Dramatistic Pedagogy
In the mid-twentieth century, a unique body of rhetorical theory emerged that came to be known as “new rhetoric.” While the phrase was anything but new, having been used by rhetoricians in the 19th century, the growing interest it attracted from academics in departments ranging from speech to communication, composition, and English is truly remarkable (Gaonkar). At the center of this cyclone of activity was Kenneth Burke, who in the years immediately following the end of World War II, published two of his best-known works as part of a planned trilogy he dubbed the “motivorum project”: A Grammar of Motives was published in 1945, followed by A Rhetoric of Motives in 1950; the proposed “Symbolic of Motives” was, however, never completed. While his work on motives and their impact on human relations started much earlier, arguably as early as Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1935), Burke’s “dramatism” hit at a crucial time as American academics were in the process of rediscovering the value of classical rhetoric and trying to determine just how to adapt it to the communication revolution that was occurring at the time. In this essay I examine Burke’s contribution to the new rhetoric from the perspective of educational pedagogy, which I argue is the defining feature of the new rhetoric that emerged between 1930 and 1970. I explore Burke’s 1955 contribution to the education annual Modern Philosophies and Education, “Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education” (LAPE), as his definitive statement on dramatism and as an example of his lifelong commitment to the pedagogy of rhetorical education.
Burke is important to the contemporary educational imperative in a number of ways. Through my “conceptual framework” (introduced below) we can assess the important contributions of Burke’s work through the development and design of a truly effective “dramatistic pedagogy.” We can establish what are usually found to be the six keywords of twenty-first century learning as rhetorical competencies required to live the good life and to participate in society as an active form of citizenship. This essay centers on Kenneth Burke and his lifelong attempt to bridge the literary and rhetorical worlds through a study of language as symbolic action. Burke’s contribution to pedagogy has gone unappreciated for far too long. It is in the realm of education, teaching, and pedagogy that his many publications have their most direct application. Ironically, it is this very audience that is most unaware of the existence of Burke and his dramatistic approach to language study as the most direct path to understanding the drama of human relations.
LAPE is Burke’s only essay focused solely on education and it has been overlooked by Burke scholars for many years. It was not until the 1990s that LAPE stared to receive some scholarly attention beyond the occasional unpublished dissertation (for example, Fillion 1969). In 1997 James Kastely presented a paper at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication entitled “Drooping Methodically: Burke’s Argument for a Negative Education.” Also writing in 1997, Ellen Quandahl describes LAPE as being “published in a collection for which ‘general philosophers’ were invited to write on education and respond to comments on their work by education specialists” (15). Nearly fifty years after LAPE was first published, Jessica Enoch published an exciting and influential article “Becoming Symbol-Wise: Kenneth Burke’s Pedagogy of Critical Reflection,” introducing Burkean pedagogy to the readership of College Composition and Communication (2004). Enoch’s excellent scholarship inspired Burke scholars to take a closer look at LAPE and in 2010, Peter Smudde published Humanistic Critique of Education: Teaching and Learning as Symbolic Action. Smudde’s edited volume contained a collection of papers dedicated to Burke’s pedagogy as outlined in LAPE. In 2015, Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert edited a special issue of the journal Studies in Philosophy and Education that included papers exploring Burke’s influence on pedagogy and education. Most recently, Ann George and M. Elizabeth Weiser edited In the Classroom with Kenneth Burke (2023). Prior to Enoch, very few academic articles or books exploring Burke’s pedagogy were published, the exception being Daniel J. Fogarty’s 1959 book, Roots for A New Rhetoric. Although Fogarty did not discuss LAPE specifically, his focus was on the development of a new “teaching rhetoric” inspired by Burke, I. A. Richards, and the general semanticists (58).
In order to account for the sudden interest in the new rhetoric in post-war America, it is necessary to examine some of the ways Burke was introduced to this particular audience. Scholarly treatments of Burke’s work were published throughout the 1950s by Marie Hochmuth, Virginia Holland, Hugh Dalziel Duncan, and Fogarty, amongst others. What is clear from these studies is that Burke’s “dramatism” had much to contribute to the development of a new teaching rhetoric. As an astute observer of cultural change, Walter Ong notes:
In the present world, the relationship of persuasion to the totality of human existence thus differs radically from what it was in the past. But only those who have no knowledge of the changes in culture itself will think that the changes in the role of rhetoric have been chaotic. The history of rhetoric simply mirrors the evolution of society. (9)
It should be no surprise then, at mid-century, after two world wars and a communications revolution, that a desire, a need, a drive to discover—or invent—a new rhetoric emerged with great force.
