This summer I will be investigating teacher preparation standards, or lack thereof, across the United States and the impact they have on teacher retention and student success rate. Much of the debate surrounding education regulation has focused on student performance and curriculum standards while largely ignoring the role the educators play.
Addressing this topic in a persuasive manner can be challenging in the current political climate. As Bowdon and Scott acknowledge in A Rhetorical Toolbox for Technical and Professional Communication excessive appeals to emotions can lead to an ever more polarized and distrustful audience. This appeal to a person’s emotions and values is known as pathos; and it is a strategy widely used by the media today which has led to an emotional and skeptical public. My goal is to engage readers that span the political spectrum and demonstrate how improving educator training standards can benefit our nation as a whole.
To accomplish this I will need to establish an exigency, a common call to action, by using logos to reach the entire audience. Logos is an appeal based upon reasoning and logic, the simplest way to apply this is using facts. Unfortunately, simply stating facts is often not enough to appeal to an audience as broad as the American public, the facts must be presented in an accessible format so that they are easily retrievable by a variety of readers. To address the text accessibility I plan to summarize the most pertinent facts and statistics into an infographic and narrated motion graphic to engage the casual or busy reader through verbal-visual integration.
In addition to producing content for the casual or busy reader I intend to develop a much more in depth proposal that lays out in detail the supporting information such as developmental psychology research, teaching methodologies, and teacher training program results.
The third strategy I am considering using, an ethos appeal, poses a potential limiting factor. I have experience working and attending multiple education systems and have gained great personal insight and experience in this field. However, I gained much of that experience serving with a non-profit AmeriCorps program. I also gained much of my experience in private schooling. Providing the reader with that information may have the unintended consequence of immediately deterring readers whose values do not align with those of AmeriCorps or private schooling – causing an inadvertent crisis of pathos.
I think this is a great topic to talk about that has been addressed in the past, but there has not been a concrete solution. My mother has been an elementary school teach for about twenty years, so this topic resonates with me a little more than the others. Judging teachers based solely on test scores removes the focus away from teaching children the material. What eventually happens is that the teachers end up teaching test taking skills and methods instead of the material itself. While it is useful to be a good test taker, the focus should be mostly on the material that is on the test, and the strategies of the scoring well should be a secondary thought.
While I don’t have a clean-cut solution to the problem, I think schools should reconsider the way they evaluate their teachers and the way the teachers are providing the tools to learn to their students. One way they could do this is to have more administrators evaluate the teacher-student interactions in the classroom. Another way could be to offer teachers seminars or classes on more effective teaching techniques. These seminars might show teachers strategies on how to explain certain concepts to students in various different ways, if they are having trouble grasping certain concepts.
The writer above notes, “This appeal to a person’s emotions and values is known as pathos; and it is a strategy widely used by the media today which has led to an emotional and skeptical public. My goal is to engage readers that span the political spectrum and demonstrate how improving educator training standards can benefit our nation as a whole.”
As an avid Facebooker and as one who has attended two conservative academic institutions and two liberal ones (By 2018, I should have four degrees in total from said places. You can praise me later for enduring right and left dung since 2004. 😉 Facetious is my middle name. -BFS.), I see the gamut of political smut produced from both sides on Zuckerberg’s Book of Faces. Liberals in the media paint Donald Trump as Satan’s twin, and conservatives in the media make Hitler seem more upstanding than Hillary. Both right and left know how to fiddle the emotions of gullibles. It’s not to say there’s not some truth in what both the left and right are saying (There is very well a kernel of truth in all of it, but that damn husk of fabrication has got to go!); let’s be honest if pathos makes you money, then pathos is going to be exalted through various media. By painting the opposition as more evil than they may be, not only do left and right use scare tactics which is to do pathos, they gain followers to tune in because these sorry people want to control what they can so they do not fall at the hands of said alleged evil persons. The truly evil may just be the news makers themselves who use pathos as a means to make their dough by producing fiction instead of really showing what’s going on.