Rhetoric's teaching and multi-modal learning.

Abstract

This paper broadly addresses the concept of multi-modal learning as it may be engaged in teaching rhetoric. It highlights an example drawn from the author's teaching experience--the creation of "vidblinks" with cell phones--as it explains how multi-modal learning is essential to a well-considered engagement of rhetoric's teaching as far as it encompasses artistic and inartistic proof. Further, the paper explains how rhetoric itself is multi-modal as an architectonic practice drawing on, and substantively contributing to, the sum of the liberal arts.

**********

Rhetoric's teaching ceaselessly engages an interest in persuasion as a situated practice addressing particular cases:

   Rhetoric has always borne its interests to the site of particular
   cases--artfully employing its means of persuasion to influence the
   judgments and actions of intended auditors. Accordingly, rhetoric's
   effective engagement is always negotiated anew as its aims are
   constrained by circumstances constituting what are called
   "rhetorical situations." Rhetorical situations require phronesis or
   practical wisdom--the apt adaptation of communication to the complex
   of autonomous people, measured times, and cultural contexts. It is
   through the strategic adaptation and mediation of symbols that
   rhetoric coactively induces cooperation without coercion--that
   rhetoric achieves its persuasive aims ... (Adams, Huling, Simons,
   279)

However, persuasion is a tricky term. Many people consider the paradigm case of persuasion to be captured in late night television's advertisements, or political speeches, or Christian evangelical discourses that overtly call upon their audiences to do something--to buy a product, to adopt a policy, to come to Christ. Even more people consider persuasion to be a necessary evil--a sort of symbolic orchestration of interests that subverts rational thought processes and plays to non-discursive sites of emotional entanglement that wrestle people down to cushiony mats made to comfort their reservations and pin them to otherwise untenable commitments. In short, many people believe that persuasion appeals to what is worst in people--the drives and incentives that are not measured by the constraining structures of logic's well-worn forms--as syllogisms With major premises, minor premises and conclusion--or in close analytic bursts of critical insight driven by a commitment to the truth, the facts, and the objective temperate and measured mean-centered life--where the only permissible emotional eruption is righteous indignation hurled at the hoi polloi as it irrationally orchestrates injustice or legislates stupidity-by-majority rule in the trance-dance of democracy.

Well--perhaps the 'paradigm case' I've just displayed is more of a caricature than a description. Nevertheless, it displays the play of meaning-making as a matter of instructive-constructing--as a matter of communicatively conjuring an intelligible symbolic display that matters in some way as far as it provides an orientation toward 'what is & isn't' and consequently predisposes plausible, possible, and even preferable lines of belief and action that are mapped, or suggested, by the shared meanings the display's communal uptake affords--by means of any medium.[1] As Kenneth Burke has taught us, "wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is 'meaning,' there is 'persuasion'" (1974, 172). Among other persuasive aims, rhetoric seeks to induce judgments of the past and the future--two times that are not present but are made to appear present by rhetoric's multi-mediated play. In discourses addressed toward the past and the future it is presence (see Perelman, 35-37 and Lombard and Ditton) or, in Quintilian's terms, "functional hallucination" (Quintilian, 126) that we strive to produce so that we may imagine what does not presently exist and make judgments about it. Among other things, presence inducing discourses are designed to settle questions of guilt and innocence and motivate lines of future action--to determine what to do next. They are addressed to auditors who are empowered to make decisions about the past and the future such as juries and political assemblies. For example, in attempts to persuade the United Nations to join the United States in war, politicians may construct and project images of mobile poison factories borne on the backs of trucks. The images may rhetorically induce the perception that there is a present threat that warrants war--that makes invading Iraq appear to be what ought to be done next. In short, in our attempts to cope with the uncertainties prompted by the past and the future, we engage in acts of showing and telling. We construct images and visions of plausible pasts and possible futures constituting "rhetorics of display" (see Prelli) that conceal as much as they reveal. As Kenneth Burke explains, every "way of seeing is also a way of not seeing" (1984, 49). Accordingly, in the play of rhetoric, as it addresses non-existent and unknowable pasts and futures, visions are projected that are at the same time ways of not seeing. In the dynamic play of revealing and concealing, at sites of advocacy the most effective rhetoric forecloses alternatives--it gives presence to a single plan of action so that we may act so we may stop talking and do something.

But--what does this have to do with multi-modal learning?

