Tribute to Northern Illinois University
After two years as Visiting Assistant Professor at NIU, my time as a Huskie has come to an end. It was my first job after earning my PhD in May 2017, and I think it has given a definitive stamp to my teaching. Before I move on to the next phase of my career, I want to pause and reflect on some of the pedagogical lessons I will take away from my rich experience here.
I taught four distinct courses during my four semesters: Introduction to Communication Studies (COMS 252), Rhetorical Theory (400), Criticism of Public Rhetoric (401), and Political Communication in America (419). Of these topics, I had only really studied rhetorical theory and criticism in graduate school. This left topics in Interpersonal, Organizational, and Intercultural Communication, Media Studies, and Political Communication for me to study on my own, in preparation to teach the students. Plus I had never taught rhetorical theory or criticism. I scoured old notes, handouts, and syllabi from my various teachers, and rummaged my bookshelves to try and piece together a coherent curriculum that would be "undergraduate ready."
Rather than try and detail every step of my journey (some of which is documented in my teaching portfolio on this website), I decided to pay tribute to the students and curriculum of Northern Illinois University's Department of Communication by listing some pedagogical lessons I learned, in no particular (deliberately conscious) order:
1) Students enjoy learning if it helps them make sense of their lives. Interpersonal Communication comes first in the introductory sequence for a good reason. How often have we all puzzled over the intricacies of our friendships, our love affairs, the reasons underlying intimacy and conflict, what makes us grow closer, drift apart, or abruptly break off contact with someone? Why are families so important and difficult? What subtle factors influence the course and movement of every conversation? The empirical data of our lives are so dense, and our understandings so superficial, that basic theories cannot fail to turn on a proverbial light bulb or two above our heads.
When you layer interpersonal dynamics into digital contexts such as the cell phone and social media, the younger students often can teach the older professors. How long do you wait before texting someone back? What kind of comments are appropriate on Facebook? Throw in the workplace and power dynamics, and students speak about their jobs. Have you ever been asked to do something at work that is not in your job description? What makes a good boss, a good employee, what distinguishes a harmonious workplace from a toxic one?
One of the strengths and seductions of the Communication major, for undergraduates, is the initial focus on complexity in everyday interactions. We do get the feeling that social tact matters. Our lives increase or decrease in satisfaction in proportion to our ability to get along with each other, to negotiate (and sometimes disrupt) social norms, and perhaps most importantly, what they call "meta-communication," the ability to speak or reflect about our communication habits. How many circular or futile arguments can be circumvented by the sudden interjection of awareness that "we have been through this before"? I don't think anyone can guarantee outcomes through theory, but the strength of the intellect can certainly help guide us and humble us to the importance and subtlety of the most basic communication tasks.
2) It is important to learn the strengths and limitations of the scientific method. Much of communication theory has been constructed on patient, meticulous observation, whether under controlled "laboratory" or naturalistic "field" conditions. I often repeat the phrase, when speaking of empirical science, that "you find what you are looking for." Each significant research question can give birth to a theory, but that theory will exclude every aspect of reality that does not fall within the scope of the original question. As long as students understand this, they can equip themselves to make use of theories as they present themselves as relevant. The danger of science is its tendency to become dogmatic, to inflate one kind or set of observations as determining reality, forgetting that science originates in human curiosity, doubt, and testing, which can always be corrected or modified.
3) Students will embrace "the classics" if teachers handle them the right way. For this point, I have specifically in mind Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, the primary figures in the canon of ancient rhetorical theory. Should you expect students to read and absorb every word of Aristotle's Rhetoric? Will students grasp every nuance of the differences between the characters of Polus and Callicles in Plato's dialogue Gorgias? Can they be expected to grasp the details of Roman legal procedure? Not likely. Should we therefore reject the classics? Far from it.
My suggestions: pick your texts carefully, make students buy (or rent) the books, and allow yourself significant class time to go through the major contours of whatever you want to emphasize. I'll give you a few examples of my successful procedures, and invite you to improvise in your own contexts.
