BiblioVault - Books about Fleckenstein, Kristie S.

Embodied Literacies

Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching

Kristie S. Fleckenstein

Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching is a response to calls to enlarge the purview of literacy to include imagery in its many modalities and various facets. Kristie S. Fleckenstein asserts that all meaning, linguistic or otherwise, is a result of the transaction between image and word. She implements the concept of imageword—a mutually constitutive fusion of image and word—to reassess language arts education and promote a double vision of reading and writing. Utilizing an accessible fourfold structure, she then applies the concept to the classroom, reconfiguring what teachers do when they teach, how they teach, what they teach with, and how they teach ethically.

Fleckenstein does not discount the importance of text in the quest for literacy. Instead, she places the language arts classroom and teacher at the juncture of image and word to examine the ways imagery enables and disables the teaching of and the act of reading and writing. Learning results from the double play of language and image, she argues. Helping teachers and students dissolve the boundaries between text and image, the volume outlines how to see reading and writing as something more than words and language and to disestablish our definitions of literacy as wholly linguistic.

Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching comes at a critical time in our cultural history. Echoing the opinion that postmodernity is a product of imagery rather than textuality, Fleckenstein argues that we must evolve new literacies when we live in a culture saturated by images on computer screens, televisions, even billboards. Decisively and clearly, she demonstrates the importance of incorporating imagery—which is inextricably linked to our psychological, social, and textual lives—into our epistemologies and literacy teaching.

[more]

Rethinking Ethos

A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric

Edited by Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones

Southern Illinois University Press, 2016

Labels traditionally ascribed to women—mother, angel of the house, whore, or bitch—suggest character traits that do not encompass the complexities of women’s identities or empower women’s public speaking. Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric redefines the concept of ethos—classically thought of as character or credibility—as ecological and feminist, negotiated and renegotiated, and implicated in shifting power dynamics. Building on previous feminist and rhetorical scholarship, this essay collection presents a sustained discussion of the unique methods by which women’s ethos is constructed and transformed.

Editors Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones identify three rhetorical maneuvers that characterize ethos in the feminist ecological imaginary: ethe as interruption/interrupting, ethe as advocacy/advocating, and ethe as relation/relating. Each section of the book explores one of these rhetorical maneuvers. An afterword gathers contributors’ thoughts on the collection’s potential impact and influence, possibilities for future scholarship, and the future of feminist rhetorical studies.

With its rich mix of historical examples and contemporary case studies, Rethinking Ethos offers a range of new perspectives, including queer theory, transnational approaches, radical feminism, Chicana feminism, and indigenous points of view, from which to consider a feminist approach to ethos.

[more]

Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things

Edited by Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle

University of Alabama Press, 2016

A fascinating addition to rhetoric scholarship, Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things expands the scope of rhetorical situations beyond the familiar humanist triad of speaker-audience-purpose to an inclusive study of inanimate objects.

The fifteen essays in Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things persuasively overturn the stubborn assumption that objects are passive tools in the hands of objective human agents. Rhetoric has proved that forms of communication such as digital images, advertising, and political satires do much more than simply lie dormant, and Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things shows that objects themselves also move, circulate, and produce opportunities for new rhetorical publics and new rhetorical actions. Objects are not simply inert tools but are themselves vibrant agents of measurable power.

Organizing the work of leading and emerging rhetoric scholars into four broad categories, the collection explores the role of objects in rhetorical theory, histories of rhetoric, visual rhetoric, literacy studies, rhetoric of science and technology, computers and writing, and composition theory and pedagogy. A rich variety of case studies about objects such as women’s bicycles in the nineteenth century, the QWERTY keyboard, and little free libraries ground this study in fascinating, real-life examples and build on human-centered approaches to rhetoric to consider how material elements—human and nonhuman alike—interact persuasively in rhetorical situations.

Taken together, Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things argues that the field of rhetoric’s recent attention to material objects should go further than simply open a new line of inquiry. To maximize the interdisciplinary turn to things, rhetoricians must seize the opportunity to reimagine and perhaps resolve rhetoric’s historically problematic relationship to physical reality and ontology. By tapping the rich resource of inanimate agents such as "fish, political posters, plants, and dragonflies,” rhetoricians can more fully grasp the rhetorical implications at stake in such issues.

[more]

Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts

Edited by Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe

Southern Illinois University Press, 2011

In Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts,editors Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe bring together seventeen essays by new and established scholars that demonstrate the value and importance of silence and listening to the study and practice of rhetoric. Building on the editors’ groundbreaking research, which respects the power of the spoken word while challenging the marginalized status of silence and listening, this volumemakes a strong case for placing these overlooked concepts, and their intersections, at the forefront of rhetorical arts within rhetoric and composition studies.

