Over the past two weeks students and faculty of Rhetoric have been busy with a number of activities inside and outside the classroom. In many respects these events reflect the active present and ambitious future of rhetoric at Wabash.

As noted in an earlier post, from February 26 to 28 the Rhetoric Department hosted the Brigance Colloquy on Public Speaking as a Liberal Art.  In addition to the excellent keynote address by Professor Denise Bostdorff of the College of Wooster, attending scholars engaged in a series of productive conversations about the role and future of rhetorical education.  Participants shared a vision of rhetoric as an art for civic engagement, discussing the role of public speaking in college curricula, how to place the practice of citizenship at the center of rhetorical study, and shared ideas of both practical import and theoretical significance in matters of teaching and scholarship.  The event energized the department’s CILA supported project and will have an important role in our work over the next 14 months.

While the colloquy holds great potential for the future of public speaking at Wabash the more visible aspects of rhetorical study have been the flurry of course related activities. Also as previously noted on this blog, on Monday March 2 Grant Gussman ’09, Daniel King ’10, and Professor David Timmerman shared their collaborative research on The Boondocks. On that same day, Professor Todd McDorman’s class met with artist Samuel Bak in the Eric Dean Gallery to discuss his work. Prior to the visit the Visual Rhetorics class read works analyzing Bak from Dean Gary Phillips and his co-author Danna Nolan Fewell. The students got their first look at the art work on Monday and engaged the artist in a discussion of the meaning of the work, testing out their own interpretations. Following the class hour the students were reluctant to leave the gallery, each flocking to the piece of his own choosing, lingering over it while considering the conversation.  The class also gathered for lunch with Samuel Bak and Dean Phillips’s class, “Parables in Jewish and Christian Traditions,” in the first of a series of collaborations between the two courses.

On Tuesday March 3 the Indiana Court of Appeals made its annual visit to Wabash.  A variety of community members attended the oral argument--students, professors, a local judge etc. However the case had the most significance for Professor Jeff Motter’s Legal Debate class. The week before the oral argument each of these students engaged in their own in-class debate on the case.  The students were able to test their understanding of the case as well as to see how the actual litigants and judges handled the argument.  Thursday, in their final class session of the half-semester course, the class exchanged their reactions and offered their evaluations of the oral argument and case.

Finally, on Friday March 6 at 6:00 a.m., Professors David Timmerman and Tim Lake left Crawfordsville with their students from African American Rhetoric and Expressive Culture.  This week the class has visited a number of significant Civil Rights sites in the south.  The student blog entries illustrate the value of the experience, the way it has brought new dimensions to their studies, and its life-changing nature.