Plan for the Day
- Introduction and Syllabus
- Why General Education?
- Introduction to Rhetoric
- Democracy/Liberty/Freedom/ETC. quotation:
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
–H.L. Mencken. A Little Book in C Major. John Lane Company, 1916, p. 19.
Introduction to Class
Before getting to the syllabus, I want to help you navigate between our Canvas site and the outside-of-Canvas website. This website will have the course notes weekly (usually Sunday nights), and you should follow along with the syllabus to keep up with the reading. If you choose not to read, you will fail.
Why both? Why a website AND a Canvas page. I promise you I’m not doing this to confuse you. You are the immediate audience, but I have colleagues elsewhere who benefit from this resource–and they should thank me more often! The class website has notes for the readings and other topics that you can access from anywhere. Only twice in 19 years has there been a situation where my class website wasn’t available. Therefore, I’m pretty confident in this website’s reliability. Canvas has gotten much better over the years, but there are glitches. All your work will go through Canvas–including the Tests and Exams.
General Education
Let’s figure out what this course is and is not.
- Read the course syllabus–Read the entire thing
- General Education Requirement
- Italian Renaissance–rebirth of Western Civilization, 14th-16th centuries
- “The new age would be a ‘rinascità’ (‘rebirth’) of learning and literature, art and culture. This was the birth of the period now known as the Renaissance.”
–History.com - Revival of Greek and Roman culture
- The Age of Exploration
- “The new age would be a ‘rinascità’ (‘rebirth’) of learning and literature, art and culture. This was the birth of the period now known as the Renaissance.”
- The Enlightenment, 17th-18th centuries
- Science, Curiosity, Reason, Philosophy
- John Locke–rulers govern by the consent of the governed
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau–argued against divine right of kings; the people working for the common good
AMDM 1575: Engaging with American Democracy (3 credits) is one of four courses (or transfer equivalents) that fulfill the Foundations of American Democracy Charlotte Core General Education requirement. The official catalog description for all 1575 courses is as follows:
An examination of issues or concepts related to American democracy, with attention to key historical documents including but not limited to: the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, select Federalist Papers, the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. Additional texts and topics may vary, depending on the specific section.
AMDM 1575 has been specifically designed to be taught by faculty across the disciplines with no specialized expertise in history or political science. Instead, students are encouraged to critically explore an essential question of American democracy from different perspectives through historical and contemporary texts.
Areas of Focus
Our class’s main Area of Focus will be the first one, but we will touch on the other two as well.
Area of Focus 1: Theoretical Frameworks, Ideals, and Principles of American Democracy
- Define core principles of American democracy
- Analyze how core principle(s) of American democracy have been interpreted and redefined over time
- Analyze how the principle(s) of American democracy differ from other democratic models
Area of Focus 2: Membership and Inclusion in American Democracy
- Describe how concepts of citizenship and representation in American democracy have changed over time
- Explain historical and contemporary challenges to representation in American democracy
- Analyze diverse perspectives on inclusion in democratic systems
Area of Focus 3: Engagement Methods and Strategies in American Democracy
- Identify the rights and responsibilities of individuals within American democracy
- Explain various methods of engaging with American democracy
- Analyze the effects of individual and collective actions on shaping American democracy
Discussion Posts
You will have ten (10) Discussion Posts this semester. They aren’t every week, so you need to get onto Canvas to see when to do them. You’ll have prompts that should inspire you to respond (in at least 250 words) to the reading from that week. All of these will be on Canvas and due Fridays by 11:07 pm—not midnight but 11:07 pm. You are responsible for doing these prompts AND making sure your response made it to Canvas, so, after submitting, check to make sure it’s there. Again, that is your responsibility. To ensure you don’t suffer from a Canvas glitch, type these responses up in a word processor (MS Word, Google Docs, etc.) and then copy + paste the response into the Canvas text box, which also provides a word count.
What you should do right now is set a weekly reminder for Thursday—giving yourself a day ahead—that alerts you a weekly reflection is due. Yes, they’re due Friday at 11:07 pm, but set the reminder for Thursday. I will not allow make ups. If you email me because you forgot, here’s my response (so you have it in advance):
- Did you set the weekly reminder I asked you to on 8/19—the first day of class? I will not reopen the weekly prompts. I also don’t accept these responses via email.
Your first prompt is to provide some information about yourself. I already added some information about myself. Because of drop-add still being open, I’m giving you until 8/29 to finish this first one. You’ll also have Discussion Post #1 due next week, so finish this introduction. These Discussion Posts are worth 30% of your grade. Not doing them will hurt your grade. Set that reminder now.
Our Rhetorical Approach
This course will consider the rhetoric of the assigned texts. Specifically, we want to investigate the ways in which the authors/speakers evoke core American values.
Ubiquity of Rhetoric
You’d think that with such a rich history, rhetoric would be introduced to students long before college. Well, it is, but not necessarily as a pillar of Western Civilization. The term comes up when politicians or their critics denounce an opponent’s speech as empty; therefore, “rhetoric” is often associated popularly with “empty speech,” non-contributing verbiage, or fluff.