Divided into three parts—History, Theory and Criticism, and Praxes—this book reimagines traditional histories and theories of rhetoric and incorporates contemporary interests, such as race, gender, and cross-cultural concerns, into scholarly conversations about rhetorical history, theory, criticism, and praxes. For the editors and the other contributors to this volume, silence is not simply the absence of sound and listening is not a passive act. When used strategically and with purpose—together and separately—silence and listening are powerful rhetorical devices integral to effective communication. The essays cover a wide range of subjects, including women rhetors from ancient Greece and medieval and Renaissance Europe; African philosophy and African American rhetoric; contemporary antiwar protests in the United States; activist conflict resolution in Israel and Palestine; and feminist and second-language pedagogies.

Taken together, the essays in this volume advance the argument that silence and listening are as important to rhetoric and composition studies as the more traditionally emphasized arts of reading, writing, and speaking and are particularly effective for theorizing, historicizing, analyzing, and teaching. An extremely valuable resource for instructors and students in rhetoric, composition, and communication studies, Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts will also have applications beyond academia, helping individuals, cultural groups, and nations more productively discern and implement appropriate actions when all parties agree to engage in rhetorical situations that include not only respectful speaking, reading, and writing but also productive silence and rhetorical listening.

[more]

Violence in the Work of Composition

Recognizing, Intervening, Ameliorating

edited by Scott Gage and Kristie S. Fleckenstein

Utah State University Press, 2022

Focusing on overt and covert violence and bringing attention to the many ways violence inflects and infects the teaching, administration, and scholarship of composition, Violence in the Work of Composition examines both forms of violence and the reciprocal relationships uniting them across the discipline. Addressing a range of spaces, the collection features chapters on classroom practices, writing centers, and writing program administration, examining the complicated ways writing instruction is interwoven with violence, as well as the equally complicated ways writing teachers may recognize and resist the presence and influence of violence in their work.

This book provides a focused, nuanced, and systematic discussion of violence and its presence and influence across pedagogical and administrative sites. Violence in the Work of Composition offers a close look at the nature of violence as it emerges in the work of composition; provides strategies for identifying violence, especially covert violence, addressing its impact and preventing its eruption across many sites; and invites readers to reflect on both the presence of violence and the hope for its cessation. Contributors consider, first, how compositionists can recognize the ways their work inadvertently enacts and/or perpetuates violence and, second, how they can intervene and mitigate that violence.

Rich with the voices of myriad stakeholders, Violence in the Work of Composition initiates an essential conversation about violence and literacy education at a time when violence in its many forms continues to shape our culture, communities, and educational systems.

Contributors: Kerry Banazek, Katherine Bridgman, Eric Camarillo, Elizabeth Chilbert Powers, Joshua Daniel, Lisa Dooley, Allison Hargreaves, Jamila Kareem, Lynn C. Lewis, Trevor Meyer, Cathryn Molloy, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, Ellen Skirvin, Krista Speicher Sarraf, Thomas Sura, James Zimmerman

[more]

Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom

Kristie S. Fleckenstein

Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

In this innovative volume, Kristie S. Fleckenstein explores how the intersection of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy in the classroom can help students become compassionate citizens who participate in the world as they become more critically aware of the world. Fleckenstein argues that all social action—behavior designed to increase human dignity, value, and quality of life—depends on a person’s repertoire of visual and rhetorical habits. To develop this repertoire in students, the author advocates the incorporation of visual habits—or ways of seeing—into a language-based pedagogical approach in the writing classroom. According to Fleckenstein, interweaving the visual and rhetorical in composition pedagogy enables students to more readily perceive the need for change, while arming them with the abilities and desire to enact it.

The author addresses social action from the perspective of three visual habits: spectacle, which fosters disengagement; animation, or fusing body with meaning; and antinomy, which invites the invention of new realities. Fleckenstein then examines the ways in which particular visual habits interact with rhetorical habits and with classroom methods, resulting in the emergence of various forms of social action. To enhance the understanding of the concepts she discusses, the author represents the intertwining relationships of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy graphically as what she calls symbiotic knots. In tracing the modes of social action privileged by a visual habit and a teacher’s pedagogical choices, Fleckenstein attends particularly to the experiences of students who have been traditionally barred from participation in the public sphere because of gender, race, or class. The book culminates in a call for visually and rhetorically robust writing pedagogies.

In Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom, Fleckenstein combines classic methods of rhetorical teaching with fresh perspectives to provide a unique guide for initiating important improvements in teaching social action. The result is a remarkable volume that empowers teachers to best inspire students to take part in their world at that most crucial moment when they are discovering it.

[more]