Rhetoric of Teaching

For my class project I am going to explore rhetoric in the classroom. Thanks to Christy’s help with this idea, I am going to explore the way rhetoric is taught, so in sense, the rhetoric of teaching rhetoric. A specific idea Christy mentioned was gender issues in the classroom and looking at this from a rhetoric lens.

The reason this idea is appealing to me is that I am looking into doctoral programs in Rhetoric and would most like likely teach undergraduate classes while going through the program. I feel that this will help me accomplish three things. One is that I believe this will heighten my awareness of how teachers teach and what traps they fall into while teaching. While I will always fall into some bad habits, I think this training is rare to professors and would give me better perspective.

This project will also give me the research that I would need to do to prepare and use to create a class and curriculum. I can read different texts see which I would assign to the students, what topics seem to be most commonly covered or most necessary to cover and would gather project/papers ideas I could assign.

Lastly I feel that it would just fulfill me intellectually being that I have become quite obsessed with Rhetoric and love an excuse to further my knowledge. Anyone that has taken a Rhetoric class knows that you really need to continually obsess before you start to understand the tiniest bit.

For my deliverable I will write an annotated bibliography. This annotated bibliography will really come in handy when I need to plan out a semester long class I can refer back to it and pull which texts I would want to use. It will also further my research and simply make me more prepared to teach this topic.