Rhetoric of Place: Exploring Environmental Narratives and Everyday Spaces in Composition Classrooms

The following multi-modal assignment encourages first-year composition students to engage in an interactive exploration of everyday spaces, practice rhetorical analysis by investigating the rhetorical functions of space(s), and prompt students to record, analyze, and reflect on buildings’ physical design in their community and on campus by identifying specific goals. Students are given a chance to practice rhetorical analysis by inhabiting places they encounter beyond the classroom confines. The rhetoric of place often creates a heuristic framework for how we inhabit and study places. The focus on the physical environment owes a debt to scholarship on technical communication in environmental rhetorics. This scholarship helps enable the emergence of ecocomposition, which places ecological thinking and composition in dialogue with the ecological properties of written discourse and how ecologies, environments, locations, and places are discursively affected. The ultimate objective is for students to learn how rhetoric functions beyond verbal and written discourse and how it acclimates them to public spaces and social contexts.