Class 15 (April 20) - Stories and Persuasion

Welcome

Welcome back to something like normality. I hope you are all okay. Today we’re going to catch up and get back into the swing of things. We have 10 more sessions together, so we need to talk about how to use them well.

Check-in

First, we’ll check in. In your breakout groups, you can chat about the following:

• How you are doing since the earthquake
• What your current situation is
• What issues you are facing in your courses at Parami
• What you hope for in the next few weeks.

Essay

Next, we need to talk about assessment. I have graded all the essays that I had until yesterday. So I need to know where everyone else is up to. I’ll do a poll to find out!

Other assignments

For your upcoming assignments, we are still required to do a presentation assignment, and a final essay. I am not going to set another quiz. The presentation will be an on-paper (PDF) presentation, not an in-class presentation. The essay will be shorter than planned.

Planning the coming weeks.

Of the coming 10 sessions, we have a bunch of different topics we can explore. But we don’t have time to cover everything. I’ll show you the original course outline.

So let’s talk about what you would like to do? Would you like the final two weeks to be essay workshops? If so, this gives us only four more classes after today. We also have to fit in a presentation, which I will set next week.

The topics we would have covered are:

• Perspectives from Cognitive Science
• Gender, argument and ethics / Feminist perspectives on argument
• Ethics, ie. Argument, community and trust, ignorance and humility etc.
• Bullshit & fake news

Which of these do you want to prioritise.

Storytelling and persuasion

I set an optional task to think about to Silent Spring. How did reading it make you feel? (If you have read it… if not, then have a read it you like! The link is here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/06/16/silent-spring-part-1) Did it change your mind or your perspective at all?

I also asked you to read Rob Jordan’s piece on Climate Storytelling: https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/stranger-fiction-climate-storytelling

Maybe today we can talk about the way that storytelling persuades, or doesn’t persuade us. Let’s try the following exercise.

Writing to change the world

One way to explore this is to try writing something. Think about an issue you care about. What is this issue? How could you write a fictional story that nevertheless changed people’s views about this? Are there things that storytelling can do to bring about change that other things (for example, academic argument) can’t?

Try to write a fictional story exploring an issue that matters to you. Think about the tricks, literary devices and forms of rhetoric you can use to really persuade your readers that this issue matters. But also think about making it a good story — readers want to be moved, but they don’t want to be lectured to! :D

If we have time, we can share extracts in our breakout groups.

Homework and next time…

We’ll decide this in the class!