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The re Is No Rhetoric , but The re Is Hope In 2005, I taught an advanced doctoral seminar in literacy studies. The topic I chose for the class was “Rhetoric and Poetics.” The fifteen students who took the class were educators from the United States and countries located across Asia and the Middle East. We began each night’s weekly session sitting in a circle, gathered around the teacher’s desk, on which students arranged whatever food they brought to class to share during that night’s session. Often the food reflected the students’ home cultures so that the sharing had particular significance for all of us—as did the discussions. Anyone who has taught students from such countries as China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will testify to the fact that speaking in class discussions is more of an unusual and potentially discomfiting experience for students from some countries than for others. Yet night after night, I noted to myself how each student, without my ever explicitly requesting that they do so, made contributions to the discussions. For some reason, in this class the students all talked and all respectfully listened. Maybe it was the food in the center of the circle that we shared. Maybe it was their desire to learn and their natural good will. Maybe it was the readings, such as Samir Amin’s The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World (2004), Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997), Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1932), Pierre Joris’s A Nomad Poetics: Essays, Tove SkutnabbKangas ’s Linguistic Genocide in Education-Or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? (2000) and writings by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1985) and Julianna Spahr (2001). Maybe it was something I did. Maybe it was all of the above and more. Not that all nights were totally comfortable. On one occasion, I thought I perceived some slight—some very slight—stiffening of the students from Taiwan when an idea about universal rights was articulated by a student from China. I remember being concerned and then stopping to think that of course international tensions would also be present in this classroom. We bring the world and our perspectives on it to class with us. It could not be otherwise. 212   national healing At any rate, except for that incident, the class worked with genuine collegiality. This was one of those semesters where it all came together, where food combined with writing, where laughter combined with serious discussion, where no one in the class attempted in any overt way to dominate the conversation or position themselves for an A (though Lad Tobin might remind us that we do not always know what is going on behind the scenes). In the course of the semester’s reading, writing, and discussions, the students came to design the major project for the class: the writing of a rhetoric. The project, which the class published for a limited time on a webpage, “Toward an International Rhetoric,” was made up of various , individual contributions from the students in the class, including descriptions of our working processes. Some nights we discussed the readings, some nights we wrote in small groups gathered around a computer, sometimes each at their own computer (writing in which I participated). We constructed running outlines of our growing and accruing rhetoric, sometimes on the blackboard and sometimes through computer projection. We researched in and out of class, and during the weeks between classes we wrote and brought our draft work to class. We read each other’s contributions to our text and revised. As with many collaborative projects, this one changed over the course of the semester. For instance, the project went from being oriented toward the shape and tenor of an actual rhetoric, as in the style of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, to a collection of writings on the idea of what an international rhetoric is (when it was decided that Aristotle’s drive to categorize did not fit the students’ contemporary needs to speak for change in rhetorical studies). The students’ additions to the project were, by and large, theoretical and programmatic in the sense that, in them, the students articulated the principles for teaching and writing in an internationalist perspective to which they could, generally speaking , ascribe as they charted their pasts and planned their future careers in education. For instance, a graduate student from Nepal, who had witnessed how both Western cultural imperialism and a Maoist-inspired, bloody civil war—with contributions by a...

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