The discourse on teachers as agents of school change has recently emerged in educational policies in many countries, emphasizing teacher-led educational reforms. The meaning of this rhetoric is quite vague; its practical meaning is revealed by analyzing how teachers' roles are normalized in educational policies. With a Foucauldian approach, this…

Ever since the rhetorical turn in education, education scholars have recognized the importance of rhetoric in constructing and mediating human society. They have turned to rhetorical theory to come to terms with this rhetorically mediated reality and to engage students as critical citizens within it. Much of this work draws on rhetorical theorist…

This essay takes a rhetorical pragmatist perspective on current questions concerning educational goals and pedagogical practices. It begins by considering some challenges to rhetorical approaches to education, placing those challenges in the theoretical context of their posing. The essay then describes one current rhetorical approach--based on…

The Rhetoric* of Writing Assessment uses strategic variations of rhetorical theory to reimagine writing assessment's complicated disciplinary past and rethink its foundational concepts through its multifaceted rhetorical situatedness. Although scholars such as Bob Broad, Brian Huot, Patricia Lynne, Norbert Elliot, Edward M. White, and Kathleen…

This study investigated and analyzed the use of rhetorical appeals, and the presence of hedges, and boosters in the argumentative essays of ESL learners. It is aimed at exploring the linguistic differences between male and female writers in terms of how they put forward their claims in an argument and how they appeal to their audience. The study…

Presupposition, a linguistic element can be employed in utterances. When this is done it enhances the comprehension of what is being communicated. This aspect of language that is implicit assumption of an utterance is a strategy that may be used to express a speaker's socio-political dominance. The truth of what is said is taken for granted and…

Focusing on matters of power and difference, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee's theory of Discourse. Although both theories offer productive ways of understanding literate practice, it is argued, they are limited in crucial respects. Genre theory offers few ways of understanding how and why some social actors have…

Although educational researchers predominately study complex, multidimensional problems, research findings and proposed arguments can sometimes be characterized as definite, simplified, and prone to particular types of answers or expected outcomes. The authors seek to problematize these definite and simplified notions of answers by looking at some…

Does rhetoric have a place in the discourse of human rights? Without certain reply, as the dilemmas of defining, claiming, and promoting human rights appear both to include and exclude the rhetorical gesture, this question invites inquiry into the preface of the contemporary human rights regime, the moment of the aftermath that provokes a struggle…

The conversational research interview constitutes a complex and fraught context for personal accounts, and the methodological literature of the past few decades has acknowledged this. Theoretical discussions about representation, ethics, and power in interviews have been extended in empirical studies of actual interaction. Particularly useful for…

In this interview Susan Jarratt reviews the trajectory of her scholarship and revisits some of the lessons learned from a variety of her projects while simultaneously drawing out historical and narrative continuities of seemingly disparate time periods and contexts. In doing so, she elucidates the value of scholarship as a political and…

Drawing attention to widespread instances of discourteous speech and hate discourse that permeate US and world culture, Alleen Pace Nilsen maintains that our imperative as educators is to teach "students the benefits of being civil to each other." She proposes some avenues for enriching students' understanding of the power of civil…

Over the past twenty years much work has been done by teachers of secondary English to describe and make explicit the semiotic resources used to access and critique the discourses of powerful institutions such as schooling. At the same time, however, there has been a growing recognition that the rhetorical resources needed for adolescents to…

This article offers a way of using the theory of audience design--how speakers position different audience groups as main addressees, overhearers, or bystanders--for written discourse. It focuses on main addressees, that is, those audience members who are expected to participate in and respond to a speaker's utterances. The text samples are…

Prevailing idealist and materialist theories of rhetoric fail to account for the continual circulation and recirculation of "racism" as a scientific discourse. An alternative theory of modal materialism addresses this problem by suggesting that the properties of all being are constituted through three distinguishable forms of matter that include…