As a rhetorician, I believe that multi-modal learning is entwined with rhetoric's overarching all-consuming interest in available means of persuasion. Teaching rhetoric's broad-band culture of persuasion has since Aristotle's time focused on rhetorical techne's interest in perfecting a distinctively human capacity--what he considered an in-born dynamis, faculty, or power of "observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (Aristotle, 1.2.1355b). The means of persuasion encompass all possible channels of inducement--discursive and non-discursive. The available means of persuasion are those that are operative in a given rhetorical situation--that are discovered, created, and strategically employed by a communicator. As they are displayed in textbooks, the means of persuasion are parceled out, giving the impression that there may be a sequence to their employment that follows the order of any given text. In addition, as they are laid out in textbooks, it makes it seem as if rhetoric's principles are not interdependently bound together in practice. For example, in the Aristotelian tradition, the means of persuasion divide into artistic or inartistic and are considered as modes of proof--as anything summoned in support of a given piece of rhetoric's intended aim. Artistic proofs are constructed by the rhetor (the artisan or practitioner of rhetoric) in accord with the precepts of the art. Inartistic proofs, on the other hand, are gathered up and used by the rhetor to further a given rhetorical aim. The primary modes of artistic proof are ethos, pathos, and logos.

Ethos is vested in displays of character that induce perceptions of credibility. Pathos is vested in displays of emotion that induce affective states accenting given kinds of judgment. For example, anger, pity, fear, humor. Logos is vested in displays of 'reasonableness' in a given piece of rhetoric that induce perceptions of its coherence. In addition to the three primary artistic proofS--ethos, pathos, logos--the art, or techne, or technology of rhetoric also engages invention, arrangement, style, and delivery.[2] Invention broadly undertakes the discovery, identification, and creation of strategic moves with regard to a piece of rhetoric's substance, aim, and consumer. Organization prescribes ways of positioning symbolic displays that accord with a piece of rhetoric's substance, aim, and consumer. Style undertakes symbol-choice with regard to a given piece of rhetoric's substance, aim, and consumer. It takes up the lore of schemes and tropes understood as figures of thought and figures of sound. For example, visual caricature can be understood as hyperbole, or the repetition of a musical phrase at the beginning of successive lines can be considered anaphora. Delivery is broadly understood as the mediation or means of serving up a given piece of rhetoric. Traditionally, it engages an interest in effectively managing the body and the voice. In contemporary rhetorical thought, delivery encompasses anything tangible that instantiates meaning as a material site of human interest (including the body and the voice). Again, however, despite their textbook division and sequential display, all the forms of artistic proof are deeply nuanced, interact with each other, and are almost impossible to separate in practice. For example, a given piece of rhetoric's incoherence will probably undermine its creator's credibility; many of the schemes and tropes work their effects by means of delivery and patterns of organization. In sum, the principles of rhetoric are analytically divided in teaching manuals. Yet, in practice they are interdependently entwined and mutually influence the quality of any given piece of rhetoric as far as any given piece of rhetoric is itself a multi-modal display. Rhetoric's teaching engages the ensemble of the means of persuasion and provides students with practical experiences performing rhetoric's precepts--in making wise decisions in particular cases concerning their deployment. It is through practice that students may come to understand rhetoric's strategic complexity as the holistic performance of multi-modal displays.

At any rate, notice how the story of rhetoric's "available means" quickly slips away from language--especially when we reach the canon of delivery or mediation--notice too how the horizon of rhetoric's intrinsic techne starts to stretch toward the uptake of inartistic proof drawn from other domains of practice. For example, a rhetor may use, but not make, music. That is, inartistic proof considers and acknowledges the use of others' arts and artifacts in order to achieve the rhetor's persuasive aim as they are taken up and multi-modally folded into rhetorical displays consisting of artistic and inartistic proofs. Moreover, the reverse is also the case--the sum of the liberal arts' scholarly and creative interests are implicated themselves in rhetoric's play. For example, philosophy may intend to display philosophy through credible discourses--including dialogues and novels. That is, rhetoric 'gives back' to the disciplines it draws inartistic proof from as far as it architectonically [3] contributes to their constitution. Accordingly, all disciplines' discourses display rhetorical dimensions as far as they are intended to induce the favorable judgment of peer reviewers, teach their subject matters, or make their productions useful to experts and non-experts alike.

