Critical Thinking and/or Argumentation in Higher Education

Critical thinking and argumentation are closely allied. And yet each field has its own derivation and antecedents, and the differences between these are fundamental not only to debates today about their centrality in higher education, but to the entire history of the relationship (in Europe at least) between thought and language as well. On the one hand, critical thinking is most closely allied to philosophy; on the other, argumentation is allied with rhetoric. The debate about the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric goes back to Plato and Aristotle. It concerns ideas, ideals, concepts, and abstract thought and logic in relation to philosophy and the expression of these categories in verbal and other forms of language. Both critical thinking and argumentation overlap in their territories of engagement, and both have pedagogical implications for learning and teaching in higher education. This chapter explores the relationship, examines some examples at doctoral level (and briefly at undergraduate level), and puts the case for argumentation as the best focus in terms of taking forward practice in higher education. In doing so, it may run counter to the arguments in many of the chapters in this book, but the challenge presented in this chapter may act like the grit in the oyster. In Toulminian terms, the challenge can be rebutted or lead to a more qualified position on the role of critical thinking in higher education

Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity. On the Challenges of Hypercomplex Objects

Through the analysis of several hypercomplex objects – Mike Gross and Peter Carey’s The Unwritten (2010) and Inkle’s 80 Days (2014), as well as Doogie Horner’s Die Hard: The Authorised Colouring and Activity Book (2016) and Chuck Palahniuk’s Legacy (2017) – the article demonstrates the challenges intermedial studies of texts without conventional profiles face. The argument presented here is that a careful hermeneutic analysis is needed to overcome these obstacles, despite the universal applicability of some media studies concept and a recent opposition against hermeneutics from posthumanist theories. The analysis of the examples unearths their aesthetics of hypercomplexity and argues for why facile categorizations of them would be detrimental to their interpretation. The conclusion suggests to draw more strongly on play within the intermedial discourse, both as a verb denoting autotelic activity and as a noun denoting inevitable or necessary imprecision, in order to engage with the intricacies of such examples

Learning to Learn in a Digital Context: Language Learning Webtasks for an Autonomising “Wreading” Competence

In this paper we aim to analyse how language learning tasks can help students develop an autonomising wreading competence, i.e. a competence involving the ability to read online texts and to construct one’s own text by traversing sites. This competence involves different types of skills: technical skills of information elaboration and management, linguistic and semiotic skills, cognitive skills, and metacognitive skills. We consider, therefore, that the development of the wreading competence calls for a new approach to language learning, based on the joint development of autonomous learning and new literacies. Although new technologies provide quality resources and tools for teachers to design pedagogical environments which meet the principles of learner autonomy, ICT does not foster by itself autonomous learning (Villanueva, 2006). The promotion of learner autonomy requires carefully designed learning tasks aiming at a long-life learning process. The purpose of this paper is to put forward criteria for the design of language learning cybertasks that promote the development of new literacies applied to language learning autonom

Making Representations Matter: Understanding Practitioner Experience in Participatory Sensemaking

Appropriating new technologies in order to foster collaboration and participatory engagement is a focus for many fields, but there is relatively little research on the experience of practitioners who do so. The role of technology-use mediators is to help make such technologies amenable and of value to the people who interact with them and each other. When the nature of the technology is to provide textual and visual representations of ideas and discussions, issues of form and shaping arise, along with questions of professional ethics. This thesis examines such participatory representational practice, specifically how practitioners make participatory visual representations (pictures, diagrams, knowledge maps) coherent, engaging and useful for groups tackling complex societal and organizational challenges. This thesis develops and applies a method to analyze, characterize, and compare instances of participatory representational practice in such a way as to highlight experiential aspects such as aesthetics, narrative, improvisation, sensemaking, and ethics. It extends taxonomies of such practices found in related research, and contributes to a critique of functionalist or techno-rationalist approaches to studying professional practice. It studies how fourteen practitioners using a visual hypermedia tool engaged participants with the hypermedia representations, and the ways they made the representations matter to the participants. It focuses on the sensemaking challenges that the practitioners encountered in their sessions, and on the ways that the form they gave the visual representations (aesthetics) related to the service they were trying to provide to their participants. Qualitative research methods such as grounded theory are employed to analyze video recordings of the participatory representational sessions. Analytical tools were developed to provide a multi-perspective view on each session. Conceptual and normative frameworks for understanding the practitioner experience in participatory representational practice in context, especially in terms of aesthetics, ethics, narrative, sensemaking, and improvisation, are proposed. The thesis places these concerns in context of other kinds of facilitative and mediation practices as well as research on reflective practice, aesthetic experience, critical HCI, and participatory design

If this stuff matters, why isn\u27t it being shared? : citations, hyperlinks, and potential public futures of online writing in rhetoric and composition.

This dissertation addresses two deceptively discrete questions: (1) how academics might reach wider public audiences, and (2) how and why people cite the way they do. It takes citation practices as a telling though often tacit practice, one through which it is possible trace the contours of a larger story about how writing is changing as it moves online. That story: Writers increasingly reflect goals of provocation, of attracting a wider and potentially global audience, of spreading a message rapidly and virally, of responding to recent events and conversations, of sharing sources and resources. To explore these questions, this dissertation forwards a mixed-methods study of citation and writing practices in three different sites: In popular press web writing (on Slate and Newsweek—Chapter II), in traditional academic print text in rhetoric and composition (in CCC and College English—Chapter III), and in academic webtext online (on Kairos and Computers and Composition Online—Chapter IV). Chapter II conducts a rhetorical corpus analysis of Slate and Newsweek, seeking transcendent citation practices within each journal and considering how those practices (and other writing practices) and others correlate (or not) with social sharing; I then report on interviews with authors from Slate, aiming to elucidate those findings. Chapter III conducts a rhetorical corpus analysis of CCC and College English, seeking an understanding of citation practices in the field of rhetoric and composition more traditionally, more historically; as in the previous chapter, these findings are commented upon and elucidated by authors/editors of each journal. Chapter IV considers hyperlink and parenthetical citation practices in webtext journals Kairos and Computers and Composition Online, via discourse-based interviews with several authors and editors for each journal. Chapter V draws parallels among my investigations and ultimately concludes with a proposal for a new kind of hytpertextual academic publication aimed at “the public”; it offers, at its close, some documents intended to sketch the shape of such a publication, including a “Rhetoric of Hypermedia” style guide for authors