In March of 1950, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), an offshoot of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), held its inaugural conference in Chicago, where Burke delivered a speech that was later published as “Rhetoric—Old and New” (Beasley and Selzer). At the time, Burke was a well-known literary critic and author, however, his appearance at CCCC ultimately led to him being claimed by a new audience of “rhetoricians in both speech and English [in] the 1950s” (Crusius 449). And it was within the speech communication community that the new rhetoric initially gained momentum (Brent 453). In fact, Burke exerted such a major influence on the speech communication discipline, that by 1968, Francis Lee Utely referred to him as one of the greatest “New Rhetoricians” (120). George has even argued that, in teaching rhetoric as the “civic ‘art of living,’ Burke inaugurated the twentieth-century body of theory known as New Rhetoric” (2).
In 1952 Marie Hochmuth introduced Kenneth Burke to the readership of The Quarterly Journal of Speech with her article “Kenneth Burke and the ‘New Rhetoric’”. The publication of Burke’s new book A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) provided Hochmuth with the opportunity to “range freely over all his works” (133). She argues that Burke “deserves to be related to the great tradition of rhetoric,” identifying Burke’s first book of criticism, Counter-Statement (1931), as an early example of his interest in rhetoric (133). Making reference to Isidor Schneider’s 1931 review of Counter-Statement, “A New View of Rhetoric,” Hochmuth contextualizes Burke’s books from 1931–1950 as being either centrally or at least peripherally concerned with rhetoric. Schneider’s review provides what may be the first reference to Burke in relation to the emergence of a “new” rhetoric. In fact, Burke concludes Counter-Statement with the assessment that “effective literature could be nothing else but rhetoric,” thus, expanding the scope of rhetoric beyond public oration (209).
With the publication of Permanence and Change, Burke begins to shift away from his sole interest in literary or aesthetic criticism and becomes what Hochmuth describes as a pragmatist or “sociological critic” (134). However, Burke never really leaves his literary interests behind as Hochmuth notes that he “approaches the subject of rhetoric through a comprehensive view of art in general” (134). This novel and “indirect approach” are what she believes allows him to present a new view of rhetoric in A Rhetoric of Motives (134). Hochmuth finds Burke to be essentially a classicist in his theory of rhetoric, indicating that he believes rhetoric to be comprised of both the use of persuasive resources and the study of them (135). Quoting Burke’s memorable description of rhetoric as “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions other human agents” (Rhetoric 41), Hochmuth highlights Burke’s intense interest in symbols through his description of language as a “symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (Rhetoric 43). This leads to what Burke describes as the difference between the new and the old rhetoric—the switch from persuasion to identification as the key term of the new rhetoric: “put identification and division ambiguously together, so you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric” (Rhetoric 25).
In a later article on Burke, entitled “Burkeian Criticism,” Hochmuth asserts that “the fountainhead for much of the current endeavor is to be found in Burke, who, for more than thirty years, has sought a re-approachment of rhetoric, dialectic, and ethics. He has had both the literary critics and the rhetorical critics at heart in his efforts” (77). Commenting on Burke’s focus on language as symbolic action, she notes that “although the notion of language using as an act is fundamentally Aristotelian, it is a bit of Aristotelianism that has rarely, if ever, received the emphasis given it by Burke. It becomes the basis of his philosophical position and the basis of his critical methodology” (78). Douglas C. Bryant, writing in 1953, one year after Hochmuth introduced Burke to the speech communication community, refers to Burke’s new rhetoric as “cumbersome and recondite” and also sings the praise of Hochmuth’s “admirable exposition of it” (402). Nearly ten years later in a review of Fogarty’s Roots for New Rhetoric, Bryant notes that Hochmuth’s “essay on Burke, in fact, also elicited the subject’s approval and admiration” (“Review” 61). While Hochmuth was not singlehandedly responsible for the speech communication community’s growing interest in Burke, her expert reading of Burke certainly set a benchmark for understanding that Burke’s ideas on language are grounded in rhetoric.
