Who is c h knoblauch

Their analyses of functional and cultural literacy are trenchant, and in their chapter titled "Critical Literacy" they expose shortcomings in the "conceptual sources of critical literacy" such as Marxism and feminism. The book's final chapter, on "Teacher Inquiry: Knowing for Ourselves," calls for teacher research being "carried out by teachers themselves rather than by educational researchers" The chapter reviews the many dimensions of teachers' lowly status and then calls for a new kind of research, a qualitative research based in narrative and owned by teachers themselves.

They cite, as a successful example of this "program of critical literacy," the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature, an Albany area group of secondary teachers who have "been producing portraits of high school literature classrooms" Throughout the book Knoblanch and Brannon have been exploding the notion of objectivity, yet when they privilege "classroom narratives" that "create Knoblauch and Brannon's sometimes lengthy sentences demand close attention.

I admire their honesty in recognizing, for example, their own privileged place. They wonder if they have misrepresented functional literacy and acknowledge "the ethical paradox here, the imbalance of power that enables us to publish a book criticizing that imbalance yet also effectively sustaining it" I am quite sympathetic to their idealism yet am left wondering where and how I might practice critical teaching.

I wonder about its practical outcomes. Yet teacher research that is genuinely collaborative between university education personnel and schoolteachers, where the latter inform and lead as much as the former, steps in the right direction. Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy deserves a serious read. H Knoblauch. Discursive ideologies : reading western rhetoric by C. Knoblauch argues that European rhetorical theory comprises several distinct and fundamentally opposed traditions of discourse.

Writing accessibly for the upper division student, Knoblauch resists the conventional narrative of a unified Western rhetorical tradition. He identifies deep ideological and epistemological differences that exist among strands of Western thought and that are based in divergent "grounds of meaningfulness.? These conflicts underlie and influence current discourse about vital public issues. Knoblauch considers six "stories? Six distinctive ideologies of Western rhetoric emerge: magical rhetoric, ontological rhetoric, objectivist rhetoric, expressivist rhetoric, sociological rhetoric, and deconstructive rhetoric.

He explores the nature of language and the important role these rhetorics play in the discourses that matter most to people, such as religion, education, public policy, science, law, and history. Rhetorical traditions and the teaching of writing by C.

H Knoblauch Book 8 editions published between and in English and held by WorldCat member libraries worldwide The argument of this book is that the earliest tradition of Western rhetoric, the classical perspective of Aristotle and Cicero, continues to have the greatest impact on writing instruction--albeit an unconscious impact.

This occurs despite the fact that modern rhetoric no longer accepts either the views of mind, language, and world underlying ancient theory or the concepts about discourse, knowledge, and communication presented in that theory. As a result, teachers are depending on ideas as outmoded as they are unreflectively accepted.

Knoblauch and Brannon maintain that the two traditions are fundamentally incompatible in their assumptions and concepts, so that writing teachers must make choices between them if their teaching is to be purposeful and consistent. They suggest that the modern tradition offers a richer basis for instruction, and they show what teaching from that perspective looks like and how it differs from traditional teaching.

Critical teaching and the idea of literacy by C. H Knoblauch Book 4 editions published between and in English and held by WorldCat member libraries worldwide This is a book for parents, teachers, and students who believe they have a right to share in the making of American educational policy. Its theme is the goals and means of critical also called liberatory pedagogy, specifically of reading and writing instruction in schools and colleges.

Shawna Gohel: There are so many ways to combine cultural traditions, so have fun and think outsid. Rhetoric—Political aspects. What we believe about words influences the ways in which we live our lives, what we think and say and do. Anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir, known for his insights into the relativity of representation across languages, argued the error of supposing that one adjusts to reality without the use of language and insisted that the real world is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of different groups of people.

No two languages, he writes, are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality Sapir , That is, what he argued regarding different assumptions about words and reality in different languages anticipates similar distinctions among the multiple, complexly interwoven discourses, or communication practices, that compose social experience in any one language—domestic discourses the verbal routines of everyday life , religious discourses, scientific, legal, political, medical, artistic, educational, scholarly, and other discourses.

