Preview this article: Metaphor 2: Crossing: Integrative Techne, Transdisciplinary Learning, and Writing Program Design, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/82/5/collegeenglish30754-1.gif

This essay argues that rhetoricians of health of medicine should continue to carve out an expansive focus on the exigencies, functions, and impacts of health-related discourse; attend to the movement, surrounding networks, and ecologies of this discourse; and work with other scholars/researchers, both inside and outside disciplinary rhetorical studies, toward a variety of goals.

The pharmaceutical industry’s corporate responsibility reports illustrate how the liberal rhetoric of civic engagement can be reappropriated to serve the market-driven aims of risk management and public relations. Tracing the ideologic linkage of corporate responsibility and service-learning versions of civic engagement, and contextualizing postsecondary service-learning along a larger neoliberal trajectory, should prompt us to reconsider basic questions about the means and ends of our institutional and pedagogical work.

Pedagogical and scholarly discussions of the process of usability tend to focus more on methods than on practices, or specific, tactical performances of and adjustments to these methods. Yet such practices shape students' learning and determine the success of their usability efforts. A teacher research study tracking students' understanding and enactment of usability and user-centered design over the course of a service-learning project illustrates the importance of practice-level struggles—and the thoughtful preparation for and facilitation of these struggles—to the development of students' flexible intelligence (metis) and rhetorical translation skills. © 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Although service-learning has the potential to infuse technical communication pedagogy with civic goals, it can easily be co-opted by a hyperpragmatism that limits ethical critique and civic engagement. Service-learning's component of reflection, in particular, can become an uncritical, narrow invention or project management tool. Integrating cultural studies and service-learning can help position students as critical citizens who produce effective and ethical discourse and who create more inclusive forms of power. Rather than being tacked on, cultural studies approaches should be incorporated into core service-learning assignments.

The cultural studies model of the cultural circuit can help students track the larger circulation and transformation of technical communication in order to ethically critique and respond to it. Applying the model to specific cases of technology and its accompanying documentation (in this case the OraQuick rapid HIV test) can illustrate for students the ethical necessity of extending the usual focus on production to distribution, marketing, interpretation, and use. Students can then channel this awareness to their own writing projects, taking action to ensure that these projects are responsive and empowering to those whom they affect.

Seeks to extend the work of Rosteck, Bazerman, Condit, and others by further elaborating what a hybrid rhetorical cultural study might look like. Studies the rhetorics surrounding HIV and AIDS, particularly home HIV testing. Focuses on the rhetoric of science and technology because of its cross-disciplinary nature and its potential to contribute to high-stakes enterprises, such as HIV testing.

n his 1992 Society of America keynote address titled Rhetoric in the Vortex of Cultural Studies, Walter Beale proposed that rhetoric and cultural engage in a mutually beneficial dialectic. The point of such a dialectic, Beale clarified, would not be to absorb rhetoric into cultural or vice versa, but to invent ways to fruitfully combine the two sets of approaches. A few years later, Thomas Rosteck similarly called on rhetoricians to advance the project of rhetorical by bringing together the rhetorical tradition and contemporary cultural studies (297). With the rising stock of cultural in the disciplines of English and communication studies, rhetoricians have begun to take up these invitations, as Rosteck's collectionAt the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies attests. Some rheto-

Abstract This essay analyzes the web of persuasion named the “knowledge enthymeme”; in the public policy debate over mandatory newborn HIV testing in the United States and especially New York. Bringing together classical rhetorical theory and Foucault's theory of the knowledge‐power loop, the essay explains how the conceptual/argumentative frame of the knowledge enthymeme helped shape the knowledge‐power relations of mandatory newborn testing in dangerous ways. Ultimately, the knowledge enthymeme blocked more responsive approaches to testing by exaggerating the beneficial effects of testing and its knowledge, ignoring the contingenices of this knowledge, and bypassing the “situated knowledges “ of the women it targets.

(1997). John Witherspoon's normalizing pedagogy of ethos. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 58-75.

J. Blake Scott describes a method and outlines the procedures, including a heuristic, for having students write literacy narratives about their history as writers. Scott argues that writing and sharing these narratives brings the students closer into community with one another and helps them produce better writing.

Drawing on arguments by Carolyn Miller, Steven Katz, and others, this essay claims that teaching ethics is particularly important to technical writing. Next, the essay outlines a classical, sophistic approach to ethics based on the theories and pedagogies of Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates. This sophistic approach emphasizes the Greek concept of nomos, internal and external deliberation, and responsible action or articulation. The final section of the essay discusses possible problems and pedagogical applications of sophistic ethics in the contemporary technical writing classroom.