Content area
Full Text
Public rhetoric pedagogy can benefit from an ecological perspective that sees change as advocated not through a single document but through multiple mundane and monumental texts. This article summarizes various approaches to rhetorical ecology, offers an ecological read of the Montgomery bus boycotts, and concludes with pedagogical insights on a first-year composition project emphasizing rhetorical ecologies.
In her article on teaching public rhetoric, Nancy Welch mentions a student who "faced possible academic sanctions for her decision to go public by hoisting an antiwar flag on the campus green without first applying for a permit and also without seeking permission to remove the American flag that had been flying there" (476). Though Welch describes students who are engaged, passionate, and creative when producing texts that may invigorate public discourse, the permit incident raises a question that public rhetoric pedagogy has not yet addressed. In the public rhetoric classroom, why shouldn't students be taught how to complete the institutional documents necessary for their public rhetoric displays?1 Why shouldn't they see their public advocacy as the interaction of several texts, aimed at various audiences, instead of focusing on only the most visible manifestations of public rhetoric? Although the permit application has a smaller audience, it is just as vital to public advocacy as the antiwar flag. So too are all documents that cultivate public deliberation, prepare groups for public rhetorical action, and sustain the momentum of advocacy movements. While these mundane documents are not always as exciting or visible as the rhetorical fireworks of more obvious public displays, supporting documents are no less necessary for the creation and re-creation of publics. In expanding public rhetoric's scope to include the mundane, we ultimately want to emphasize the ecological nature of public discourse and offer a pedagogy designed to help students recognize and engage public rhetorical ecologies.
We are encouraging an ecological approach to public rhetoric pedagogy that takes a cue from the environmental artist Christo Javacheff, who considers the permits he files and the public hearings he attends to be as vital to his art as the final product of, say, Running Fence, a gigantic fabric fence that extended through nearly twenty-five miles of California. The book he wrote about Running Fence contains both images of the fence...