These discourses are themselves different worlds of words, albeit within a single language, and they feature, some more self-consciously than others, not just distinct vocabularies, syntactic styles, and registers, but different views of what C.

Ogden and I. In the most self-conscious of these discourses—religious, legal, or scholarly, for example—one commonly finds competing rhetorical theories vying for authority, with significant consequences attending the ebb and flow of alternative points of view. Ask a Catholic and an Anglican theologian about their contrasting views of the doctrine of transubstantiation, or two lawyers about the intent of the framers of the US Constitution, or two literary critics about their readings of Young Goodman Brown, and conflicts regarding not just meaning but also the meaning of meaning will be quickly apparent.

Friday morning, George comes down to breakfast and the newspaper, observes while pouring milk on his cornflakes that the carton says sell by September 15, which was two days ago, and, fearing the milk may be spoiling, plays safe and empties the carton in the sink.

He reads a front-page story on a bond proposal to fund new buildings in his local school district and accepts the objectivity of the report along with the display of evidence supporting the need for new taxes to pay for the borrowing.

Turning to the editorial page, he finds a piece on global warming to be mere opinion, unsubstantiated by facts, its author melodramatic, and decides to withhold judgment until dispassionate science quiets the noise of discordant voices. He spends part of his work time writing proposals to potential business customers that detail how his consulting firm can troubleshoot their management practices and present software solutions.

Arriving home that afternoon, he sorts his mail, saving a notice of jury duty in two weeks and throwing away a breathless proclamation that he has won a Caribbean cruise, not bothering to open the official-looking envelope. He listens to a phone message from his mother but dismisses her familiar complaint that he never calls as an unreasonable plea for attention.

First thing Saturday morning, George, a devout Catholic, goes to confession at his church, admits to the priest that he has failed recently to keep holy the Sabbath day, and earnestly recites the requisite Hail, Marys and Our Fathers as penance, confident that he has been forgiven.

On the way home, he notices a traffic sign saying No U Turn. Louise follows similar routines, motivated in part by equally tacit, occasionally different, assumptions about language. She glances at a letter to the editor in which the writer refers to Palestinian militants as freedom fighters, a label with which she disagrees strenuously, believing that the militants are just plain terrorists. Like George, she sees a cautionary notice in her workplace elevator but regards it not as an example of engineering discourse but as a legal statement protecting the manufacturer from liability if the elevator fails when too fully loaded.

She is skeptical about the safety of elevators and often climbs the stairs to her office. She spends part of her workday writing an online human resources newsletter that relies on a friendly, personal touch to maintain a positive image of her company while giving employees valuable information in user-friendly language supported by clever graphics and humorous anecdotes. She has always been grateful to her ninth-grade English teacher for giving her the grammatical proficiency that has made her so successful in her job.

Even her diary entries are carefully crafted. Her brother emails that evening, promising to come soon for a visit. Saturday morning, she heads for the beach, following directions on her GPS. A sign prohibiting U turns obliges her to go around the block to reach the freeway, which she willingly does because the law is the law.

There may be little, if any, articulate awareness of language directly motivating what George and Louise say, understand, or do.

Like the rest of us amidst our ordinary routines, they probably find just thinking to be challenging enough without also consciously thinking about their thinking. Yet they are immersed in language, and their thoughts as well as actions are influenced by a rich array of beliefs and assumptions about words. What they believe comes to them as settled understanding rather than theory or argument, mostly from the European inheritance of linguistic and rhetorical speculation that has served for centuries as the repository of our cultural common sense about language and discourse.

It would take many pages to explain the details and nuances of this common sense, even limited to the thoughts and actions described above, but a sampling of its axioms should be sufficient to make the point.

The most important belief George and Louise share is that language enables people to name, experience, organize, manage, and interact with realities that are different from and outside of language , including a world beyond the self other people, human institutions, nature and also a world within the self feelings, ideas, memories, fears, hopes, imaginings.

