Welcome to "Tea with Julie," a weekly missive by me, Julie Bogart. My wish is to give you food for thought over a cup of tea to enhance your life as an educator, parent, and awesome adult. Glad you're here. Pinkies up!
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Cincinnati, December 25, 2021
Hi Friend,
Today is Christmas Day and for those of you who celebrate, I wish you a heartfelt Merry Christmas. For those of you who read here and celebrate a different array of holidays, please know that I wish you a safe and happy holiday season as well.
I am grateful for each of you who read this email newsletter, who click "reply" to share the stories you are living with your families. I value our connection and our shared efforts to make the world a little more peaceful and loving. From my home and heart to yours: thank you. You make my life better. xo Julie
All children learn without instruction what constitutes “normal” for them—what can be taken for granted, what we deserve, how we’ve been wronged, who is out to get us, and who is on our side.
As we grow up—our circle widens and we encounter for the first time: “the other.” We determine whether or not we will include or vilify this alternative way of living and seeing the world.
The Rhetorical Imagination
The experience of expansion has a name and it is valuable to becoming an educated person. I call it “the rhetorical imagination.” (Hint: I unpack this concept more fully in my new book which publishes on February 1, 2022—Raising Critical Thinkers.)
The rhetorical imagination is the experience of:
- encountering,
- examining,
- and holding multiple viewpoints simultaneously, dispassionately.
The rhetorical imagination is a tool we use to grow academically. We open ourselves to the perspective presenting itself and begin with the assumption that there is an internal coherence and logic to a viewpoint, even if that coherence and logic make us uncomfortable. Even if inconvenient.
This capacity requires us to suspend our own judgments and to momentarily shift into the seat of the other to see the world through different eyes. Those eyes may be more or less religious, more or less tolerant, more or less educated, more or less political, more or less financially secure, more or less experienced, more or less skilled…
Even “objectively” wrong views (the belief that the world is flat, for instance) believed by individuals are rooted in some kind of interior logic (after all, in our own heads, what we think is true makes sense to us or we couldn’t think the thoughts!). The task of an academic is to wade into those views (our own and those of others), to suspend judgment in order to identify how that person has arrived at that conclusion and what that conclusion offers the one who holds the viewpoint.
Famously, centuries of misinformation have been sustained by a lack of tools to measure what we did not know, or by political and/or religious empires that stood to gain from an uneducated constituency. It was stunning, for instance, to visit Prague to see the Astronomical Clock which measured the time by putting the earth in the center of the clock face. Each day, citizens would walk by this clock to tell time. How could a person in the 1400s have any hope of understanding the true nature of the universe with that out-sized misinformation mounted and gilded (measuring the minutes and hours every day with planet earth dead center in the solar system) towering over them? Of course the earth was the center of the universe! There it was, on display, all day every day!
What a blow it would be to imagine that the earth was not in the center! For that new interpretation to gain footing, the challengers of the status quo had to be willing to unseat the power of centuries old beliefs.
The capacity to inquire, to be curious, to willingly suspend one’s own point of view in favor of opening to someone else’s is at the heart of the academic enterprise. It’s the discipline of higher education in particular! The research conducted in any field must begin with inquiry and suspending one’s own preconceived ideas in order to be open to new and different conclusions and solutions.
The development of a rhetorical imagination is critical to good academic writing:
- the essay,
- research paper,
- and beyond.
So often parents and teachers obsess about formatting and citations. They are worried the student won’t know how to look up books with a card catalog and the Dewey decimal system, or how to write a “Works Cited.”
Those are easily taught. What is far more difficult is deliberately opening to a wide variety of viewpoints. It takes courage and curiosity. It requires a willingness to overturn assumptions, to be changed by what is read.
In fact, I’d say that the heart of the academic enterprise is the drive to be startled into insight!
The rhetorical imagination—the capacity to consider a wide variety of perspectives and possibilities—is the vehicle to take us there.
Pushing ourselves and our kids out of our cozy comfort zones of thought is our educational obligation and opportunity.