Now, as I teach rhetoric it is imperative to provide students with multiple opportunities to experiment with its artistic and inartistic play and to continuously scan the landscape for emergent means of persuasion. The search for means of persuasion opens the prospect of engaging multi-modal learning because it enables students to approach rhetoric's study through a variety of media and technologies while addressing a singular interest in creating rhetorically effective messages. It deepens their appreciation of the constraints on rhetorical discourse and how they must be managed in every given case to construct effective messages. For example, a few years ago I undertook a project with a student and colleague to query war by constructing rhetorically effective videos--with cell phones (see Adams, Huling and Simons). Given that they were recorded on cell phones, the messages could be distributed over the internet or from cell phone to cell phone. We called them 'vidblinks' as the visual counterparts of sound bites. To us, the videos' production was a natural extension of the cell phone's ubiquity and incessant omnipresent use as medium of communication. Thus, we took up cell phone video as an emergent means of persuasion.

The rhetorical challenge was to work within the constraints afforded by a cell phone video recorder's technology--screen size, audio and video quality, recording time (approximately 20 seconds)--to create an order of presence enabling the settling into consciousness of a piece of visual-aural rhetoric designed to query war's practice. And here is where the lesson taught by the play of rhetoric is flexed by the inartistic abduction of art video's practices--the extra-disciplinary employment of others' techniques and technologies--techniques and technologies a rhetor may need to use that come into play at multi-modal sites of rhetorical production that are enacted beyond unmediated face-to-face oral communication. Accordingly, the multi-modality of rhetoric's engagement of artistic and inartistic proofs demands some teaching-learning at the margins of other disciplines' focused technical engagement of their well-considered interests. I don't teach video. But rhetors may have need of video. I don't teach mathematics. But rhetors may have need of mathematics. I don't teach biology. But rhetors may have need of biology. I don't teach music. But rhetors may have need of music. This refrain goes all the way around the circle of the liberal arts: "I don't teach X, but rhetors may have need of X, so I teach them how to rhetorically use it as a form of inartistic proof."

So, back to the cell phone videos--the vidblinks--no matter how ineptly we may have traversed art video's techne--we were taking up a rhetorical challenge and delivering it through a newly developed medium--a heretofore non-existent "available means of persuasion." We were playing with rhetoric's interest in delivery--in mediation--along with its interest in audience adaptation, adjusting messages to the constraints of time and space afforded by the cell phone, and styling the messages to give them presence and make them memorable. Working with the cell phones presented all the aspects of meaning-making that in some sense present themselves as adaptive challenges and get at the heart of the rhetoric's interest in multi-modal learning and the practice of persuasion. The 20-second vidblinks were not edited they were real-time productions that also demanded a quality of effective extemporaneous performance as the student produced them. That is, most of the vidblinks were produced in one take. For example, in one vidblink the student holds the cell phone in front of him to capture his face as he says "Stop war." However, as he says "stop war" there is no sound only his angry face mouthing the words. Then, he pans the cell phone to a stop sign where somebody has added the word "war" below the word "stop." As soon as the camera focuses on the stop sign, unmuted, he says "Can you hear me now? Good." Obviously, the vidblink plays off of the Verizon commercial where the technician travels the countryside ensuring that Verizon's signal is ubiquitous and strong. The employment of a familiar phrase as a sort of allusion is a form of inartistic proof--the student did not author the phrase, rather, he used it. The stop sign was already there with its anti-war message painted on it. Again, the student used it inartistically to make a point. The technique of muting the voice, displaying an angry lace mouthing the words "stop war", and then panning to the same text (stop war) imprinted on a stop sign is an example of using video-production techniques to give multi-modal presence to the vidblink's message through sight and sound. Last, using the phone's messaging and internet capabilities enabled the vidblinks to be "cell-cast" to other cell phones and computers as downloadable clips. [4]

By undertaking the vidblink project, the student learned how to use the cell phone as a resource to create and distribute persuasive messages. Drawing on art video's techne the student gained a deeper appreciation of inartistic proof's place in the creation of rhetorically effective messages and how the available means of persuasion may be discovered and deployed. By making cell phone videos, the student learned how to effectively use a newly evolved medium to promote an ageless hope--to effectively cope with uncertainty--and in the case of the vidblinks he made, to induce a quality of presence intended to prompt us to ponder, and avoid, the prospect of unwarranted war.

