The topic I will be discussing over the next few weeks, educator training in America, has an incredibly broad audience. As such, the “public” I am trying to address with my campaign is very complex. To participate in and engage with such a diverse public sphere it is important to understand how timing and approach play into the reception and reaction of the audience. This rhetorical concept of ‘timing’ is best understood when considering the overarching concept of kairos. Kairos is more than simply the temporal judgement of your discourse, Sheridan et al. point to Sheard for a concise definition:
Kairos is the ancient term for the sum total of “contexts,” both spatial (e.g., formal) and temporal (e.g., epistemic), that influence the translation of thought into language and meaning in any rhetorical situation.
These contexts may seem out of the rhetor’s control but it could be argued the rhetor has the ability to influence these contexts to develop the right time and space for the discussion. Sheridan et al. demonstrate this by examining the structure of scientific writing in which the scientist identifies and explains an existing gap in knowledge, therefore creating a need or an opening through which the author can engage with the reader. I intend to employ this strategy by beginning my campaign with an analysis of the real problems facing not just the education system, but how those challenges impact the prosperity of America and how this solution has not been seriously considered to date.
The public sphere I am faced with cannot be simply defined as a singular group of people engaged in common discourse. In fact, the public sphere I am attempting to engage with is a complex amalgamation of small specialized communities, government entities, and citizens. When I initially planned my campaign I proposed the idea of creating social media snippets to grab the attention of citizens, what I did not consider is how to use that attention to establish a conversation. As Sheridan et al. point out, simply publishing a text does not create a public. Kairos must be considered to ensure the text that is produced is circulated iteratively. This is not to say the social media snippets are not important, but I need to create intertextuality with additional resources in the public sphere.
In their critique of the liberal bourgeois public sphere, Sheridan et al. challenge the notion that the public sphere is limited to the “social space[s] where rational-critical debate leads to public opinion”. This assumption risks dismissing multimodal rhetoric altogether in a time when multimodal rhetoric constitutes a growing avenue for social discourse. Sheridan et al. redefine the function of “public-sphere practice as [the] poetic world making that shapes consciousness and identity through the captivation of attention.” This opinion makes clear the value of multimodal communication as a tool to engage and entice the audience. This confirms my decision to use a multimodal approach during my campaign, engaging the professional public with a white paper and the general public with a social media snippets and news articles.