I believe my classroom is a rhetorical space. By "rhetoric" I mean skills in speaking and writing effectively. By "space," I believe the bricks-and-mortar definition matters less and less as the requirement for a central, physical workspace diminishes.
Students no longer have to leave their old lives to go into the academy for knowledge and skills that they carry out to the “real world.” That 19th-century institutional model of higher education is obsolete. Technology allows students to continue to participate in their own communities, explore others, and invent new ones, even as they sit in a college classroom. Off-site and distance learning change the definition of what makes a classroom.
Where the classroom is and what that space is constructed of becomes secondary. It is who is in that rhetorical space and how they are participating that defines it.
A few years ago, I taught composition courses on a college campus three days and in a nearby prison the other two days a week. One of my students in the prison classroom wrote in his essay: “When I was a drug dealer on the street, doin’ what drug dealers does…”
When he and I sat down together, I explained: “I grew up on a farm in north central Iowa. I don’t know what drug dealers do when they are on the street of a city.
"If it’s important for me, as your reader, to understand, you’ll have to explain it to me. Describe what it looks like, smells like, sounds like to be on the street dealing drugs. Help me understand.”
He looked at the paper and sighed. “Well, it is important that you understand what I mean, so that you ‘get’ my story. You have to see where I come from to get my meaning.”
“Then tell me just what I need to know,” I said. “You don’t have to incriminate yourself or anyone else. Just give me some insight.”
He look shook his head. “But I don’t want you to think badly of me, Miss.”
I shifted in the rickety one-armed desk that I had dragged up next to where he sat. I looked at the words he’d printed carefully on the lined loose-leaf paper. Offenders were not allowed spiral notebooks because the wire binding could be used for “other purposes.” He held one of the pencils I passed out when he and his classmates filed into the room, each wearing identical khaki shirts and pants without belts.
Shortly, I would collect those pencils, counting to make sure I got them all back so that none would become a weapon in the general population. A guard would appear in the doorway of my classroom – with its broken windows and creaking ceiling fans -- that smelled of bodies crammed into barracks and occasional showers -- the room filled with men convicted of drug offenses, armed robbery, and manslaughter -- and he would lead my students back to concrete buildings behind razor wire.
And still, my student was concerned that I might think badly of him. The physical surroundings didn't matter. What was important in that rhetorical situation was between two people.
That student was one of the few who did not graduate on the inside. He completed his sentence shortly before commencement and walked with other students who I had in class on campus. After the ceremonies, he sought me out and introduced his mother and girlfriend.
"Thank you for the education, Miss," he said as we shook hands.
"Thank you for teaching me," I replied. I was proud of the work we had done together because I knew it might influence his choices and keep him from going back to prison. But that work changed me too. It broadened my understanding of the world and the people in it. It has helped me make better choices, especially in the classroom, where I understand that the important stuff still happens between individuals.
I believe that the class itself is a rhetorical exercise. My students and I make meaning for ourselves and each other as we work together. Each time we connect in our rhetorical space – whether face-to-face, through their writing, or via digital mediation – it is an opportunity to re-sort our understanding of language, literacy, our world and ourselves.
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