• DOI:10.1080/02773940802405546
• Corpus ID: 146260356

A Review of: “Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865–1911, by Jessica Enoch.”

@article{Webber2008ARO,
  title={A Review of: “Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865–1911, by Jessica Enoch.”},
  author={Jim Webber},
  journal={Rhetoric Society Quarterly},
  year={2008},
  volume={38},
  pages={467 - 469}
}

• Jim Webber
• Published 14 October 2008
• Education
• Rhetoric Society Quarterly

In Refiguring Rhetorical Education, Jessica Enoch engages with recent discussions on the purpose of English studies. In a 2006 College English Symposium (‘‘What Should College English Be?’’), for example, Shirley Wilson Logan argues for English as the study ‘‘of how to analyze and deploy language and images in ways that better prepare [students] for meaningful civic engagement’’ (110). Likewise, Bruce McComiskey, in his 2008 English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s), describes English as the ‘‘analysis, critique, and production of discourse in social context’’ (43). Like Logan and McComiskey, Enoch is concerned with the purpose of English studies generally and with education for rhetorical practice in particular. However, Enoch distinguishes between rhetorical education for participation in the civic sphere and rhetorical education for participation in students’ communities, especially those communities whose identities and modes of participation are marginalized alongside dominant voices in the civic sphere. Rhetorical education, Enoch writes, is classically understood as connecting ‘‘civic engagement, language practice, rhetorical strategies, and social and bodily behavior’’ (5) for ‘‘the discipline and maintenance of a dominant subjectivity’’ (Crowley qtd. in Enoch 6). Although such an education may help students engage with dominant voices within the civic sphere, it does not, Enoch notes, address students’ communal identities and participation. To depict a rhetorical education that accounts for students’ civic and communal participation, Enoch recovers the pedagogies of five women. She examines their resistance to dominant notions of literacy education that excluded African–American, Native American, and Chicano=a students from full civic participation. Enoch shows how these teachers instead supported their students’ participation within their communities and in the larger civic sphere. Lydia Maria Child encouraged her readers—newly freed slaves—to distinguish among arguments from white and black authorities for freedmen’s compliance with or resistance to Rhetoric Society Quarterly Vol. 38, No. 4, October 2008, pp. 467–469