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Description
Cultural rhetoric seeks to expand Western notions and traditions of rhetoric to allow for the study of rhetoric from other cultures and traditions. As strides have been made in cultural rhetoric scholarship for the past three-four decades, the field of rhetoric has grown to accept various ways of being and arguing. The field has consequently expanded its parameters for what constitutes “good” writing and research, incorporating these expanded parameters into many required composition courses. Concurrently, the field of education has been expanding its own notion of what constitutes “good” writing, research, and storytelling. Culturally responsive teaching and culturally relevant pedagogy have sought to create a new approach for teachers, starting from students’ funds of knowledge, by designing and executing student-centered lessons that reach students in their unique and varied backgrounds and experiences. While scholarship in both the field of rhetoric and education has expanded greatly, the two fields don't always coexist when it comes to curriculum in K-12 education. This project is a response to the district-provided curriculum at an urban K-8 language immersion school, asking how the curriculum can be changed and expanded to apply theories of cultural rhetoric. The provided curriculum is highly scripted, with literally every line already planned out for the teacher, and therefore leaves little room for the student-centered lessons and pedagogy that cultural rhetoric and culturally responsive teaching would demand. The aim of this project is to invert the usual planning process, giving teachers of all levels a framework for questioning their school-provided curriculum and examining their own starting place when designing lessons. Rather than starting with standards and texts from the Western canon, and then adding in texts by minority authors, this project demonstrates how using funds of knowledge and cultural rhetoric as a starting place for curriculum still allows for ample coverage of state standards, Western texts, and district-provided curriculum. Each of the three teaching units in this project engage all students and their own histories and experiences so that they all learn from each other and gain a much broader sense of the world of literature and the world around them.
