Teaching Symbolic Rhetoric for Multicultural Education

303 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.The dissertation is an attempt to move the educational discourse on multiculturalism forward to meet the new challenges of an increasingly multicultural and global society. New conditions of rapid cultural change, intercultural engagement, and the instability of traditional notions of identity require of multiculturalism that it be able to account for emergent transcultural and intercultural identities and well as the hybridization of the systems of norms thought to be essential to particular cultures. I have made an effort to give serious consideration to the structuralist method of inquiry into culture. Structuralism is regarded as past its moment of relevance and criticized for presenting an overly deterministic and universalized notion of culture. But it contains within it resources for understanding culture that allow not merely for describing existing cultural forms, but for understanding how they came to be, how they are effective in solidifying communities around conceptual ideas, and how cultural concepts are susceptible to transformation especially in moments of intercultural contact. I argue that cultures are not merely structures or systems transcending individuals and everyday actions, but are rather constituted in everyday practices. In the discussion of how cultural systems are put into practice I hope to have shown that individuals not only reproduce these cultures but are productive of them as they put these symbolic practices into play. Finally, and this is the primary goal, the dissertation introduces, describes, and attempts to justify a pedagogical method appropriate to the contemporary multicultural and globalizing society which I refer to as an articulatory pedagogy. I hope that this dissertation provides the theoretical basis of such a pedagogy, but moreover, I hope that it offers a pragmatic explanation of the pedagogy including evidence of its relevance, examples of its application, and descriptions of the skills that this pedagogy can teach to enable students to be more effective participants in an increasingly multicultural and global society.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD