Cherwitz and Daniel's "Rhetoric as Professional Development and Vice Versa"

Cherwitz, Richard A., and Sharan L. Daniel. “Rhetoric as Professional Development and Vice Versa.” JAC 22.4 (2002): 795-814.

Cherwitz and Daniel represent the graduate-level Intellectual Entrepreneurship program at UT Austin, which “offers courses, workshops, internships, and certificate programs” and as of 2002 “already [had] enrolled more than 2,500 students in nearly ninety different graduate disciplines” (797).  The program addresses five types of challenges facing graduate students: teaching, research and publishing for varied audiences, securing funding, speaking for one’s discipline to varied audiences, and effecting policy (798).  After initiating this program and watching it grow, the authors realized that what had developed was a rhetorically based WAC program at the graduate level.  While unplanned, the rhetoric bent emerged because the IE program aimed to nurture “citizen-scholars, equipped with the rhetorical resources to adapt to a variety of audiences and appreciating that the perhaps once clear lines between teaching/research, academic/nonacademic, and content/form are now fuzzy at best” (799).  Further, the program administrators believed that too much of graduate school is discipline-serving, designed to preserve established practices and values within the academy, and not student-serving, designed to address students’ needs as they move into professional roles.  In instituting IE, the authors found that students needed rhetorical skills that allow 1) those who take positions inside academia to interact with those outside it, and 2) those who go outside academia to apply their discipline-specific expertise in the public sphere.  The authors argue that by taking a rhetorical view of their own disciplines, graduate students “develop a greater philosophical sense of their own disciplines” and thus gain more facility in interacting with professionals in and outside the field (800).  Because it addresses the intersection of knowledge-generation within the academy and discourse in the public sphere, the authors see IE as essentially concerned with rhetoric.

The authors situate this program within the history of WAC, casting IE as a sort of next stage that takes WAC to the graduate level.  They make an understated call for more such programs.  In this call, they revisit their previous praise of the citizen-scholar and restate the need “for pedagogy that examines the rhetoric of professional discourses with the end of enabling students to participate critically in the various communities they will enter as educated citizens” (803).  They note the existence of discipline-specific rhetorics as well as broader academic rhetorics, which students in multiple disciplines share.  In discovering these through IE courses, students gain a better understanding of the “practices, products, and governing principles we use to advance our collective knowledge,” so that the IE courses become in some ways inductions into the cultural norms of scholarship (805).  Finally, the authors suggest that “this kind of rhetorical curriculum, which crosses disciplinary boundaries and melds the public and academic issues central to a scholar’s life, is the next step for rhetoric’s reinvention in the academy” (807).  Thus they seem to see this grad-level WAC program as not only part of a WAC progression but part of the progression of rhetoric as a field since its renaissance several decades ago.

This article’s usefulness is in its argument that WAC practices offer professional development because they build rhetorical skills and sensibilities.  This connection, though established through theoretical justification when I might have liked guiding principles for practice, is valuable to me as I seek to clarify the nebulous cloud of ideas surrounding WAC and professional development.