But the study of rhetoric is much more complicated. Just as each discipline has its own epistemology–the study of knowledge, its foundations and validity– each discipline’s communication has a rhetoric. And rhetoric isn’t limited simply to disciplines: Movements, Social Norms, Technology, Science, Religion, etc. have a rhetoric. I often define such analyses into “rhetorics of…” as common factors surrounding the power or belief in a particular area. In other words, beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices are rhetorics of prevailing social ideology: One’s acceptance of cultural “truth” is based largely on one’s immersion into the culture’s myths and beliefs. Therefore, this definition of rhetoric requires us to recognize the relationship among sender-receiver-mediator. Of course, for our discussion, the “mediator” is culture. There is no concrete, definitive transmission of rhetorically pure communication. Sender and receiver filter the message(s) based on their experiences. Lucky for us, we can locate prevailing patterns in messages because culture mediates them. When doing a rhetorical analysis, you have to ask what are common ways particular ideas are conveyed in a culture. As you read the texts this semester, pay attention to the authors’ use of core principles, such as “freedom,” “liberty,” “pursuit of hapiness,” etc.
A brief Introduction of Rhetoric.
What This Course Is Not
This course takes a rhetorical approach as opposed to a historical or political science approach. That doesn’t mean we won’t discuss history and political factors related to the Government; it just means we’re privileging rhetoric as our method for interpreting core American values.
Vocabulary for Discussing Culture
These are important terms to know when talking about culture and communication. Sometimes we (English professors) use different terms interchangeably, but the definitions below are good for our purposes in this class. They might not be the exact definitions your fields adhere to, but, knowing there are slight differences, allows you to (re)consider how a person from a certain discipline comes to knowledge.
- Ideology: prevailing cultural/institutional attitudes, beliefs, norms, attributes, practices, and myths that are said to drive a society. Members of a culture (or subculture) aren’t devoid of ideology. Take a look at the OED Online’s 1st and 4th definitions.
- Hegemony: the ways or results of a dominant group’s (the hegemon) influence over other groups in a society or region. The dominant group dictates, consciously or unconsciously, how society is structured and how other groups must “buy into” the structure. For example, the former Soviet Union was the hegemonic power influencing the communist countries of Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
- Rhetoric: the ability to perceive the available means of persuasion (Aristotle), or the ways in which meanings are conveyed.
- Epistemology: “a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge.”
- Illusion: “false or misleading representation of reality.”
- Privilege: (as a verb) to grant something a special right or status; to value something over another. An economist privileges a worldview that believes individuals make decisions based on maximizing self interest.
- Ambiguity: “doubtfulness or uncertainty of meaning or intention.”
The last word, ambiguity, is extremely important for this type of class. Unlike assumptions of other disciplines, we’re not searching for material to plug into an equation. Most answers will be contextual—they will depend on the situation. Not all ideas are black and white, but we often absorb information from speakers that, rhetorically, present ideas as black and white. You should be ready to leave class with more questions than answers. That doesn’t mean you leave saying, “what was that all about?” Instead, you leave being able to ask smarter questions. A more informed person and one able to deal with ambiguity will be able to ask smarter questions. Remember what Voltaire said:
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. (Voltaire)
Highlights from Introducing American Politics
This is not a required text but a quick way to brush up on “forgotten” aspects of the structure of the United States government. Time permitting, I’ll point to afew aspects of the text.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the government now in a convenient graphic guide. Although I hope this is a refresher for you because you got all this in 8th-grade civics and 11th/12th grade US History/Government, it might be your first time with these particular concepts. Because people invoke the US Constitution, specifically, or laws, in general, a course on rhetoric benefits from having the vocabulary of jurisprudence and the concepts assumed in these texts. Laws are in place because the powers that be need to develop reasonable standards for both identifying our responsibilities and recourses for grievances. They are agreements, often based on tradition, in place to assist in adjudicating disputes that may arise. In the pseudo-democracy (republican, representative) of the United States, representatives develop, debate, and decide what laws should be “on the books,” and the courts interpret those laws and can even nullify a law. The important thing to remember for a class on rhetoric is that laws are based on the societies (and the hegemons of those societies) from which they come. As Locker & Scheele point out, “…governmental institutions…[are] the product of a mutually transformative interaction between state and society. Politics doesn’t happen in a vacuum” (p. 3).
- p. 6: “A political ideology can be held by an individual or group, but it tends to contain values, understandings, and beliefs about how the political and social world can and should work.”
- p. 9: “Generally, conservatism centers around preference for tradition and social order, and a distrust of change.”
- p. 13: “…based on their party affiliation, we can usually make a number of assumptions about their stance on key issues.”
- p. 19: American exceptionalism
- p. 24: In the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party “was the majority party for all but 4 years in a 62-year period (1930-1994).”
- p. 31: “As we go about our daily lives, our actions are constantly being shaped by political rules and institutions….institutional stickiness—the persistence of an institution even if it no longer provides for optimal outcomes.”
- p. 34: “…the Constitution itself was shaped by the shared norms and understandings that existed at the time it was written.”
- But whose? Think hegemony.
- p. 64: “The type of rhetoric that different presidents use when taking on world challenges tends to reflect both their personal style and how they interpret the state of critical world affairs.”
- You, personally, might not be persuaded by a political figure because your worldview might be different, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t an attempt made to influence and audience.
- There is no communication situation devoid of rhetoric.
Next Class
Let’s get to it! Read The Declaration of Independence for Thursday, 8/21. We might not have gotten to everything today, so we’ll catch up on Thursday.