Plato's Gorgias: I have a Powerpoint presentation on this dialogue, and I typically ask students to read through the first few pages in class, assigning parts to students who volunteer to read (I never force anyone to participate, but I will ask students to read if no one volunteers), but I found the best aid to this dialogue was writing a condensed summary. Yes, this was quite labor intensive, but initiating twenty-first century students into a love and understanding of the classics? Priceless. One student asked of later classical texts, where is the condensed summary? I said I didn't have time to do the other ones, that's a lot of work, you know? Ok, they understand, they'll forgive me and we'll smile about it.
Small note on the Gorgias: Although Plato's putative topic is the truth or falsehood of rhetoric, the deeper theme is power and justice. Ask the students, if you could commit any crime (injustice) and get away with it, would you do it? I find especially some young men react the way Nietzsche would have predicted in his Will to Power, Book IV:
"One would make a fit little boy stare if one asked him: 'Would you like to become virtuous?'-- but he will open his eyes wide if asked: 'Would you like to become stronger than your friends?'--"
And so the class gains an introduction to the character and arguments of Callicles. Talk about relevance to all of our lives!
Aristotle's Rhetoric: I'll just relate a brief anecdote on this text that secured its importance (for me) in an undergraduate curriculum. I asked my COMS 400 classes last fall (2018) to select one (or two, was it?) short section(s) or passage(s) and give some commentary on it, pretty much any reaction they had. I don't have the text nearby, but a famous and wonderful portion of Book II Aristotle devotes to a study of human emotions, especially those most frequently exploited by rhetors. The first of these is anger. I always loved Aristotle's analysis of anger, from the moment I first read it in Ellen Quandahl's ancient rhetoric course at San Diego State in the fall of 2006.
We feel angry at being slighted, and we feel anger at the ones we love. On a side note, this simple concept always seemed to explain to me a lot about the native character of my home city, Chicago. But that's another story. It's painful to be angry, we don't want to be angry, we want to rid ourselves of anger. For many of us, we view revenge as the remedy for anger. Think of sibling rivalries! Observe children playing together, or grown-up children bickering.
So one student chose to write about this passage on anger. He said, when I read this, I thought of my father. It described my feelings toward my father. I am angry because he left us. I felt slighted by him, as if he implied we were not worth his time. I wanted revenge against my father. Reading this passage and working through it in writing helped him release his anger, and he seemed, by the end of his short essay, written as a college assignment, to have adjusted his feelings favorably to his own satisfaction. There is part Kenneth Burke and part Sigmund Freud in that sublimation. Success!! Catharsis through the classics.
Cicero's De Oratore: I have less to say about this dialogue, because I could greatly improve my treatment of it. It is so comprehensive and subtle and, in a way, it has "defeated" me both times I tried to teach it. One only has so many weeks in the semester to prepare for class, and in many ways this text remains the fixed center of rhetorical theory. No one before or since has given such a rich portrait of rhetorical life, and I daresay the field's interpretation of Cicero has much room to grow.
I'll just report that students respond to the great senator's jovial humor. Cicero handles the ambivalent relationship between the orator and audience, the line between authentic feeling and manipulative deception with far more grace and tact than the dogmatic Plato. Students pick up on Cicero's analysis of humor and jokes, their rhetorical effectiveness; the speaker's need to feel the emotions he (or she, if we update it) represents to an audience; the histrionics of Roman oratory, the suitability of different styles (high, middle, low) to different audiences and occasions; and the positive sense of ambition through a career in rhetoric that Socrates had deprecated in Athens. Like Whitman, Cicero pauses ahead, waiting for us.
4) Students intuitively recognize the links between power, ideology, and the media. This point relates to the discipline of "media studies," and also constitutes the bulk (as far as I can tell) of the content in Political Communication. Anyone who has gone through graduate school since the 1980s in a humanities-related discipline (and perhaps some of the sciences as well!) has most likely encountered the legacy of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and other scattered theorists of power and ideology. It seems, for now, an indispensable part of the curriculum, and so I teach it.
