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Today's guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn (see end of post for bio).
Teaching rhetorical concepts is time well spent in our multimodal classrooms because it helps students become critical consumers of information and images around them. Many are familiar with teaching the classical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos towards rhetorical analysis. I also find it helpful to introduce the additional concept of Kairos and its relevance to writing and visual rhetoric. Ancient rhetoricians talked about two concepts of time: “Chronos – linear, measurable time – the kind that we track with watches and calendars and Kairos to suggest a more situational kind of time, something close to what we call opportunity.”
This is important for our multimodal writers to understand, particularly with the impact of participatory communication, social media and the currency of information. Writers must understand kairotic moments that will make their writing more persuasive and engaging through drawing upon current issues, commonplaces, and ideologies of the rhetorical time in which they are writing.
In their book, Ancient Rhetoric for Contemporary Students (2012), Crowley and Hawhee discuss the situatedness of arguments in time and place and the particulars of given rhetorical situations. Effective writers must not only understand their own opinions and beliefs but they must also include the “opinions and beliefs of their audiences at that time and place as well as the history of the issue within the communities that identify with it” (48). This means that in order to understand an issue, students must understand chronos – the history of the issue – along with the way particular communities view the issue as well. “In short, the rhetor must be aware of the issue’s relevance to the time, the place and the community in which it arises” (48).
Students can research the history and perspectives of issues to determine kairos and other rhetorical appeals. These concepts are easily applied to digital and visual rhetoric as students analyze visual and textual artifacts to understand both the history and ways ideas and images are situated in particular communities and time periods.
The Assignment
For this assignment, I ask students to compose a digital analysis of the history and progression of a particular product or industry through advertising artifacts (print or video). They can easily access these artifacts through image and video searches. Starting early and working their way up to current contexts, they detail how kairos and other rhetorical appeals change along with the historical time periods and connect to the culture in which they arose. In a digital blog post students analyze the images and embed them along with proper citation and documentation.
Students
Reflections on the Activity and Student Samples
My students came to understand the concept of visual rhetoric and kairos through their thoughtful analyses and historical progression of a variety of products and industries.
References
Crowley, Sharon and Debra Hawhee. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, Longman, 2012.
Guest blogger Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Composition.
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