Speaking the Truth: Supporting Authentic Advocacy with Professional Identity Formation

When law students are asked to articulate legal rules in a persuasive communication such as a brief, they may experience internal tension. Their version of the rule, as framed to benefit a particular client’s position, may be different from the way they would articulate the rule if they were not taking on an advocate’s role. The conflict between those two versions of a legal rule leads some students to wonder if advocacy itself is deceptive, if an advocate’s role requires one to sacrifice ethics for success, and if ancient Greek philosophers were correct when they derided persuasive communication as “trickery and magic,” and criticized advocates for making arguments that were “artfully written but not truthfully meant.” This tension is not unique to students. All advocates must ask themselves whether they can provide a true and accurate version of the law (truthful law) and simultaneously articulate a version of the law that will help their clients. This question speaks to the very nature of law and what it means to be a lawyer. If the question is not successfully resolved, students and lawyers are more susceptible to the cynicism and discontent that permeates the legal profession.Using Plato’s denunciation of rhetoric and rhetoricians as a starting point, Part I of this Article will explore how the first year of law school may create and exacerbate tension between law students’ desire to advocate on behalf of their clients and their desire to truthfully communicate the law. Part II will explore how law school could resolve this tension with an explicit discussion of legal determinacy and the lawyer’s role in creating law: what students need to hear, when they need to hear it, and where that conversation might be placed within the curriculum. The Article will identify the developing area of professional identity formation as a natural location for an effective discussion, which would ideally occur within the first year of studies. In that discussion, law students can explore a view of lawyers as meaning-makers and truth-tellers: rhetoricians who understand and are faithful to the true essence of a law but are also able to create alternatives within the scope of that true law. Students and lawyers can integrate their own identities into this professional identity, and maintain authenticity in their advocacy

United States certificate programs in technical communication : a feminist-sophistic investigation

Technical communication certificates are offered by many colleges and universities as an alternative to a full undergraduate or graduate degree in the field. Despite certificates’ increasing popularity in recent years, however, surprisingly little commentary exists about them within the scholarly literature. In this work, I describe a survey of certificate and baccalaureate programs that I performed in 2008 in order to develop basic, descriptive data on programs’ age, size, and graduation rates; departmental location; curricular requirements; online offerings; and instructor status and qualifications. In performing this research, I apply recent insights from neosophistic rhetorical theory and feminist critiques of science to both articulate, and model, a feminist-sophistic methodology. I also suggest in this work that technical communication certificates can be theorized as a particularly sophistic credential for a particularly sophistic field, and I discuss the implications of neosophistic theory for certificate program design and administration

Moral Education in Plato\u27s Gorgias

In this thesis I argue for the theme of moral education as an important theme for Plato\u27s Gorgias. The Gorgias has been commonly understood in terms of politics and philosophy either separately or jointly. I argue that the theme of moral education is equally important and deserves attention. I first contextualize the Gorgias into the cultural background of late 5th century BCE when the decline of traditional morality stimulated the Greeks to ask whether virtues (which were traditionally conceived to be hereditary traits exclusive to members of noble family) were teach-able (and thus, could be learned). Next, I analyze the three conversations in the Gorgias as a unity that demonstrates the impact of Gorgias\u27 teaching. Then, through an analysis of the relationship between morality, education, and politics, I argue that the Gorgias as a whole presents two contrasting modes of education, namely, Gorgias way of teaching and Socrates\u27 education, between which Socrates\u27 education is preferred, but not without its problems

2015 GREAT Day Program

SUNY Geneseo’s Ninth Annual GREAT Day.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1009/thumbnail.jp

A Rhetoric and Philosophy of Interprofessional Healthcare Education: Communication Ethics in Action

Healthcare professionals belong to a moral community. Caring for patients is a community act carried out by healthcare professionals working in teams within complex political and organizational systems. This teamwork is crucial to quality patient outcomes; however, incivility threatens to derail necessary and effective collaboration towards the common organizational good. Necessarily, interprofessional healthcare education is becoming a required element for pre-health professionals. Currently, schools are using competency-based approaches to interprofessional education to teach ethics/values, roles/responsibilities. communication, and teamwork. For reasons explicated throughout this dissertation, the categorizing of these particular elements as competencies is problematic and cultivated within a positivistic and empirical worldview. By exploring concepts of professionality/interprofessionality, biomedical discourse, and ethics, this dissertation shows how a focus on competency frames conversation, shapes certain outcomes, and limits the educational opportunity for impactful exploration of difference and meaning. A rhetoric and philosophy approach to team building is recommended as a necessary complement to the current educational model

Volume 30, Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, Fall 1992/Winter 1993/Spring 1993/Summer 1993 Speaker and Gavel

Complete digitized volume (volume 30, numbers 1-4, Fall 1992/Winter 1993/Spring 1993/Summer 1993) of Speaker & Gavel

Postmodern American sociology: A response to the aesthetic challenge

Over the past two decades, American sociologists have debated about the postmodern and what we might call postmodern American sociology began to emerge at the turn of this century. This dissertation examines the nature of the postmodern in general, and postmodern American sociology in particular, in terms of three models of knowledge: science, morality, and aesthetics; This dissertation pays close attention to the fact that science, morality, and aesthetics began to be differentiated from religion in the modern era, which posited two problems: the problem of legitimacy of knowledge and the problem of figuring out the relationship among science, morality, and aesthetics. It sees the modern as a specific way to address these two problems. About the first problem, the modern derived legitimacy of knowledge from the idea of progress: progress in science and technology will lead to the improvement in material well-being as well as the moral perfection of individuals and societies. About the second problem, the modern presented two positions. The Enlightenment tried to reintegrate science, morality, and aesthetics into society according to scientific laws while the Counter-Enlightenment did so according to moral laws. In this sense, the modern is defined as the scientization and moralization of ontology, epistemology, and ethics/politics, which proceeded from the 17th century to the early 1960s in Western societies; This dissertation also observes how the process of dedifferentiation, a process of social entropy leading to the collapse of boundaries, is changing the two issues associated with the modern. It is increasingly difficult to derive legitimacy of each knowledge from the idea of progress because science and morality become contested arenas mainly by the implosive impact of electronically-mediated culture industry on ontology, epistemology, and ethics/politics. The process of dedifferentiation also makes the problem of integration of science, morality, and aesthetics into society outdated by refiguring them in terms of the state of incommensurability. In this sense, the postmodern is defined as the aestheticization of ontology, epistemology, and ethics/politics, which has proceeded from the early 1960s on in advanced Western societies; This dissertation examines the nature of postmodern American sociology by situating it within this general relationship between the modern and the postmodern. It investigates how sociology has been based on the modern, excluding the aesthetic, how the postmodern as the aesthetic challenge is threatening the modern discipline of sociology, and how some American sociologists, especially critical and interactionist sociologists, form postmodern American sociology in the course of responding to the aesthetic challenge. Finally, this dissertation proposes that postmodern American sociology needs multi- or trans-disciplinary approaches for addressing the postmodern, the core of which is the synthesis of poststructuralist linguistics and post-Marxist political economy

2007 GREAT Day Program

SUNY Geneseo’s First Annual G.R.E.A.T. Day.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1001/thumbnail.jp