Faith, Maggie and others have already taken up the question of Berlin's pedagogy, and throughout the semester we've returned to the (important) question of how to put theory into practice without merely nodding to the social epistemic as one more writing exercise (i.e. Our next unit will focus on how all of you are socially constructed: free-floating signifiers unaware of the unresolved narratives you consume and the political unconscious you each reify. The unit after that will ask you to describe a place that is special to you, why that is, and what you learned there. For our last unit you'll need to bring Diane Hacker's style guide . . .)
Let me add to this thread by highlighting the conclusion of Patricia Harkin's "Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures as an Articulation Project":
"The students Jim dealt with are, by and large, products of a homogeneous, rural, politically and religiously conservative culture. My mentees and I have named this typical students the 'postmodern Hoosier rhetor.' . . .When the postmodern Hoosier rhetor has a contradiction pointed out to her, then, she is less likely to contemplate the cognitive dissonance as a spur to invention and more likely to simply say 'whatever.' And since Jim's method calls for students to arrive at genre as a function of their invention processes, the pomo Hoosier rhetor reinvents the 'whatever' genre--the essay that concludes by asserting that 'everyone is entitled to their own opinion'--the very kind of writing that we hoped cultural studies would eliminate." (205)
Maybe we can spend a bit of time sharing how we've either fallen into the rhetoric Hairston would accuse us of ("oh, these "unsophisticated" students. . .) or had to dig in a bit pedagogically (countering the whatever / relativist position with something Berlin might have encouraged).
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I have not been given reign of any classroom (at MU any way) *yet* so I can't speak to experiences that would translate well to rhet/comp in the English 1000 sense of the term, but one thing that I used while at UC-Davis that helped counter the "whatever/relativist" position in classes I helped teach in other regards was Gloria Anzaldua's _La Frontera/Borderlands: The New Mestiza_. Anazldua could be described as a walking contradiction, a hybrid of oppositional forces. But rather than have an "anything goes" ethic, she calls for a new understanding of those contradictions. I could do a whole post on this--and maybe I will--or maybe it's something to bring up in class.
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