Rhetoric+&+Pedagogy

=Rhetoric & Pedagogy=

Elementary mathematics education exists in a mixed world, a world of collisions and separations. In this world we find the mathematician, the pedagog, the care-giver and (among other things) a persuader. It is in this mixed world that I look at how preservice elementary teachers use the arts of persuasion to help further their teaching agenda, even to the point of convincing the students in their classes of the material that is being taught. Rhetoric, by definition, is the art of persuasion. Education, by nature, is persuasive. Teachers, by right, are rhetors.

Rhetoric Triangle

"[Ancient rhetoricians] had great respect for the power of language. Archaic Greeks throught that the distinguishing characteric of human beings, what made them different from animals, was their possesion of //logos//, or speech" (Crowley & Hawhee, //Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students//, 2009, 22).