At the basis of Yameng Liu’s argument in “To Capture the Essence of Chinese Rhetoric: An Anatomy of a Paradigm in Comparative Rhetoric” is the admonition to not allow preconceived or untested notions, ideas, or philosophies to taint your own understanding of Chinese rhetoric. He argues that because previous researchers had used and accepted unfounded or ill-founded arguments regarding Chinese rhetoric all of their postulations were invalid because they were based on faulty premises. At the heart of these premises is an ethnocentric viewpoint that taints the researcher’s opinions because they are looking through culturally distorted lenses. To gain a clear understanding of the Chinese culture and their rhetorical theory you must set aside your assumptions of their culture and your value systems based upon your own culture. Only then, he argues, can you gain a better understanding of the depth and complexity of their rhetorical theories.
This lesson of cultural bias is important and applicable because it applies not only to looking at other cultures basis for learning, teaching, and using rhetoric but our own as well. In teaching rhetoric to our students we must be careful to remember that they may come from a diverse background with many different beliefs and values’ regarding what rhetoric is and how it should be employed. Understanding that our students may have been raised with different expectations of what good writing is essential to being able to provide them with a deeper understanding of rhetoric and language composition. However, at the same time the issue arises of how to embrace their cultural viewpoints while striving to maintain a level of competence in English rhetoric. Do we just teach toward their beliefs and strengths? Do we disregard or set aside those notions and teach only what is prescribed as proper English rhetoric? Or do we try to blend the two, embracing the diversity of language and ideas, to promote a wider and more holistic view of what rhetoric is? I’m sure the debate will rage on, however, I truly feel that we cannot begin to educate others until we are able to view the ones we are teaching without ethnocentric bias.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like this is very important advice, but I am not sure that any of today’s authors are able to actually instruct us how to go about achieving this stepping away from Western education and the belief that non-western rhetoric is inferior or non-existent. I think as professors, we may have some wiggle room in accounting for different social, religious, and political backgrounds in the classroom, but I’m not sure that K-12 teachers have the time or the resources to make exceptions or accommodations on behalf of individual students.
Kristen, you identify an important point in Liu’s article, and extend it in an important way to our own classrooms. Rachel raises a good question though.
Do you think there are specific things teacher’s might do in order to better work with students who have a different background, or should teachers be trained differently? Or maybe we need much more sweeping changes in our educational system. What do you think?
I have not actually gone through the credential program myself so I am not sure on all the things that are required or trained for teachers, however, I would think that one of the most important things for a teacher to learn is to take a anthropology class or a diversity class so that they can learn about ethnocentrism and different cultural perspectives. I know that when I took cultural anthropology it really opened my eyes to how tainted everything we perceive is based off of our cultural beliefs. That class alone enabled me to identify and be cognizant of cultural biases.