Scaffolding the Trivium through Kairos: Grammar, Rhetoric, Circulation

After class on Tuesday, two things stuck in my mind as evidence of my misunderstanding: one on the ground level, one on a broader conceptual level. The first was my struggle with taking McLuhan out of Brooks and Mara’s “rhetorical container” to understand their argument that the Trivium might be a point of convergence rather than separate parts. Muddying that water even further, Dr. Graban mentioned that over the past two weeks, we have been trying to focus on the field’s shift to dialectic: what I took from that was that Brooks and Mara are using the Trivial “dialectic” as a node on their own “Trilectic” relationship with Grammar and Rhetoric, which confused me. That’s when I realized I haven’t understood the broader sense in which we have been using the term in relation to this “turn.” By working with Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel I have begun to understand the word in a broader sense, which I think has more to do with interrelationships of multiple parts rather than the classical, i.e. Platonic, sense of 

Sheridan et al rely on diagrams of networks to illustrate their conception of kairos, but ultimately, I think they end up showing us rhetoric as a whole. Connecting their conception of kairos to Brooks and Mara’s re-conception of the Trivium, I think we might be able to map each in relation to modern day writing students. If McCluhan was interested in media scholars using the interconnected Trivium, I’m more interested in how the trivium and kairos work to train those media scholars because I think we still scaffold them through our education system, and rightly so; dialectic is an advanced and fairly abstract notion, but re-thinking it through Sheridan’s Kairos we can see how it is a goal of advanced study in rhetoric. With classical Grammar being primarily concerned with collecting knowledge and learning forms and systems, it sounds strikingly similar to primary and secondary education that is oftentimes concerned with regurgitation and belletristic texts for five-paragraph AP exam essays. In FYC, we attempt to un-teach some of those methods by offering a good grounding in rhetorical knowledge so that our students can perform in writing contexts. To that end, I aim to provide my students with an understanding of composition almost exactly like Sheridan et al’s diagram on page 54. But we needen’t throw out students’ previous education; the diagram requires grammatical knowledge in terms of genre. Whereas early education teaches the forms, we teach them to think about forms and how they can serve their purposes as composers. I think the goals of FYC align well with the goals of Trivial rhetoric in that we try to prepare them for the discursive practices of the academy and the public sphere. In getting to think in terms of this first rhetorical network, we then prepare them for 

I’m still a bit hazy on how to treat the classical dialectic because as I said, I always associate it with Plato. And looking at Brooks and Mara again, I’m still getting that sense, to a degree. Classical dialectic is the highest level of the Trivium and associated with finding “Truth” in the world by looking at it in its totality, but Brooks and Mara highlight that modern dialecticians have attempted to ground themselves more in pragmatism of the everyday. We can connect this to Sheridan’s Kairos by looking at their treatment of Circulation as the culmination of rhetoric. There is a growing sense in writing studies that we are doing our students a disservice by teaching writing in a rhetorical vacuum through synthetic assignments with nebulous exigencies and vague audiences. Concepts like Circulation offer us a chance to bring “real life” into the writing classroom by having students not only define their audiences, but also choose the medium and modes of circulation that ensure their compositions will actually find their way to the target audience. This aspect of writing tasks is a fairly advanced concept that requires an awareness of logistics; and while I think many Freshmen could be capable of this task, I don’t think circulation should be in the first year-classroom. And that’s also a matter of logistics: in a fifteen-week-course, you can’t expect to introduce a foundation of rhetoric, genre, modes, and media, and circulation. Teaching with something advanced like circulation requires a foundation of the other concepts, which is why an advanced course like WEPO at FSU is a good forum for circulation. Students must compose rhetorical rationales for each of their projects, and the final project is viral campaigns, the focus of which is 

So, while a “new” trivium might be useful to us as theorists, if we consider it pedagogically, it may still be a useful model for student progression. Naturally, I couldn’t have come to this understanding without grappling with Brooks and Mara through Sheridan and the Prezi that Erik and I made together. I think it was Sheridan et al’s use of networked diagrams that really resonated with me, and it helped that their first diagram models a pedagogy that I try to accomplish in my classroom. I was amazed at how they elaborated on this first diagram with circulation because it provides such an encompassing view of the factors that go into the processes and products of composition. In doing so, they invoked a lot of theorists explicitly and implicitly, which Erik and I tried to show in our sections on ethics, intertext, and philosophical contours. I’m sure that we left many folks out, e.g, “Bakhtin, et al” was shorthand for the many others that have helped build genre theory. Further, I was left a bit puzzled about how they draw the lines between circulation, distribution, and delivery; while they are separate tiers of the hierarchy, I wasn’t completely sure that they should have been. Regardless, visualizing the article helped me see their concerns and connections and understand the larger project we have been engaged in the past two weeks.