In sum, rhetoric's teaching necessitates multi-modal learning if students are to fully comprehend rhetoric's scope of application in its search for the available means of persuasion in any particular case. Students must learn to become adept at using a variety of proofs and to range freely across a variety of disciplines, subject matters, and communication technologies as they construct their intended messages. As it is taught, rhetoric invites students to artfully construct their appeals by the guidance of its own precepts, and also, to creatively play in fields of others' making so that inartistic proofs may be constructed or drawn from them. That is, students must learn how to use visual and aural media, concrete objects, statistics, quotations, maxims, and all other preexisting 'proofs' to advance their positions to pick and choose qualities of evidence that may appeal to one or more senses or sensibilities--discursively or non-discursively--in support of a given discourse's aims. In addition, where appropriate, as in the case of vidblinks, students of rhetoric may learn how to construct messages using emergent communication technologies such as video cell phones. The engagement of emergent technologies as sources of inartistic proof enables students to creatively exploit their potential to serve rhetoric's traditional aims in new and unanticipated ways. This is especially the case with electronic media and the qualities of presence it induces.

Thus, multi-modal learning should be considered as intrinsic to rhetoric's teaching as far as rhetoric reaches toward the available means of persuasion--the multiple modes of persuasion--in any given case. In fact, research in the fields of education and artificial intelligence that take up an interest in multi-modal learning in many senses reproduce rhetoric's interest in engaging the available means (the multiple modes) of persuasion (see for example Love, 307-08, Jewitt 83-85, and Smith and Gasser, 14-15; 21-27). After all, one of rhetoric's chief aims, as it is explained in the Ciceronian tradition, along with delighting and moving auditors, is teaching. In the ancient literatures of rhetoric deep sensitivity is displayed toward appropriately balancing these aims' proportions in a given discourse. For example, teaching may include humor, and may at some point move students to take up a new preference, but the emphasis of a given unit of instruction is not solely to delight or move auditors. In fact, if the emphasis is too pronounced in either of these directions a teacher may be accused of clowning or brainwashing students. So, along with multiple modes of proof and the means of mediating them, there are multiple modes of effect that the proofs' employment affords. In the context of a broad interest in teaching, the teacher-rhetor may employ rhetoric's techne to determine in a particular case of teaching which modes of proof best advance a specific objective with sensitivity to the interests and capabilities of the students. Reframing multi-modal learning as a fundamentally rhetorical process aligns its teaching and assessment with a cultural practice that has played, and does play, a central role in liberal arts education. It unabashedly presents teaching as a rhetorical enterprise that may be deeply informed by the sum of rhetoric's techne and the multi-modal deployment of artistic and inartistic proofs. Moreover, it engages learning as a deeply rhetorical enterprise as a function of education, but more importantly, as a function of lived experience as far as people's "experience of the world is profoundly multimodal" (Smith and Gasser, 13). As the artfully constructed counterpart of one's experience of the world, rhetoric gathers its persuasive power to the point that one's experience of it may be indistinguishable from one's 'other' experiences of the world, as is the case of presence wherein "emerging technologies ... are designed to provide media users with an illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated" (Lombard and Ditton). This is the hallmark of virtual reality.

In rhetoric's teaching, instructing students how to effectively and consciously use what's already been produced, in order to produce presence-inducing persuasive messages, enables them to better understand the interconnectedness of human praxes in the multi-modal ecologies of meaning-making. Rhetoric's consciousness enables students to critically experience their position as active participants in the network of social and cultural interdependencies constituting resources for the construction and interpretation of rhetorical designs as far as they are themselves rhetorically designed. This, in turn, promotes an understanding of rhetoric as architectonic--as infused throughout social and cultural practices and products as the rationale of individual and communal choice-making that effectively addresses the contingencies of creativity and the communicative quandaries of everyday life (see Buchanan). It enables us to engage in "nexting" [5] as we attempt to bring into being 'next' what we imaginatively desire--whether it is a sculpture, a light bulb, a war, a loving relationship, a laboratory experiment, or a political speech. It also enables us to discover where we've gone right and where we've gone wrong: rhetoric enables us to summon a plausible past and use it as a mode of proof; as a lesson learned and wisely applied to audience-centered deliberative discourses addressing present and anticipated urgencies--urgencies such as hurricanes, wars, homeland security, famine, and global warming.

