2012 CCCC Chair's Address

I enjoyed reading Malea Powell’s address from the 2012 CCCC Convention in St. Louis. Her use of personal stories from individuals at the conference was a powerful rhetorical strategy to include the audience in the conversation, evoke emotions in the audience, and leave room for different interpretations of the messages she was presenting. She thanks everyone who contributed stories, appealing to her own ethos while doing so. By using the voices of other people to present ideas, she is not forcing her own ideas or ways of thinking onto the audience. Instead, she has arranged the stories and selected them in a calculated manner that helps to achieve her own rhetorical goals.

The message I took away from the whole piece was a message to English teachers that they must be responsible for breaking away from colonial teaching methods. It seems like the Western classical rhetorical traditions are part of the colonial language that adds to the traditional European methods of teaching and thinking. Powell is encouraging teachers to recognize all the different tools they can provide students with and all the different forms of knowledge available for them to teach. She is encouraging the exploration of different epistemologies, rather than just the Classical Greek epistemology. This idea of breaking away from colonization is called decolonization, and she believes it will improve the future of education if decolonization is made possible in the English discipline.

Another take-away message from the reading was Powell’s value of place. She encourages the audience to move away from the thinking, “I think; therefore, I am” to a new kind of thinking, “I am where I think and do.” This new way of thinking is a kind of decolonization and places a great deal of value on place rather than the individual. The introduction is largely focused on the history of St. Louis, where the conference is located. She presents surprising facts about the history of the land that I as a reader would have never known. I suspect many people in the audience felt the same way when they heard about “the largest archeological site in the United States” or the Monks Mound that is “larger at its base than the Great Pyramid of Khufu, Egypt’s largest (Hodges).”

The use of repetition was powerful in the essay. Powell repeats the lines: “Stories have an effect. They are real. They matter,” and “Take this story. It’s yours now. Do with it what you will.” Both of these repeated lines are important because they reiterate the importance and value of stories that Powell is trying to convey. I found it surprising that many of the personal stories commented on how difficult it is to include stories in academic writing, because I personally think it has a powerful effect on academic pieces and should be included more. However, I was not surprised by the many personal stories that commented on the challenge of exploring non-western kinds of rhetoric. The fact that it is difficult for them to get published or receive recognition for their work displays how powerful the Classical Greek epistemology remains today.

Questions:

1.     Do you think stories help or hinder academic writing?

2.     Do you think the arrangement or the personal stories helps Powell to reach her intended goals in this address, or is it random?