- James Berlin maintains social-epistemic rhetoric is the best system for teaching writing because “social-epistemic rhetoric views knowledge as an arena of ideological conflict: there are no arguments from transcendent truth since all arguments arise in ideology. It thus inevitably supports economic social, political, and cultural democracy” (20). He argues that since teachers cannot get away from ideology, they need to recognize it and use it in the classroom. From your position as a teacher, what are the issues surrounding ideology in classroom praxis?
I guess I’m struggling to understand what “using it in the classroom” would practically look like, because Berlin really doesn’t get into that. He talks about all these things conceptually, but practically speaking I’d like to see what examples he’s got for me. As a teacher, yes, I think this is the ideal; we create a classroom environment where everyone is hashing out their personal ideologies and we’re reaching new understandings of truth for particular people and rhetoric’s role in all that. My caveat to that is that my students literally won’t do that a lot of the time. Right now, for example, I have some students who have hard core political and social justice views in their papers, but in the classroom they won’t speak a word (probably because they recognize that the majority of their peers DON’T have opinions or thoughtful ideology about stuff. So much of it is new to them (e.g. Apartheid–they really didn’t know what the deal was.)) Even when we talk about LGBT issues they all just go crickets on me because they’re clearly not comfortable talking about it. It’s not exactly an environment conducive to the practice of social-epistemic rhetoric.
I also get that he’s more talking about the teacher’s role in acknowledging ideology and “using” it, not necessarily the student’s. But, again I think of ideology as something that’s at least a little bit amorphous. Do I know my own ideology? To an extent, yes, but I’m also learning new things and adjusting my ideology along with my students. I’m recognizing it as I go, and I always will be. It’s not like a fully formed hammer that I can pull out and show to the students before I hit them all over the head with it. And it seems to be that would be true for Berlin as well, since he argues for social-epistemic rhetoric, which he describes as by nature an ever-evolving, discourse-based process, rather than a polished final product.