Ideology depends on the reinforcing inter-relationships between power-institutions: Law, Government, Military, Education, Finance, Health, Fashion, Entertainment, Technology, to name the first that come to mind. Like an integrated personality or ego, these institutions cannot disagree with each other, or the ideology will crumble. The other crucial insight from the Marxist legacy (thank you Gramsci) is the unrelenting power struggle at the center of any ideology. This is easily illustrated by the principle of parliamentary politics (thank you Kenneth Burke). Someone is always in power, and whoever happens to be out of power, you can be sure, will be scheming on the margins, in or out of the shadows, to regain the throne and scepter. "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown," states the all-wise Shakespeare.
This past spring, after a lecture and discussion on hegemony as it applies to the media and power-institutions, one of the most enthusiastic students, who would always sit in the front row, linger after class, and visit office hours, one of those students that a teacher will remember for years afterwards, said in class, "Whoah ... I think I just got 'woke.'" Mission accomplished!!!
Another great quip line I said to the students, as I was deeply immersed in Oscar Wilde's "Decay of Lying" ... "I just realized ... you know everyone is lying to you all the time, right?" But that doesn't solve our problems, it just returns us to Gorgias (the Sophist himself, not Plato's polemical dialogue about him) and the radical insights of post-modernism. Don't be scared! Students can handle this. They welcome the "realness." It doesn't establish anything definitely, it does what our graduate school teachers told us was supposed to happen with post-modernism. It destabilizes everything, but also returns the power of agency to the students. If you recognize the instability of language, its contingency, if you will, you become better equipped to make your own judgments. Like my point # 1, it helps students make sense of their lives.
5) Students need more practice writing. I'll keep this one short because it fuels my long-term career plans, and it originated my interest in graduate study. It doesn't matter how much theory you teach, what text you assign, how clever you or your students are, students need more practice writing. I won't say anything negative (my mother would be proud), but everyone needs more practice writing, and I daresay this is the fundamental objective of the university. See here and here for more of my thoughts on writing instruction.
6) Culture is not a zero-sum game. Cultural differences and "diversity" are not such an insurmountable obstacle as they are often portrayed to be. Yes, we all have a culture. Yes, we all have a race and a gender and an economic position. Yes, these things are fluid. People are not wrong to trouble these categories, and people are not wrong to surmise that there may be something essential to these categories. Everyone has an identity, and rightly so. Everyone has prejudice, and to a certain extent, everyone has a right to prejudice. But besides skin color and genitals, we all have brains, we have the power of language. It's all about respect. Let's acknowledge our differences, let's acknowledge what makes us unique.
On the one hand, we want to learn from others, we want to accommodate others, we want a universal ideal. Yet at the same time—and this is also universal—we all want an "in-group" feeling, we establish identities invariably by both inclusion and exclusion. We reach out to others, but we also recoil from others. Instead of blaming people and attacking each other, we can sympathize and laugh, but only under the right circumstances. It is not as hard as everyone supposes.
Let's begin with the premise that everyone has dignity, everyone suffers insult, and everyone has the capacity for generosity. I have never seen these premises refuted in practice. Our technology tends to alienate us and splinter us, isolate us as everyone says. Think about the principle of casting stones, and think about the principle of loving your neighbor. If you insult me, I won't pretend you are righteously doing me a favor. I would expect you to respond in the same way if I insulted you (see Aristotle on anger? the primary rhetorical emotion?). No one deserves anything, no one owes anyone anything. The state of the world is intolerance and mistrust. If we can break the surface tension through sympathy, through conversation (see point # 1 about interpersonal relationships), through common, mutual interests in identification, however partial and contingent, we might learn to transcend our prejudices. We should view this as an achievement, costly won, as a treasure.
Intercultural communication may be the most important challenge in the world in the twenty-first century. The path may be difficult, but in principle it is also simple. I don’t claim to have the answers, but empirically, through humor, humility, and—perhaps most importantly—a secure self-possession—we can proceed with confidence. We don’t want to undermine others, but we can’t extend our sympathy if we undermine ourselves. Let us begin with the dignity of each individual. I’ll leave the mystery of that principle for you to ponder, as I thank you for reading, and I thank the Communication Department of Northern Illinois University for giving me the best possible launch I could hope for to begin my academic career.