They presume that language represents these worlds and enables us to function within them. Rather, milk spoils, and the warning predicts approximately when it will happen. For George and Louise, things precede the names we give them : real money underlies taxes and bond proposals; physical heat gives meaning to words like warming and cooling ; actual cosmetics come before the ads that promote them.

It follows, then, that the truth and accuracy of language involve a correspondence between words and the worlds to which words refer. Substance is always more important than form. Louise exploits the clever graphics in her desktop publishing program, but she believes that her PR language is substantial, not mere rhetoric, because it offers real information; it is user-friendly but not misleading or manipulative.

George and Louise also believe in common that language enables communication. People also communicate with them through talk and through a variety of media, including television, Facebook, e-mail, text messages, blogs, books, newspapers, telephones, letters, business memos, and official documents.

They are satisfied that the interchanges, the sending and the receiving, create and maintain valuable, or at least useful, human relationships. The writing must be clear and technically correct, however, in order to be reliable.

Clarity and correctness assure translucent communication , resulting in social bonds that enable the mutually beneficial conduct of commerce and daily life. Of course, because of the prior belief that words are subordinate to things , both George and Louise understand that actions speak louder than words. Louise believes that she and her brother know and relate to each other partly as a result of their ability to communicate, but she also knows that what her brother says in his e-mail message must be contextualized by earlier failures to follow through with actual visits.

More generally, what people say must always be evaluated by reference to what is actually the case. George and Louise draw different conclusions from the message in the elevator and partly but only partly base their actions on what they read. Both George and Louise believe that we cannot only match language to factuality but that we can look through a verbal statement to perceive the intent of the person who makes it.

They both know what their mothers mean, and what the elevator signs mean, and they confidently, though differently, appraise the truth-value of each. For Louise and George, different statements have different truth-value , and they trust them more or less depending on the ways in which they are classified and ranked.

He believes that there are sacred utterances, like the Bible, that speak to human beings with divine authority and also that there are specialized human utterances that have the power to affect supernatural or divine agencies , including prayers and rites such as Catholic confession. The letter announcing his entitlement to a Caribbean cruise is at the bottom of the hierarchy, not just manipulative but deceitful.

He finds, as most people in our culture probably do, that there is more truth-value in realistic writing, like history, than in fiction writing, that prose is more reliable than poetry , and that argument is more reliable than narrative. Louise's hierarchy makes room for the value and usefulness of personal, not just objective, writing because the sincerity of personal writing assures the reliability of its statements.

She believes that writing can portray the self and connect with the inner beings, the selves, of others. Whether she is writing in her diary, communicating with her mother, or informing her colleagues at work, she has confidence that sincerity is a basis for authenticity, that statements from the heart have more value than rhetorical manipulations of seeming objectivity.

The passionate conviction of the global-warming argument gives its author integrity: she knows where the writer stands. For example, she does not read ulterior motives into the sign prohibiting U turns, accepting the authority of this particular civil discourse without presuming to retain any interpretive license. George, by contrast, regards a commandment to keep the Sabbath as different from a commandment to avoid U turns, although the differential regard is more likely a consequence of rationalized self-interest than a parsing of the degrees of authority implicit in religious and civil discourses.

Still more beliefs and value-laden assumptions can be mined from this brief encounter with George and Louise. Both of them agree that the primary value of literacy, the ability to read and write, is mainly practical, allowing the deployment of language skills for social and economic advantage.

George clearly believes, with many Americans, that foreigners should speak our language if they are going to live in our country.

Louise believes that language is comprised of building blocks syllables, words, sentences, paragraphs that are joined together to form ever-more-elaborate statements, and that teaching reading and writing requires learning to manipulate the building blocks from simplest to most complex.

She thanks her ninth-grade teacher for these insights. One could go on, but my concern is only to underscore the observation with which I began: what we believe about words influences the ways in which we live our lives.