Teaching Argument Through Relationships
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Teaching Argument Through Relationships William Keith1 · Roxanne Mountford2 · Timothy Steffensmeier3
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract One way of understanding how to intervene in dysfunctional public discourse is to attend to the ways that we teach argument. This article contends that argument pedagogy would benefit from consideration of the process of argumentation, in which participants are prepared to enter into deliberation by attending to relationality. To ground their discussion, the authors present rhetorical praxis taught in two university sites and one public site. Keywords Argumentation · Relationality · Rhetorical listening · Civic empathy
1 Introduction What is going on in the public sphere these days? The acrimony around the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump seem to signal a kind of failure of public argument. The penetration of conspiracy thinking (aided or not by Russian trolls, Jamison 2018) seems like a serious threat to the possibility of a healthy public discourse, and hence to most notions of liberal democracy. Given these conditions, attention naturally turns to what the study and teaching of rhetoric can offer. The civic traditions of rhetoric that grow roughly out of the legacy of Isocrates, Quintilian and Cicero have always focused, among other things, on the role of reason in public life. While rhetoric has multiple dimensions, some tending toward manipulation and emotion cleaved from rationality, the robust exchange of arguments for deliberative purposes has never been far from the foreground. What form does the public use of reason take? Generally, it is in the ability to argue—that is, to muster arguments and evidence for a position, bill or a policy.
* William Keith [email protected] 1
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, USA
2
University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA
3
Kansas State University, Manhattan, USA
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W. Keith et al.
As Bruce Kimball argues in Orators and Philosophers (1986), a civic and rhetorical version of argument predominated until the first part of the nineteenth century, when at least in America a sea change occurred, when the “folk hero” of the educated class went from Cicero to Socrates, with a corresponding change in the kind of argument valorized, from broad public argument about the particulars of the moment, to bounded philosophical argument about universal themes and claims. In the process, the place of argument in liberal education shifted to a focus on logical arguments, to the syllogism, and later, to formal reasoning and fallacies; the rhetorical character of argument, in college instruction, was therefore attenuated. Discontent with the pedagogies of civic argument arose early in the twentieth century (Keith 2007) as people wondered if the dominant pedagogy of debate represented the best version of democratic politics. The evolution of discussion pedagogy was an attempt to find a different mode of argument, focused on discussion rather than debate. We see ourselves as continuing that project, for a
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