Jimmy's Handout

Jimmy Kendall

12/13/2010

WRIT 540

· My presentation today in class will cover a singular aspect about the rhetorical merits of Native American texts that can be used to help our student’s rhetorical approaches.

I.TOPIC

· How the rhetorical merits of Native American texts can help our student’s rhetorical approaches.

II. Purpose

· Native American texts can provide students with powerful rhetorical styles that our students can emulate in an effort to improve their writing.

· As students at times have a tenacity to think that generalizations can act as “truths,” or that their perspectives are universally shared, they fall prey to appeals of bifurcation and logical fallacies that render their papers one dimensional and limited in scope.

· Where Native texts come into play is how they can help students foster what is called an “awareness narrative,” which asks students write in a way that has them “reveal their beliefs, inquire into problems, and articulate where they stand” (Swiencicki 347). In other words, students write towards a topic or theme that has a transformative social context, and therefore must think critically about their perspectives in the wake of others.

III. Use in the Classroom

· When students write in an awareness narrative, they write for a wider audience, and are typically writing about a topic that covers some aspect of race, society, culture, or politics. Therefore, they have consequences to what they write.

· This is a valuable practice students can finesse for writing into genres like the PAA, Op-ed, and life place. If fosters critical thinking, academic writing, and creative empowerment in the idea that their personal perspectives come into conversation with a larger social context.

IV. Putting it to use: Sherman Alexie’s “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City”

· In you handouts, all of you have a copy of a poem by Sherman Alexie that does a good job of exploring what an awareness narrative looks like.

· Read it over it and imagine how you would have your students emulate this kind of writing in an effort to discuss experiences with some of the issues Alexie touches on (race, culture, history, etc…), and how that writing speaks about “the way the world operates and about how we can and should operate within it” (Brent).

V. What this achieves

· In using Native American texts like this in the classroom, we can hopefully have our students:

- Think, read, and write more critically

- Be aware of the larger social contexts when they write

- Be mindful of other perspectives to avoid appeals to bifurcation and logical fallacies

- Be open to difference and disparate view points

- Write in a manner that is both academic and creative