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Rhetorical Listening in the Classroom

Although the DALN suggests many kinds of assignments in an undergraduate writing course, Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen's work on narrative suggests some particularly interesting options. In their chapter "Narratives of the Self," they describe progressive narratives, in which storytellers demonstrate that something in life is improving, and regressive narratives, in which storytellers demonstrate that something in life is declining. While progressive and regressive narratives might sometimes be described along scripted lines—for example, learning to read in kindergarten might be considered a progressive narrative or earning a low grade on a book review in high school might be considered a regressive narrative—part of the value of the DALN is the ways it makes available situated knowledge that complicates these scripts. For instance, while Driscoll's description of having to re-read and re-sign R. L. Stein books to his English teacher might, from a Hearing-normative perspective be a regressive narrative, from a Deaf-normative perspective it might be a progressive narrative, reflecting his insider status and membership within the Deaf community where ASL is privileged against written English. The localized knowledge of the literacy narratives can help teacher- and student-rhetors re-see not only the narratives within the archive but also the ways they might construct and situate their own narratives.

Similarly, the DALN suggests assignments in which students can assume the role of the autobiographical narrator that Jerome Bruner describes:

A narrator, in the here and now, takes upon himself or herself the task of describing the progress of a protagonist in the there and then, one who happens to share the same name. He must by convention bring that protagonist from the past into the present in such a way that the protagonist and the narrator eventually fuse and become one person with a shared consciousness. Now, in order to bring a protagonist from the there and then to the point where the original protagonist becomes the present narrator, ones needs a theory of growth or at least transformation. (69)

By making available the perspectives of others that we might not otherwise have access to, the DALN affords us as listener-rhetors the opportunity to hear the ways contributors construct their own growth and transformation within, among, and against institutions, Discourses, and versions of their earlier selves.

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