Busting Out the Greek!

Uh oh, we are busting out the Greek... Crowley and Hawhee just took it up to the next level.

As I move my students toward selecting a research questions and beginning their exploration of their research topic, thinking about the kairos of their topic is becoming very important, particularly for my unique class.

Confession time, I have joined the covert band of rebels that use literature in the composition classroom. To make my students lives more difficult (and hopefully to enrich their lives as well) I am making them pull their research topic out of the work we are reading in class. As a side-effect, my students are predictably freaking out about how they are supposed to select something that they can research out of a fictional text. “The world of the novel is not real, and nobody has written on it before, so how am I supposed to do a research paper on it,” my students cry out to me in class. It is in the midst of these protestations that I might be able to direct them towards finding the “kairos” in the text, or the pockets of text that are relevant either to the student or the world the student inhabits.

Relevancy, that is the word that I associate to kairos, and it is word that needs to be applicable to my student’s papers and consequently to the text that we are reading out of. That is why I really appreciated the list of questions on page 43 that force the students to recognize the kairos of an argument, which should help them decide whether or not the argument is worth pursuing or not. Overall I found the text pretty useful and a nice supplement to the information in the A&B Guide.

In the stasis theory section, I could see the clear relationship between it and the exploratory essay. In essence, we are forcing our students to slow down and engage with their subject slowly by spending time getting to know the conversation around the subject without charging in with a thesis, blindly hacking away at whatever counterarguments arise. I also liked the section about dividing up arguments between the theoretical and the practical. This is a division that I might share with my students, because I think some of them will want to focus on more practical issues like human rights and political issues, while other might approach their topics from a more theoretical perspective such as engaging in a historical or literary approach. I am always looking for ways for students to incorporate their own knowledge base into their assignments, be it their major or simply their interests, and I think this devision may help with that. When it came to the final four questions of conjecture, definition, quality and policy I was not sure about where I might incorporate this into my own classroom. Perhaps it is because right now I am focused on invention, and these questions seemed aimed at polishing the topic proposed in the exploratory essay into a feasible research project. Maybe these types of questions may be best incorporated into my feedback to the students on their exploratory drafts? I am not sure yet, but what i do know is that Crowley and Hawhee gave me a lot to chew on as I move into the research process with my students.