2012 CCCC Chair's Address

I really enjoyed reading Malea's address to the CCCC convention. She uses incorporates multiple stories of people that were at the convention. I thought this was a powerful rhetorical strategy because, it was a way to spark emotion within the audience. It also makes her stories more credible because the people in them are sitting in the audience so obviously they are true. Did you think the stories were necessary for her speech?

I saw many similarities between the piece we read by Dr. Villanueva and this piece. I think I mainly saw these similarities when it came to the topic of colonization and western rhetoric. I especially saw this when she discusses Walter Mignolo's book and how the book begins; "the belief that Western civilization and European modernity "was the [zero] point of arrival of human history and the model for the entire planet came to be taken for granted."This brought me back to our discussion of how Western rhetoric has taken over and its hard to find non western rhetoric material. She makes note of this too when she says that indigenous rhetoric has almost been eradicated.

I think it was also interesting that she incorporates the role a teacher plays in the classroom. This discussion brought me back to class when we discussed how teachers are essentially paid to change the minds of students. Malea supports this by discussing how her students learn about Western Rhetoric essentially so they can be mini versions of Malea. Do you that is possible for a teacher to teach without influencing the beliefs of students? Can learning be separated from emotions.