Macklemore, the Rhetorical Triangle, and Toulmin Logic

I did it!

Yesterday's lesson plan was awesome. Why? Because half of it was designed by one of my TAs. My newest TA, to be specific.

Last week, I subbed for 388V, the "how to be a TA" seminar. In it, the TAs/ students split into groups and came up with a lesson plan. The lesson plan that my TA's group came up with was so awesome that I told her I wanted to use it this Monday.

TA Lesson Plan from 388V: The Rhetorical Triangle

1. 4 minutes of a video clip covering the Grammy weddings. In 388V, the TAs used a video clip of an "Entertainment Tonight Style" host recapping the performance. I adapted it to be a video clip of the actual performance: Macklemore "Same Love" Grammys 2014 (3:22 to 6:00)
2. Ask students to ID the message, speaker, and audience
3. Draw the rhetorical triangle and explain how the three points relate to each other

This is essentially where the TAs in 388V stopped. Here's how I adapted it for yesterday:

Continuation: From Rhetorical Triangle to Toulmin Logic

1. Ask "What would happen if we changed one of these? What if the audience were different?" What if the audience was a group who was not supportive of gay marriage?"
2. Use "a conservative congregation" as the new audience.
3. Would Macklemore and Queen Latifah be good speakers for this audience? Would they be able to deliver this message as effectively? No? Why not? Okay, who would be a good speaker?
4. ID reverend/ preacher (all three sections came up with this on their own). 
5. Pairs: In pairs, come up with the best way to deliver this message to this audience. Frame it as a complete enthymeme: a claim + reason. (2 minutes)
6. Ask pairs to give their claim and reason. Write on the board. Have class ID which claim and reason would be the strongest and why.

As they were evaluating the enthymemes, the students discussed the values and beliefs of the audience. "Yes, invoking God is a good idea because..." or "No--don't invoke God. Make it about equality." "So, separate church and state?" "Yes, that's the only way this will work for them." "No, that's not enough--this needs to be about Christian values.."

Brilliant. "Okay, what you guys have just done is figured out which values and beliefs to appeal to in order for the audience to accept the message. In so doing, you've completed the enthymeme with the warrant.

Enthymeme: Claim + Stated Reason. That's your skeleton of the argument. In order to make sure it works, you need to identify the unstated assumption, or warrant, embedded in the enthymeme.

Complete Argument:               Claim + Stated Reason

                                                            Warrant

Bingo. Then, students took out their homework exercise, in which they had identified the claims and stated reasons for two articles that made arguments about their research topic, and worked on identifying the warrants in those arguments in groups.

After a few minutes, I wrote a couple of their enthymemes on the board and we identified the warrants as a class, e.g., 

Orca whales should not be kept in captivity because no killer whale has ever killed a human in the wild.

Warrant: Only animals who have killed a human in the wild should be kept in captivity.

And so forth. Tomorrow: back to stasis theory and evaluating sources, with a splash of Toulmin for reinforcement. Both stasis theory and Toulmin logic will be reinforced almost daily for several weeks--these take awhile to really click. But the triumph: both concepts are in by Week 4!