs is something that the study of rhetoric directly addresses and is typically thought of in light of political rhetoric, as David Carter stated earlier. It is the responsibility of teachers to turn out responsible citizens, which means that students must be able to think critically about the issues that plague our country. The ability to understand what is said by politicians as well as the ability to express their own opinions is critical then to every person, to every student. Rather than looking solely at different speeches given by different politicians and analyzing each, which can be time consuming, Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare, lends itself well to demonstrating to students how a political speech functions. In the third act both Brutus and Antony give a speech at Caesar’s funeral. Each employed different strategies aimed at convincing the audience to agree with him and eventually Antony won out. Having the students examine these speeches along with some background of different rhetorical strategies would allow them to draw conclusions about what creates a persuasive argument and what does not. These students could then apply these skills to a myriad of other situations where they are being asked to form opinions based on information given to them from others.

Another important skill rhetoric teaches is imitation. In traditional studies of rhetoric, the best rhetoricians would study the “best practices” and then attempt to copy the form using a different subject or the subject using a different form as an exercise to expand their arsenal of persuasion. This same study is highly effective for secondary students to learn many skills across many different subject areas. While there are many different works and ways to engage this principle of imitation, Shakespeare’s works again lend themselves to this practice. One example is his sonnets. In my college Shakespeare class, each student selected a sonnet to imitate where the form and sometimes even style were kept the same. Each of us learned about the purposes of not only a sonnet, but in using any prescribed form to write. This would be a great discussion for students to engage in as they ponder their own justifications for writing in particular genres.

Both of these are excellent ways to incorporate rhetoric instruction into a secondary curriculum without taking extra time away from other important core requirements. In my expanded paper I plan to explore this idea more in depth.