Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Culture Of Civic Action: Deliberative Pedagogy For Composition, Trevor Colin Sprague

Theses and Dissertations

Despite rhetoric and composition maintaining a role as a producer of democracy, democratic deliberation has not appeared widely as a pedagogical practice, outside of reinforcing traditional modes of argumentative writing. This dissertation articulates the dispositions and practices for a deliberative pedagogy in composition that supports students’ development of rhetorical understandings of social-political life, actively redresses exclusions and inequities in dominant understandings of democracy, and engages the discipline with a progressive vision of social change. Agency and citizenship are re-theorized as a grounding to this pedagogy, making clear how a wide variety of communicative acts support the processes and aims of …