Interactivity - Hypertextuality - Transversality. A media-philosophical analysis of the Internet

My considerations are organized into three parts. In the first part I expand upon the influence of the Internet on our experience of space and time as well as our concept of personal identity. This takes place, on the one hand, in the example of text-based Internet services (IRC, MUDs, MOOs), and through the World Wide Web’s (WWW) graphical user-interface on the other. Interactivity, the constitution characteristic for the Internet, stands at the centre of this. In the second part I will show how the World Wide Web in particular sets in motion those semiotic demarcations customary until now. To this end I recapitulate, first of all, the way in which image, language and writing have been set in rela-tion to one another in the philosophical tradition. The multimedia hypertext-uality which characterizes the World Wide Web is then revealed against this background. In the third, and final, part I interpret the World Wide Web’s hypertextual structure as a mediative form of realization of a contemporary type of reason. This takes place on the basis of the philosophical concept of tranversality developed by the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch

If We\u27re Mocking Anything, It\u27s Organized Religion: The Queer Holy Fool Style of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

Asking questions in and about the often rough terrain at the intersection of sexuality/gender and religion/spirituality, this dissertation seeks to excavate the concept of queer holy fool style as a fitting response to dominant Judeo-Christian narratives that marginalize LGBTQ individuals. To do so, I utilize the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), a drag performing community of “21st Century Nuns,” as a synechdoche; pulling examples of their communication and performances as evidence of queer holy fool style. In exploring three facets of stylistic study (embodied, textual/hypertextual, and sociological), I blend queer theoretical concepts (like camp, performativity, and disciplining) with rhetorical methodological frameworks (such as Burke’s [1969] four master tropes and parody). At the end of the analysis, I uncover counter narratives within the SPI’s communication featuring themes of sexual freedom, spirituality, and safety in coalescence. Throughout the dissertation, I continually ask questions regarding queer holy fool style – some I answer, others I do not – as an attempt to engage the reader with the work. In this way, I perform the playful, yet disruptive nature of queer theoretical work. I conclude with suggestions to extend the study of queer holy fool style; primarily, the inclusion of oral histories to identify intricacies within the style as well as an autoethnographic approach that would track the creation of an individual’s performance of the style. Advisors: Damien Smith Pfister and Carly S. Wood

Literary mediality in the long eighteenth century: a textual, paratextual, and print-cultural study of James Thomson's 'The Seasons', 1730-1820

James Thomson’s descriptive long poem 'The Seasons', originally published in 1730, had a profound impact on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and print culture in Britain and in Europe more generally. This dissertation aims to produce a textual, paratextual, and print-cultural study of Thomson’s poem, from 1730 to 1820. It adopts an interdisciplinary methodological framework, drawing on methodologies of genre theory, print culture studies, book history, and translation studies, to generate a novel understanding of the text by examining the ways in which the poem was mediated both textually and materially throughout the period. Engaging with the latest developments in print culture and book-historical research, it examines the paratextual apparatuses and material packaging of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century editions of The Seasons to make sense of their interpretative and cultural ramifications. It identifies the economic impulses and editorialising strategies informing developments in the make-up of editions of the poem to offer insights into the history of the production and marketing of books in Britain and beyond

Narratives of Selfhood: A Study of the Arabic Biographical Novel, 1967- 2010

Scholarship on the Arabic novel often approaches it in light of questions of national consciousness, identity formation and contact with the West. This study relates the traditional fictional narrative of individual self-development found in biographical subgenres of the novel such as the Bildungsroman, autobiographical and confessional novels with these scholarly enterprises. It explores how biographical forms, as found in the post-1967 Arabic novel, have reflected an individualistic worldview that began as a reaction to certain collectivist ideas inherited from a previous generations of writers and intellectuals. The individualism of biographical forms is shown to be a reaction to the literary conventions associated with the themes of national identity and the Western encounter. The New Sensibility movement that evolved during the period that the study covers is analysed in relation to various Arabic texts from eight countries. Theories of intertextuality provide the interpretive tools to discuss the links between those novels and the changes in genres over time. Gérard Genette’s concept of hypertextuality is one of such tools used to analyse the relationship between the contemporary texts and their predecessors, and Bakhtin’s ideas on utterances and speech genres allow me to interpret the implied writers’ views on the values associated with the literary convention in which they are participating. I use three prototypical narratives to summarise the elements of the established literary conventions and the presuppositions of the writers and readers. The study focuses on two recurrent themes in the contemporary biographical novel; political activism and immigration. It shows how these two topics were developed literary codes that contemporary writers gave new significations. In prototypical narratives, they were literary vehicles for imagining a unified community, and in the late twentieth century they transformed into narratives of self-discovery and individualistic emphasis on uniqueness and agency. By focusing on certain attributes of the biographical form, such as the spontaneous desire of the individual and the persistent motif of the double, I show how this particular subgenre of the novel was used to disturb the collectivist ideologies and stable speech genres that had become prevalent by the latter half of the twentieth century

Volume 45, 2022 Communication and Theatre Association of Minnesota Journal

Complete digitized volume (volume 45) of Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal