Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911

by Jessica Enoch

Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911 examines the work of five female teachers who challenged gendered and cultural expectations to create teaching practices that met the civic and cultural needs of their students. 

The volume analyzes Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book, a post–Civil War educational textbook for newly freed slaves; Zitkala Ša’s autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 that questioned the work of off-reservation boarding schools for Native American students; and Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, and Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s contributions to the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica in 1910 and 1911—contributions that offered language and cultural instruction their readers could not receive in Texas public schools.  

Author Jessica Enoch explores the possibilities and limitations of rhetorical education by focusing on the challenges that Child, Zitkala Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas made to dominant educational practices. Each of these teachers transformed their seemingly apolitical occupation into a site of resistance, revising debilitating educational methods to advance culture-based and politicized teachings that empowered their students to rise above their subjugated positions.

Refiguring Rhetorical Education considers how race, culture, power, and language are both implicit and explicit in discussions of rhetorical education for marginalized students and includes six major tenets to guide present-day pedagogies for civic engagement.

 

 

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Jessica Enoch is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland. Her areas of research interests include feminist rhetoric, theory, and history; rhetorical education; spatial, material and embodied rhetorics; historiographic and archival research methodologies, and Kenneth Burke.

Reviews

[Alyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like much of this doesn't hold up perfectly in 2021 BUT this is a really great introductory text into the history of rhetorical theory in non-white spaces, which is very much a topic that is still rarely covered.

[Lance · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is truly one of the most important books I've read in the history of rhetoric for quite some time. Using what one might call a methodology of juxtaposition, Enoch shows how minority teachers contested dominant pedagogies by "refiguring" rhetorical education for their students. She takes three unique contexts that illustrate how both dominant pedagogies and rhetoric functioned differently in each location, though with the same purpose -- to equip students for the participation in a civic world built to either exclude or homogenize them. Enoch's book is particularly engaging, because the time span involved (1850-1920) is generally considered a desert wasteland for rhetoric and a hay day for homogenous discourse. This book will definitely inspire you to think about how your own pedagogy functions in today's contexts and will hopefully inspire other scholars to explore this part of history from other angles.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for Engendering Rhetorical Power class. Lots of ideas to think about, but definitely a niche work.

[courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

my cousin wrote this!