(TEACHING) LEVELS OF POLICY CONFLICT -- 2/14 WORKSHOP

Hello, Everyone. 

The situation: We are holding Thursday’s "(Teaching) Levels of Conflict" workshop on the blog, which gives you an opportunity to teach some of the concepts from this unit to a reader who is savvy about public discourse, but not necessarily in our class. Teach by explanation, illustration, example, situation, recontextualization, hyperlinking, etc. Write focusedly and clearly, but write specifically and accurately. Cite and reference where needed. Construct an audience who is not in this class, and don’t be afraid to present the complexities of the concept you are teaching. Also, don’t be afraid to take risks with your understanding of what makes the concepts complex.

Your task: I have included four questions, but you only have to respond to three. You will recognize some of these questions from our 2/12 discussion day. Feel free to answer them again and to build on (revise, lengthen, edit) your response from 2/12.

Your post: Please create a new post on your own blog, and include your three responses there. Please give your post coherence (so that it doesn’t look like a list of answers to three questions) by discovering a theme between your responses, or by connecting them in an artful way. Please post by Thursday (2/14) 12:15 p.m.

Question One (conflict and policy)


Briefly recount a specific disagreement or misunderstanding you have had with someone and analyze it on one of Kaufer’s “5 levels” (pp. 58-59). You’ll want to explain the conflict and then determine whether the source of the conflict was level 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. Please don’t just make something up—the point of this assignment is to reach into your own experience and try to account for it on Kaufer’s terms as accurately as you can. For this to make sense to your audience, you will need to be clear and detailed with your explanation of what happened during the disagreement or conversation. Unpack any terms that carry assumptions, no matter how small they seem or no matter how much you are sure we would share them. Also, remember the difference between "Level 5 Conflict" and "Some Associated Issues" (Kaufer 58, 63). The issue is the topic or the particular example in which the conflict resides, while the conflict itself is the opposing pair of ideologies that clash in order to make the issue.

Question Two (authenticity) 

From our <"Course Resources,"> locate a brief op-ed in one of the "Blogs and Online Journals of Opinion," or -- if you prefer -- select one of the op-ed pieces from our Texts for Editing folder on Blackboard. (Select one that is explicitly biased.) Quickly skim it and decide whether it qualifies as a “simulation” of an argument or whether it qualifies as a real “ethical deliberation” (Jones 158). Justify your choice in Jones’s terms. Also, justify your choice in Kaufer's claim about weight of policy conflicts versus scale of conflict (61).

Question Three (logic and ethical style)
 

Read through that same op-ed sample until you find a key statement that you think is pretty close to what Williams and Colomb might call an "ethical violation of style" (e.g., obscurity, misdirection, subversive clarity, opacity) (Style lesson 10) or what Jones might call a violation of “The Usage Rule” (177). Discuss what makes it so. As part of your discussion, be sure to help us know the context in which that statement was made and the argument it was being used to support. Feel free to draw on Style lesson 10, Style pages 23-26 (“Absent Characters”) and 43 (“Avoiding Distractions”), WWC 138-142 (“Clarity and Conciseness”), or WWC on punctuation (end of Chapter 8). 

Question Four (language and ideology)
 

Is there anything in the op-ed that acts like a "value" term or an "ideograph"? The concept of "Ideograph" was popularly coined for rhetoric by Michael Calvin McGee, although the word in its general definition has existed for some time. McGee's "ideograph" is a word that uses abstractions in order to develop support for a political position (e.g., "freedom," "liberty," "justice," "pursuit of happiness," etc.). Not just any term can be an ideograph, but if -- in the context of discourse -- the word carries ideological assumptions and inspires familiar associations among an audience, it is likely functioning this way.

Do well, but have fun with this!

-Prof. Graban