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Teaching Philosophy
Teaching Writing and Rhetoric in an Attention Economy
A Teaching Philosophy
—Richard A. Lanham, The Economics of Attention
I have come to believe that every life bears in some way on every other. The motion of cause and effect is like the motion of a wave in water, continuous, within and not without the matrix of being, so that all consequences, whether we know them or not, are intimately embedded in our experiences.
—Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones
As a writer and as a teacher of writing, I like epigraphs. When I write, epigraphs provide me with a starting place and an organizational thread, and they allow me to juxtapose voices and ideas that I might not otherwise put together, as is the case with the two epigraphs that begin this essay. When I teach writing, I often ask students to write an essay that begins with an epigraph from either a course text or a text that they’ve read as part of their outside research. I do this because I hope that students will find epigraphs useful in the ways I find them useful as a writer. I make it a point to tell them this. But I also make it a point to tell them that as a reader, I often don’t like epigraphs. I don’t like them because I’m often not sure what kind of attention to give them. I often don’t like them because I’m not able to see the writer’s thought processes at work in a single quotation or in two juxtaposed quotations. And though a good essay will help me see the thinking behind the writer’s choice of epigraph(s), I know that I often don’t pay enough attention to them.
I share these predispositions toward epigraphs as both a writer and a reader with students because I want them to see my thought processes as a teacher. I want them to see that I am a human being with all-too-human motives that sometimes contradict one another. I believe that one of the most instructive attitudes I can model for students is one of self-consciousness—self-consciousness about myself as a writer, as a reader, and as a teacher.
In his recent book, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, Richard A. Lanham argues that our economy is not an information economy, for economics is the study of scarce resources. Information, we all know, is anything but scarce. The scarce resource in the information age is attention. Rhetoric, Lanham argues, “might as well have been called ‘the economics of attention’” (xii) for it “tells us how to allocate our central scarce resource, to invite people to attend to what we would like them to attend to” (xii-xiii). The study of rhetoric and of writing has always required an ability to see in two ways at once—as a reader and as a writer. Lanham argues that rhetoric in an attention economy becomes central to a liberal arts education because rhetoric demands what he calls an oscillation between looking at and looking through. To look through a text is to take its message for what it claims itself to be; to look through an advertisement is to find oneself persuaded—or not—to purchase a product or service. To look at a text is to see the text as a construction, as something that has been made by writers aiming to get your attention; to look at an advertisement is to analyze how the designers tried to get their audience’s attention.
This oscillation between looking at and looking through requires a self-consciousness that has, as Lanham in the first epigraph argues, long been considered suspect. But in an economy in which attention is the scarce resource, self-consciousness about where one chooses to focus one’s attention—as well as about how one might successfully attract the attention of others—is paramount.
As a teacher of both undergraduate and graduate courses in writing and rhetoric, I’ve recently found myself becoming more and more self-conscious about my teaching and about the things I ask each group of students to attend to. Recent scholarship in composition and rhetoric has demonstrated that undergraduate students are able and eager to study writing as writing—what I would call writing as noun—in addition to learning how to write—what I would call the study of writing as verb. At the same time, graduate programs in composition and rhetoric require that students master the body of knowledge that is composition and rhetoric—encouraging a through disposition. Yet I wonder what happens to graduate instruction in writing. When and how do graduate students in composition and rhetoric analyze the construction of texts—their own and those that are assigned as content? When and how do graduate programs in composition and rhetoric encourage graduate students to adopt an at disposition toward writing?
In my undergraduate rhetoric courses, I ask students to attend to all forms of language and text self-consciously. For instance, I’ve taught three sections of English 283 as “The Rhetoric of Fear,” a theme that allows me to engage students in discussions of the ways that fear-based rhetoric accomplishes its motives—it makes us afraid of, for example, West Nile virus or inner-city crime—at the same time that it depends for its effects on our own deeply-held values—in these cases, health and safety. At the same time, I encourage students to consider the ways that successful rhetorics of fear distract our attention from other, perhaps more pressing, issues. In an effort to engage students in both looking at and looking through their own writing, I ask students to create a text, any text, that aims to change a specific audience’s ideas, thoughts, beliefs, or actions about an issue of their choice. That’s part 1 of the assignment. Part 2 asks students to conduct a rhetorical analysis of a classmate’s text before conducting a rhetorical analysis of their own. In this way, I aim to engender in students a self-consciousness about their rhetorical choices in ways that go beyond merely asking them to reflect on their writing process, a strategy that has become commonplace in writing courses. I believe that, by encouraging students to become more self-conscious about their choices as writers and as rhetors, they become more likely to question the choices that go into texts that are meant to persuade them. They thus become savvier economists of attention.
While I also work to include contemporary rhetorical scholarship in my undergraduate courses to give students a sense of the kind of research that composition and rhetoric scholars do, I find myself struggling with this issue in reverse in my graduate courses. Most graduate courses are understandably heavy on content and ask students to read as readers. As a junior professor with very recent experience in graduate courses that did not always offer direct instruction in writing, I make instruction in writing for professional and academic audiences a priority in my graduate courses. As I do in undergraduate writing courses, I share my own drafts of projects—in various stages—and I bring in excerpts from their work in order to demonstrate a particular writing technique or convention. In other words, I am working in my graduate courses to encourage students to read both as readers and as writers. For instance, in my Special Topics course, “Authorship in Composition Studies,” I required that students submit a conference proposal to either the university’s Graduate Symposium or to the University of Michigan’s conference on “Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism.” For the first hour of three or four class periods, we workshopped conference proposals, talking both about the ideas expressed and the means of expression. We looked both at and through those proposals self-consciously, and I believe that each of those nine students now understands both what makes an idea conference-worthy and what makes a conference proposal successful.
I teach self-consciously because I want students to know that I know that teachers have an effect on students long after the course is over. So I share lots of stories with them, stories from other classes, important points students in other sections made that day or that week, the ridiculous thing I did in class as a new teacher years ago (they usually laugh). But I also want them to know that they have an effect on me, that the ideas they share with me, the stories and the writing and the connections they help me see, are a wonderful consequence of this teaching life, that they are “intimately embedded in [my] experiences.”
Contact me at aerobil@ilstu.edu