Background
Last year was a year of change for me. Due to some personal challenges, I felt compelled to make a professional change, so I moved from my previous 8th-grade ELA position to a new position teaching 11th-Grade American Literature and A.P. Language and Composition. Along with this new role came an opportunity (and a requirement) to participate in an A.P. Summer Institute (APSI). For those who have been considering A.P. training, I have to say that, while it was an expensive professional development ($1,000 from the Allegheny Intermediate Unit), I found the experience to be incredibly valuable. From the program description, I expected the course to be fairly test-focused; however, what I learned not only prepared me to teach my A.P. course at a high level, but also transformed my teaching more generally.
The A.P. Language and Composition course focuses on rhetoric and argument, so the training focused on the rhetorical situation in a highly nuanced way–considering both the intended audiences and unintended audiences of a text; framing arguments in multi-dimensional rather than “two-sided” ways; and exploring the value in connecting texts to their larger contexts. While these were somewhat familiar topics to me, taught in the first-year composition course I teach at the Community College of Allegheny County, the depth into which we explored these topics and the ways in which we complicated them helped me to see them in a new light.
The Gift of Collaboration Outside our Districts
Before I discuss how the rhetorical situation has informed my teaching of American Literature, I’d like to say one more word of praise about professional development in general and the A.P. Summer Institute in particular. There’s something incredibly humbling about participating in a training full of enthusiastic and experienced English teachers. When I work in my Professional Learning Community in my district, I deepen my bonds with my colleagues, and we develop synchronicity. We grow to understand how we each think and teach. We begin to anticipate each other’s needs as we crunch data and refine assessments. However, when I’m in a room full of teachers that I don’t know so well, from different communities, schools, and styles of teaching, I become enriched in a different way.
One of my colleagues at this summer’s APSI teaches at a private Jewish school; another at a public district in Ohio; another has been teaching A.P. for years and was attending to refresh his memory and sharpen his skills; another teaches both A.P. Literature and A.P. Language. Even as I drank in all of the knowledge I could from these teachers, I was able to share very helpful and unique contributions from my context in a cyber charter school. In addition, our instructor, Dr. Brandon Abdon, encouraged collaboration while also bringing years of expertise and insights about the A.P. exams and scoring experiences. Experiences like this one can only happen when we reach outside our districts to our wider professional communities, including WPCTE (if you haven’t joined, now’s your chance–it’s free!), PCTELA, and NCTE.
Bringing Rhetoric into the Literature Classroom (Everything’s an Argument)
After completing the APSI, I was able to look at my (new-to-me) American Literature curriculum with fresh and critical eyes. I was seeing rhetoric everywhere–the T.V. shows and movies I was watching were making arguments at me; the bumper stickers on people’s cars, the text messages I was receiving; and the product packaging at the grocery store all were making arguments. Of course, then, I could see that the literature I was reading to prepare for the course was making arguments, too. Some, like The Crucible, contained very explicit arguments but also more subtle and perhaps unintentional ones. The convergence of what we commonly call a “theme” and what we might call an “argument” had never been so clear to me before, but I had become convinced that, indeed, “Everything’s an Argument.”
This year, I’ve used this insight to have students (at all of the levels I teach) conduct a rhetorical analysis of the Iroquois myth “The World on a Turtle’s Back” (available in my HMH textbook, Into Literature; a shorter adaptation on Newsela with a free account) analyzing the ways in which Iroquois storytellers used rhetorical techniques to transmit values to their audience. Students were intrigued and developed a much deeper understanding of the myth in particular and oral storytelling traditions in general, and they were more easily able to see the link between this text and other early American texts from European colonists such as “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which attempted to do essentially the same thing–transmit values to the text’s listeners and readers.
Additionally, with my A.P. students, we’ve explored The Crucible at a much deeper level by analyzing the rhetorical situation, including the rhetor (Arthur Miller), his audience, and the context of the play. Students have unearthed patriarchal and racially insensitive arguments Arthur Miller (likely unintentionally) made in the text and even have the opportunity to “correct” them by rewriting a scene from the play to make their own argument for today’s audience.
Finally, the understanding that “arguments are everywhere” has forced me to turn a critical eye to the curriculum we teach. When we present American Literature as a survey class to 11th graders, there is such a tradition of teaching Puritan rhetoric, then transcendentalism, then romanticism, etc., etc.; and there is such a tradition of hitting certain big names within each literary period. This canonical adherence in curriculum design makes an argument–that American Literature can be neatly packaged for consumption by limiting it to certain movements and that their “heavy hitters” (Edwards, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe, Whitman, etc.) are the arbiters of American Literature, culture, and tastes. When we present these texts in this way, we perpetuate that argument–unless we invite students to question it, to explore alternative ways of understanding American literary traditions. As I work to supplement the curriculum in various ways, I also encourage students–not just A.P. students, but all of my students–to question the sacredness of the authors we read–not only to appreciate their contributions but also to criticize their ideological assumptions when it’s appropriate. Most importantly, I’m working to invite students to make their own arguments and to see the arguments in everything they say and everything they create, from an essay in English or History to an Instagram post to a conversation with a sibling, parent, or friend.
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