Courses: Public Speaking, Rhetorical Criticism, Persuasion, Political Communication, and Media Communication. Objectives: By the end of this activity, students should be able to: explain the key components of Lloyd Bitzer's rhetorical situation; assess and navigate various conditions affecting various speaking situations; conduct audience analysis…

Political memes are argumentative visual texts commonly encountered on social media. Through the strategic combination of imagery and captions, a political meme presents information as fact about a topic, an individual, or a specific group. The power of political memes can be attributed to their viral nature and their effects on public discourse…

Courses: Rhetorical Criticism, Composition, Environmental Communication. Objectives: This unit activity, for which students view a documentary to identify and evaluate persuasive ethos and then create their own rhetorical messages for reducing food waste, serves as a platform for teaching both the critique and practice of rhetoric, as well as…

Courses: Persuasion; Persuasive Speaking. Objectives: Students will demonstrate the ability to apply persuasive concepts in constructing persuasive messages creatively, and students will present and analyze their persuasive messages.

This study assessed 1,706 eighth-grade students' reasoning abilities through a critique task in an integrated argumentative reading and writing test. Results indicate that the majority of students did not detect fallacious arguments or clearly explain problems in the arguments. They encountered various challenges in critiquing an argument: (a)…

Over the last couple of years, White nationalist groups have been at the forefront of American political life, especially with the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. The historical roots of White nationalist movements run deep in the United States and are most closely associated with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). In this article the authors explore…

Responding to the increasing sophistication in the arts of deception in the public realm, the authors turn to Goodlad's ideal of democratic citizenship nurtured through human conversation in the classroom and development of critical skills to evaluate the accuracy of arguments.

When directed to ignore evidence of a witness's previous bad character because of a violation of the rules of evidence, are jurors' beliefs still affected? The intuition is that they will be because in everyday argumentation, fallacies, like the ad hominem, are effective argumentative strategies. An ad hominem argument (against the person)…

Policy texts present problems, propose solutions to those problems and persuade multiple audiences of the legitimacy of the proposed problems and solutions. The rhetorical analysis of two decades of higher education and science and technology discourse in Finland, Germany, UK, Portugal and USA highlights the discursive elements that contribute to…

Courses: Argumentation, Public Speaking, Political Communication. Objectives: After completing this unit activity, students should be able to (1) demonstrate comprehension of Burke's (1941) concept of terministic screens; (2) apply the concept of terministic screens to write a brief political autobiography of themselves that analyzes the history…

Several social processes guide and shape how school actors engage with high stakes state and district policies relative to mandated curriculum and instruction. In this article, we use rhetorical argumentation analysis to explore how stakeholders mobilize resources through argumentation and rhetorical appeals (logical, emotional, and…

Rhetorical analysis was a required unit of study for college students enrolled in intermediate English as a second language (ESL) composition. Twenty-six students participated in a project creating an original product and its infomercial. The project aimed at increasing student motivation to continue writing essays in English and providing a space…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the quality, evolution, and position of university students' argumentation about organic agriculture over a 4-week argument-critique-argument e-learning experience embedded in a first year university biology course. The participants (N = 43) were classified into three groups based on their…

In this essay, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández reflects on the comments made in a forum convened to reflect on his article "Why the Arts Don't 'Do' Anything: Toward a New Vision for Cultural Production in Education," published in the "Harvard Educational Review" ("HER")'s special issue entitled…

In the spring of 2013, the "Harvard Educational Review" ("HER") published a special issue entitled "Expanding Our Vision for the Arts in Education" (Vol. 83, No. 1). Following a variety of forward-looking essays and arts learner reflections concerning the potential of the arts in education, the issue concluded with a…