References

Adams, J., Joshua Huling, and Janet Simons. "Video Cellphones, War, and Vidblinks: Exploring the Rhetorical Constraints of Time and Place." Proc. Seventh Annual Workshop: Presence 2004. Ed. Mariano Alcaniz Raya and Beatriz Rey Solaz. Valencia: Universidad Politecnia de Valencia, 2004: 279-82.

Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. Rhys Roberts. Retrieved July 12, 2006. http://www2.iastate.edu/~honeyl/Rhetoric/.

Buchanan, R. "Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Art in the Philosophy of Culture." Philosophy and Rhetoric (34:3) 2001:183-206.

Burke, K. Permanence and Change. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.

--. A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press, 1950; rpt. 1974.

Jewitt, C. "Re-thinking Assessment: Multimodality, Literacy and Computer-Mediated Learning." Assessment in Education (10:1)2003:83-102.

Lombard, M. and Theresa Ditton. "At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence." Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (3:2) 1997. Retrieved July 12, 2006. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol3/issue2/lombard.html.

Love, M. "Multimodality of Learning Through Anchored Instruction." Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (48:4)2005-05:300-310.

McKeon, R. Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery. Ed. Mark Backman. Ox Bow Press. 1987.

--. "The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts." Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery. Ed. Mark Backman. Ox Bow Press, 1987: 1-24.

--. "Rhetoric in the Middle Ages." Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discover. Ox Bow Press, 1987: 121-66.

Perelman, C. The Realm of Rhetoric. University of Notre Dame Press, 1982.

Prelli, L. Ed. Rhetorics of Display. University of South Carolina Press, 2006.

Quintilian, M.F. The Orator's Education. Ed. D.A. Russell. Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Smith, L. and Michael Gasser. "The Development of Embodied Cognition: Six Lessons from Babies." Artificial Life (11) 2005: 13-29.

Stewart, J., Karen Zediker, and Saskia Witteborn. Together: Communicating Interpersonally: A Social Construction Approach. Roxbury Publishing, 2005.

Endnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented at symposium on multi-modal learning hosted by Hamilton College. I am grateful to the Office of the Dean of Faculty for funding in support of this article's publication.

[1] See Lawrence Prelli, Ed. Rhetorics of Display (2006) for the most recent scholarly publication extending rhetoric's scope to non-discursive domains of rhetorical influence.

[2] These aspects of rhetoric's art are implicit and explicit in the Aristotelian tradition and are characterized as the "canons" of rhetoric. The canons were made explicit and regularized in Roman antiquity. The 'story' of the canons' sources and evolution is beyond the scope of this paper. However, the canons are usually considered five-fold (invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory), with the canon of memory not usually covered in the contemporary teaching of rhetoric--in a way it has been subsumed under delivery by the use of outlines, teleprompters, manuscripts, PowerPoint (and other visual aids), printed note cards, etc. and instruction on how to deploy them. However, like all artistic proof, in practice there is overlap--as in an outline's engagement of invention and organization prior to its deployment as an agent of delivery. Accordingly, I have excluded the canon of memory from consideration in this paper.

[3] See Buchanan for an exposition of rhetoric's architectonic function as a techne of design. Buchanan draws substantially on the work of Richard McKeon who first pointed out rhetoric's architectonic aspect. See Backman's edited collection of McKeon's essays--especially "Rhetoric in the Middle Ages" (121-66) and "The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts" (1-24).

[4] The reception of the vidblinks was loosely assessed as a part of the project--recipients were asked to fill out an online questionnaire for each vidblink they received. This was one part of the project that fell short of our expectations. We were unable to use the data we collected because of flaws in our online questionnaire. In the future, the assessment piece should be refined. In addition, the vidblink project was conducted in connection with Vassar College's 2004 Summer Media Institute. The vidblinks were displayed there and generally received positive feedback from the other participants. To the best of our knowledge, we were the first people to use cell phones to produce substantive targeted messages. Subsequently, micro-cinema has emerged as an art form in its own right.

[5] The concept of "nexting" comes from Stewart, J., Karen Zediker, Saskia Witteborn. It is used to explain a skill that they believe is central to effective interpersonal communication: through one's present acts of speaking and listening, trying to make something happen next that is good for the relationship.

John C. Adams, Hamilton College

Adams, Ph.D., is Visiting Professor of Rhetoric and Communication in the Department of Communication.