Here are links to some videos on YouTube regarding a parallel debate to the Confederate statues--debates about the Confederate flag.

A trailer from a movie on the confederate flag

John McCain

Mike Huckabee

Manor High School visited as part of the SPURS program on Monday, and we debated issues related to Affirmative Action. Although this is certainly a different question that the debate about the confederate statues, there are obvious parallels that we can talk about in class.

In a collaborative writing workshop here on the class forum, we will respond to each other's informal paper 5 by disagreeing directly with what your partner says. We'll do this to practice a couple rhetorical moves. One is disagreeing with somebody in a productive, respectful, and generative manner, as we read about in our course packet. Another is helping your partner come up with concession and refutation moves, which is the same thing as "planting a naysayer" discussed in your course packet. These moves will be things I'm grading for in your final paper for this unit.

This week, we start digging into the second case study of the year: the debate about the Gender and Sexuality Center's funding, hate crime legislation, and the QSA report. While these are three distinct areas, they have strong interconneted themes that we'll explore. We'll also start thinking about what makes for good evidence.

Jim Warren will come talk to us this week about the SPURS program. Jim is a recent graduate of the Rhetoric PhD program at UT and is the Director of the SPURS program.

This week, we're finishing up the paper for case study 1. Click here to download the peer review form.

Liz Young, YCT Director of Academic Freedom, will be visiting our class today. Here are questions the class generated on the forum.

One of the documents we'll be looking at is the YCT watchlist. Here is a link to it.

They evaluate teachers on their honor role versus those on their watch list, which gives us a great opportunity to look for the different value assumptions about what makes for good teaching. This will allow us to compare these value assumptions with the ones made by other people in this debate. We're looking for value conflicts that can help us understand and deconstruct the different perspectives underlying this rhetoric.

This week, we'll finish up our introductory unit and get cracking on case study 1, the debate about classrooom indoctrination. We'll analyze several arguments in this debate using some tools of rhetorical analysis. We'll be posting regularly to the class forum and preparing to interview people on campus who have a stake in this debate.