Abstract
This paper explores the Loyola Marymount University Rhetorical Arts Festival (RHETFest), a signature event for the first-year Core Curriculum since 2015, and how a university event can respond to both shifting approaches to and continued critiques of humanities education by uplifting students while simultaneously encouraging post-pandemic engaged learning, student-centered activities and emphasizing audience as a threshold concept. Originally a forum for first-year students to increase high-impact learning through a persuasive speech competition concerning social justice topics, RHETFest has responded to changing needs of students by transforming to a collective conversation that empowers students to share and discuss social justice topics important to them while reducing public speaking anxiety, increasing student confidence, and encouraging active student involvement. The goals are threefold: to push learning beyond the classroom, expanding students’ flexibility in adapting their writing and speaking acts to varying rhetorical situations, to increase the complexity of students’ understanding of audience by offering a context that provides a wider range of rhetorical techniques available to them in order to potentially generate successful, adaptive messages, and lastly, by doing so, to indirectly persuade that a Humanities major might be a great, even practical degree of study to pursue, and that activities such as these can bridge rhetorical education with the need to prepare students for the workforce. This approach continues the tradition of speaking for social justice causes among first-year students, while establishing greater emphasis on the importance of community, self-efficacy, and the importance of dialogue and communication to address complicated challenges.
Presenters
John YoungSenior Instructor, Rhetorical Arts, English Department, Loyola Marymount University, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Past and Present in the Humanistic Education
KEYWORDS
High Impact Practices, Engaged Learning, Student-Centered Activities, Communication, Pedagogical Approaches
