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Even though
I’m a new Teaching Fellow, I still consider myself to be
a fairly seasoned member of the Stanford community. I spent six
years here as a graduate student, and taught PWR several years
back as part of my degree program. So when Fall quarter began,
I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, and a pretty
good sense of the information I wanted to convey in the classroom.
But as soon as the quarter got underway, I realized that I still
had a lot to learn—and that I could learn it from my students.
During an impromptu discussion toward the end of class one day,
I began to understand the meaning of rhetoric. I learned how to
orient myself in a rhetorical community, and how to honor the
contributions that my own rhetorical stance can make to any conversation.
About halfway through the quarter, I invited students to share
research from their RBA’s. One particular student, an international
student from Singapore, jumped at the chance. He was writing his
RBA on forced conscription and shared an article detailing atrocities
experienced by military conscripts. His interest in the topic
stemmed from his time spent in Singapore’s military, and
during discussion he likened his experiences to the horrors described
in the article. His classmates sat listening to him in stunned
silence, until one woman raised her hand and told him that she
didn’t think his life sounded like it was all that difficult.
The fact that he was attending Stanford, she explained, seemed
to indicate to her that he had been very fortunate. She felt that
she had also experienced many hardships in her life, but that
she nevertheless ultimately considered herself very lucky, because
she was attending Stanford.
As the two students traded stories in an emotionally-charged exchange,
their classmates sat wide-eyed and open-mouthed. They swiveled
their heads back and forth, taking it all in and presumably feeling
that they had few relevant anecdotes to share. I was just beginning
to wonder how to intervene and turn this into a productive lesson
when one of those students spoke up and did it for me. She said
she knew that she had never experienced anything close to what
they had, but she had learned from listening to them, and wanted
to share her perspective. Once she did, many other students chimed
in as well, and the discussion eventually broadened to touch on
topics ranging from the pros and cons of the military draft, to
the opportunities and privileges each of them would gain from
attending Stanford.
I was immensely
grateful to the two students who had started the conversation
by sharing such private and difficult memories with their classmates.
And I was also immensely grateful to the student who worked up
the courage to jump into a conversation that seemed to offer her
little opening. Her ability to make her own experiences and insights
relevant to the conversation modeled exactly what we ask our students
to do in the RBA, when we ask them to carve out their own rhetorical
space in the conversation surrounding their research topic. Prior
to this classroom discussion, I knew how rhetoric worked and I
knew how research worked, but I hadn’t yet figured out how
one related to the other. Thanks to a discussion about sacrifice,
hardship, and privilege, I learned how our own rhetorical stance—the
beliefs and experiences and perspectives that position us in a
discursive community—informs our approach to research and
analysis. I’m very proud to say that all I really need to
know about writing and rhetoric I learned from my class of first-quarter
freshmen.
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