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Dewey’s Progressive Pedagogy for Rhetorical Instruction Teaching Argument in a Nonfoundational Framework Donald C. Jones I first read Experience and Education while I was an undergraduate student, and I found that Dewey explained many of the frustrations I had felt back in high school. I was one of those students who loved to read, but I was completely turned off, for instance, when I was told that we would be reading Shakespeare because he had “stood the test of time.” I was expected to read and revere the immortal bard just as generations of students had before me.As I read Experience and Education, I realized that Dewey was offering an alternative to the traditional education that had frustrated me. He provided more engaging methods as well as more compelling reasons for education. For example, canonical literature such as Shakespeare’s plays could be read for an interpretation that enriched my own life. When I first read Dewey on education, I wrote “brilliant” in the margins, and now on the best days of my own teaching I like to think I still can feel some of that brilliance. On these days I am able to pose questions, elicit comments, build a discussion , and help students reach important insights and genuine understanding. Yet on other days, I must admit, as Dewey cautions, progressive education that seems “simple” enough in theory is not so “easy” to practice (Experience and Education 30). On these lesser days I may be able to lead students to recognize, say, a particular fallacy in an argument, but their understanding ends there, and I will find myself presenting—or worse yet, repeating—the rest of the logical fallacies. Such repetition of fixed knowledge, which Dewey dismisses as “dictation,” rarely fosters true learning and genuine understanding (72). After one of these mediocre lessons, I find little solace in the fact that others too find progressive education to be, as Dewey predicts, a “harder business” to Dewey’s Progressive Pedagogy for Rhetorical Instruction 217 sustain (Experience and Education 76). For example, many argument textbooks employ a progressive approach at least as they begin. These textbooks often appeal to the experiences of their undergraduate audience by highlighting our daily arguments over familiar issues. For instance, the opening of The Well-Crafted Argument by Fred White and Simone Billings begins by asserting, “All of us find occasions to argue every day” and offering such examples as arguing over restaurant choices, favorite movies, and educational reform (2). In Everything’s an Argument, Andrea Lunsford and John Ruszkiewicz extend this experiential approach to such nonverbal disputes as “the clothes you wear” and “the foods you eat” (4). These familiar examples appeal to students, making rhetorical theory seem less daunting. Yet these textbooks abandon Dewey’s pedagogy as readily as they have employed it, and let me specify that I am using these two textbooks because they strike me as typical of most argument textbooks today. After their engaging openings, most argument textbooks abruptly shift to a much more traditional approach. Textbooks such as Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz’s Everything’s an Argument and White and Billings ’s The Well-Crafted Argument present chapter upon chapter of this then that rhetorical term, which students are expected to memorize, recognize, and employ. After appealing to student experiences with argumentation, Everything’s an Argument , for instance, continues by presenting seven purposes, three occasions, four kinds of arguments, the rhetorical appeals, and the rhetorical triangle in the next thirty pages of the first chapter (Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz 5–35). With this abrupt shift to content-centered instruction, learning consists of the “acquisition of what already is incorporated in books,” as Dewey warns, and there is little “participation of [students] . . . in what is taught” (Experience and Education 19). This acquisition is shown as subsequent chapters of Everything’s an Argument and The Well-Crafted Argument elaborate on several kinds of arguments. Chapters 3 to 5 of the latter work present the classical, Toulmin, and Rogerian models of argumentation. The third chapter begins with an outline of a classical argument and a sample essay for students to evaluate (White and Billings 83–88). The rest of the chapter elaborates on the model’s use of the rhetorical appeals and ends with two exemplary published essays (White and Billings 88–110). Through this traditional emphasis on the subject matter,“the past [is presented as the] end in itself,” and the progressive approach of the introduction has been abandoned (Dewey, Experience and...

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