A Rhetoric of Turns: Signs and Symbols in Education

Abstract

In our research and teaching we explore the value and the place of rhetoric in education. From a theoretical perspective we situate our work in different disciplines, inspired by major ‘turns’: linguistic, cultural, anthropological/ethnographic, interpretive, semiotic, narrative, literary, rhetorical etc. In this article we engage in the discussion about what all these turns might entail for education by elaborating on what it implies to read the world as a ‘text'—as is central in a semiotic approach—and by introducing new rhetoric in general, and the work of the literary critic and rhetorician Kenneth Burke in particular, as a possible theoretical and methodological resource. We illustrate its application in the analysis of a fictional narrative. Our aim is to explore how an understanding of education as rhetoric can be integrated into the teacher education curriculum.

Postliberal education

“…For other thinkers of course, such as Barnett (2014) or Fuller (2014) (channelling the cyberfeminism of Donna Harraway), the very idea of liberal education and education in the 'humanities' was simply too bloodsoaked and too crippled by histories of injustice and connivance with imperial and orientalist oppression to survive in any recognizable form. Inspired by inflammatory readings of Nietzsche, Adorno and Foucault, this adversarial stance demanded the epistemological and ethical repudiation of the Western modern or liberal education model and its replacement by a renovated aesthetic and heuristic order, the precise lineaments of which our own current limitations inveterately prevent us yet from seeing -a posthuman version, perhaps, of a Derridean or Levinasian 'Education to come', forever testing the boundaries of liberal triumphalism (Rutten and Soetaert 2014). If I am correct in my judgement that each version of postliberal education is imprinted by or contaminated with the versions that preceded or surround it, then I have complicated the task of assessing the nature of its current inflections, even if this is confined to mapping those movements active in the public and educational spaces that persist in calling themselves 'postliberal' on even a speculative or calculatingly tendentious basis.…”