Taking into account the twin dynamics of permanence and change in human culture across time, the most straightforward way to explain the need for a new rhetoric is to acknowledge that Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which was written over two-thousand years ago and yet remains the definitive reference on the subject, quite simply does not account for such an unimaginable scenario as the communication revolution of the twentieth century. James Berlin, speaking to both the orthodoxy and the influence of Aristotle in the field, reminds us that there is “the consideration [to be made] that Aristotle has provided the technical language most often used in discussing rhetoric—so much so that it is all but impossible to talk intelligently about the subject without knowing him” (767). But as Bryant makes clear, similar to “the limitations of [Aristotle’s] poetic, the limitations of his rhetoric derive mainly from his failure to consider phenomena which had not yet occurred and to make use of learnings which had not yet been developed (“Function” 404). Aristotle’s focus on the medium of speech, was, of course, sound for his time, but Burke does point out that “Aristotle treated rhetoric as purely verbal” (“Old and New” 205). “As everyone knows,” Crusius notes, “Aristotle was thinking of public speaking—oral persuasion—directed at a general audience of Athenian citizens” (Discourse 22). Thus, Aristotle’s system, as preserved in the Rhetoric, needs to be extended with supplements that go beyond the original communicative situation of public oratory in an Athenian democracy.
Addressing an audience at a conference on communication organized by Lee Thayer in 1966, Burke laments,
I find it regrettable that social scientists automatically ignore Aristotle’s Rhetoric. I don’t say Aristotle has given us the last word on these matters. But I submit that his actual treatment of topics is fundamentally correct. You could add new topics and develop accordingly. But what you got 2,000 years ago was the kind of approach that can be built on in principle. (“Dramatism” 327)
By presenting his “new” rhetoric as a supplement to Aristotle, and swapping-out the key term of persuasion for identification, Burke ushered in the age of a “social rhetoric” designed to meet the contemporary needs of a technological society inundated with messages spread by the mass media (Ehninger 1–5). In adapting rhetoric to the changes in the way humans communicate, Burke was certainly one of the main progenitors of the call “for a new, conceptually refurbished rhetoric better adapted to the exigencies of the modern age” (Gaonkar 55). Thus acknowledging the need for a social approach to rhetoric, Fogarty senses that the new rhetoric will need to study “ways of arriving at mutual understanding among people working toward patterns of cooperative action” (4). Additionally, Virginia Holland finds that Burke’s general approach to communication includes a strong sense of “social justice” (174).
In Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, Young, Becker, and Pike provide a succinct rationale for the development of a new rhetoric to deal with contemporary exigencies:
As a result of rapid and mass means of communication and transportation, our world is becoming smaller, and all of us are learning to become citizens of the world, confronting people whose beliefs are radically different from our own and with whom we must learn to live. It has become imperative to develop a rhetoric that has as its goal not skillful verbal coercion but discussion and exchange of ideas.” (8)
Today, this imperative has influenced the goals of global citizenship in educational discourse.
Similar to Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” notion, as citizens of the world we need to develop an appreciation for the power of the new media to connect us in new ways (31). However, Burke did not view the emergence of a global communications network as entirely beneficial: Daniel Adleman and Chris Vanderwees point out that “writing before the existence of the home computer or cellular telephone, Burke adopted a much more skeptical frame than McLuhan about the emerging Global Village” (55). As Burke argues in A Grammar of Motives, “the technological scene itself, which requires the planning of a world order, might be thought such as to favor a large measure of ‘dictatorship’ in our political ways (at least as contrasted with the past norms of democracy)” (17). Out of necessity, civic discourse must now include the geopolitics of a global society.
Discussing his views on the role of communication as a social act in an article from 1974, Burke maintains a perspective reminiscent of his early work from Permanence and Change:
Actually, the very powers developed by us and grounded ultimately in the primal naturalistic necessities of strife or strain are the same resources by which we perfected our modes of cooperation. Thus I never think of “communication” without thinking of its ultimate perfection, named in such words as “community” and “communion,” though such terms do also imply a competitive element, as does indeed the very concept of “persuasion,” which in most cases is to be classed as the very antithesis of war. (“Communication” 144)
From this statement, it is clear that Burke’s “Marxist theorizing” from Permanence and Change had a continuing influence on the direction of his writing as well as his lifelong interest in communication: now that humans have developed a technology that has the power to destroy not only our species, but all life on this planet as we know it, Burke argues that the ability to connect with each other and make decisions on a global scale is paramount. The competitive “win rhetoric” of capitalism only serves to extend the divisive nature of a class-structured society. As Duncan notes, “from his earliest work . . . to A Grammar of Motives (1945), Burke has been trying to analyze communication as a common ground not for literature alone but for all types of action” (93). As Burke comments in his “prologue” to the 1954 second edition of Permanence and Change: “So all told, concerned with words above all, when things got toughest [the author] thought hardest about communication” (xlviii). The following questions, which are indicative of the social component of the new rhetoric, are thus raised by a close reading of Burke’s work spanning 1930–1955:
- How can the development of effective communication skills contribute to peace making and the de-escalation of war?
- How can these skills (or competencies) mitigate disagreements or arguments in everyday life?
- How can the development of a “listening rhetoric” lead to increased tolerance and contemplation in the classroom?
- How can the practice of textual analysis, the building of critical awareness, and the appreciation of the different modalities of symbol-use help students navigate their everyday lived experience?
- What are the rhetorical competencies required for “getting along”?
Ann George continues this inquiry, exploring what she refers to as Burke’s “critical civic pedagogy” in her 2018 book, Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion. In the introduction and conclusion, as well as a few individual chapters, George explores Burke’s contribution to the new rhetoric in addition to treating Permanence and Change as a work of critical civic pedagogy. In chapter three, she highlights Burke’s use of six key terms throughout the text, three of which are extremely relevant to the current discussion: “communication, cooperation, and participation” (110). According to George, Burke’s civic mission is to help everyday citizens improve the quality of human relations. George argues, along with Gregory Clark, that Burke’s civic mission is “to teach people how to render their conflicts productive rather than destructive” (qtd. in George 13). Thus, she presents Permanence and Change as “the” inaugural text of the new rhetoric (207).
Given George’s recent work on Burke’s “critical civic pedagogy,” it is truly advantageous for teachers working with Burkean pedagogy that Canadian public education has been moving towards a holistic, civically oriented approach to education in line with the global movement of “21st century learning.” In 2016, the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) initiated a plan for all provinces to develop a set of six global competencies to assist with numeracy and literacy. These six new competencies, as articulated by CMEC, are designed to provide “an overarching set of attitudes, skills, knowledge and values that are interdependent, interdisciplinary, and can be leveraged in a variety of situations both locally and globally” (“Global Competencies”). CMEC’s six global competencies are broadly construed under the following headings:
- Learning to Learn/Self-Aware & Self-Directed
- Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship
- Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Global Citizenship and Sustainability
The simplicity of these competencies has great potential to reinvigorate pedagogy in contemporary classrooms. While the familiar 3Rs of “reading, writing, and arithmetic” still remain the primary focus of K–12 education in Canada, not to mention around the world, the global competencies present an extremely pragmatic solution for addressing some of the major challenges faced every day by teachers and students in the technologically advanced global society in which we now live (hence the emphasis on 21st century learning).
When working with CMEC’s global competencies in the classroom, I prefer to use education scholar Michael Fullan’s “6Cs”: character, creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and citizenship (Fullan et al. 2018). The nomenclature of the 6Cs serves a dual purpose: one, the 6Cs represent six competencies that are to be applied globally across all subject areas; two, in the work of Fullan, the 6Cs are literally arranged as six words that start with the letter “C”. While the discourse on “21st century learning” can be traced back to at least the early 1980s (Emeigh 47), Fullan’s work with the 6Cs began with the circulation of a 2014 white paper through his organization New Pedagogies for Deeper Learning (NPDL). His version of the 6Cs have had a significant influence on education that has been assisted by a global network of NPDL schools, as well as through his more recent publications, such as Deep Learning: Engage the World Change the World (2018) and Dive Into Deep Learning: Tools for Engagement (2019).
The 6Cs are useful for a number of reasons, however, one of the major hurdles in education that they help to overcome is the complex nature of dealing with the digital communication revolution. With the proliferation of Web 2.0 and “literacies beyond literacy” including digital literacy, media literacy, critical media literacy, financial literacy, visual literacy, the discourse surrounding literacy has become problematic for educators. The overarching term “multiliteracies” has now come into vogue. With the 6Cs focus on “communication” as a global competency, we now have a way to maintain a concentrated focus on literacy as one of the main aims of education while attending to an expanded media environment containing an ever-growing assortment of media with their attendant modes of communication—in Burke’s terms, “symbolic action” (Language). While preserving literacy across the curriculum, we now have the ability to discuss communication across the curriculum as well—a discourse lacking in public education.
It is clear that a conceptual framework is needed in order to present Burke’s pedagogical ideas in a clear and succinct fashion. As Duncan has reminded us, one must read all of Burke to catch the nuance of his thinking (xliv). In presenting my “conceptual framework” for a “dramatistic pedagogy,” I highlight the reciprocal relationship that exists between Burke, rhetorical education, and the 6Cs. Many Burke scholars acknowledge the difficulty that both they and their students have in reading Burke—Hochmuth once stated that “Burke is not bed-side reading” and that “superficial skimming of his works” will not be productive (“Burkeian” 77–78). Quinn notes that the “chief problem that I have encountered in teaching Burke is, quite simply, that students find him overwhelming” (231). Commentating on Burke’s prose, Quinn finds that “even when it starts from systematic definitions or examinations of specific texts, inevitably [it] seems to end in a consideration of the whole human condition” (231). This perspective is summed up well by Stanley Edgar Hyman, who, back in 1948 compared Burke with Francis Bacon, writing that “Burke has set out to do no less than to integrate all man’s knowledge into one workable frame” (375). Holland finds that by carrying out a close reading of Burke’s material, his “writings constitute an intricate interrelationship of concepts cutting across many of the traditional subject-matter areas, but close examination reveals that the points form a coherent whole” (184).
Doubtless, Burke requires serious explication, but the effort is rewarding. In order to organize the “Burkean System” it is helpful to consult the basic criteria articulated by educational theorist Jerome Bruner regarding the structure of conceptual frameworks. Bruner suggests that “the merit of a structure depends on its power for simplifying information, for generating new propositions, and for increasing the manipulability of a body of knowledge” (41). Once a conceptual framework is worked out, we can start to see how the 6Cs are already present in Burke’s work, especially so in Permanence and Change. Holland easily identified “action, participation, cooperation, and communication” as descriptive key terms for discussing “man’s essence” present in Burke’s corpus (175). William Rueckert also notes that Burke uses such terms as poetic, cooperative, action, communication, and participation quite interchangeably (48); in fact, quoting from Permanence and Change, Rueckert highlights the relevance of these terms for Burke’s focus on motives: “to act in a creative assertive synthetic way is man’s ultimate motive” (qtd. in Drama 48).
In the decade that separates Permanence and Change from A Grammar of Motives, Burke develops the dramatic, or “poetic” metaphor from Permanence and Change into a literal approach to criticism. In The Philosophy of Literary Form, Burke dubs this approach “sociological criticism” (293). By the time that he wrote LAPE, Burke had definitively worked out the “dramatistic” approach as literal, “not figurative. Man literally is a symbol-using animal. He really does approach the world symbol-wise (and symbol-foolish)” (260). LAPE is a very unique text as it is one of only two or three focused attempts made by Burke to present dramatism to a specific audience in relation to his entire corpus. The “linguistic approach” taken by Burke in LAPE is ultimately that of dramatism. We need only to acknowledge Burke’s stressing of language as symbolic action to see the connection. Drama works here as a synonym for action, and if the use of language by human beings represents a symbolic act, then we are in essence treating the problems of education as problems of human symbol-use.
Using Fullan’s hand-list of the 6Cs—character, creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, citizenship—we can start to build a conceptual framework using the six “global competencies” as common essential learnings that can be applied across the entire curriculum, or wherever human symbol-use occurs. What is apparent in the word cluster of the 6Cs is that, for rhetoricians, they are extremely familiar. In the model of Dramatistic Pedagogy that I have created (see Appendix), the 6Cs are listed under the heading “Rhetorical Competencies.” Each of the 6Cs is grounded in the two-thousand-year-old tradition of classical rhetoric. “Character” represents eloquence, ethics, virtues, and the rhetorical appeal of ethos. “Creativity” appeals to the emotions, or pathos, enhances creative expression and develops an appreciation of the arts. “Critical Thinking,” while obviously a collocation involving related processes, could be thought of as synonymous with “reason,” representing logical appeals, analytical thought processes, approaches to argumentation, and the act of criticism itself. These first three rhetorical competencies apply to the individual and can also be observed in other people or characters in literature, film, theatre, and other imaginative texts.
The following three rhetorical competencies apply to social interactions between humans on three scales of interaction: local, national, and global. “Communication” includes all the multifaceted ways that humans, as symbol-using animal, act in the world. From gesture to speech, to numerical symbols and equations, to the mass media and the arts and beyond, the scale of communication in human experience is truly astounding. Communication competencies relate to effective communication and cover the various modalities as required. “Collaboration,” or “cooperation” as Burke would refer to it, focuses on all the familiar aspects of teamwork, common goals, and group comprise. People in social situations will often find the need to come together to achieve a common goal or to problem solve for issues that affect the collective. Collaboration is the process that facilitates success in these scenarios. “Citizenship” arguably receives the least amount of attention in the common school curriculum, yet it impacts all adults when they reach voting age. However, the conceptualization of citizenship here is conceived as more than just engaging in the democratic process by voting—human rights, social justice, ecological intelligence, and civic discourse all come into play. How agents choose to act in the world is informed by their knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes towards other human beings, society, and the environment; this is the true drama of human relations.
The 6Cs as illustrated here act as integrated circuits of discourse with each one contributing to the development of the six rhetorical competencies, these competencies are essential for participating in the co-construction of the “good life.” As Doug Brent reminds us, “rhetorical systems have always been seen as training for citizenship in general as well as for practical persuasion (465). In the context of the new rhetoric, dramatism presents a way to create social cooperation. Burke’s widely cited definition of rhetoric from A Rhetoric of Motives is useful to illustrate the point: rhetoric is “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (43). David Flemming in his article “Rhetoric as a Course of Study” describes how training in rhetoric contributes to the “intellectual development of the student, who is seen primarily as a future citizen in a community of free and equal citizens. From this perspective, ‘rhetoric’ is inextricably involved in the character-forming project of education” (178). Flemming equates the “language user” with “citizen” (184).
The next level in my conceptual framework falls under the heading of “Communication Modalities.” Here we find the common “language arts” as English teachers have come to know them: speaking, listening, reading, writing, viewing, and representing. It is important to have the ability to differentiate between oral texts, printed texts, and visual texts (at minimum). The contemporary media environment is full of new and novel forms of communication media and our students need to be skilled at identifying the inherent modalities found in multiple forms of text in addition to having the ability to access them as well. Flemming notes,
students need some kind of rhetorical “art,” a theoretical vocabulary providing the language user (speaker, writer, listener, or reader) with a way to isolate, analyze, and manage communication situations, goals, resources, acts, and norms. This art needs, I believe, a fairly robust notion of human agency . . . . And it also needs, I believe, some way to reliably separate form and content. (183)
Students who study with a dramatistic pedagogue will be encouraged to explore their sense perceptions in relation to the symbolic action of everyday texts. Multimodal discourse of the variety articulated by Susanne Langer in her Philosophy in a New Key serves as the foundational theory for exploring feeling and form across a variety of symbol systems.
The next component of the conceptual framework focuses on Burke’s major concept of “Language as Symbolic Action.” Here I utilize the educational theory of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in their book Understanding by Design (UbD) to select four “Big Ideas” that make or break the study of symbolic action. As presented in my conceptual framework, the four big ideas are “Meaning, Design, Power, and Systems” (see Appendix). Wiggins and McTighe ground the UbD program using their concept of big ideas to represent the core understandings of a subject area or discipline. Regarding dramatism, new rhetoric, or “language as symbolic action,” these four big ideas (meaning, design, power, systems) act as generative principles that animate the “essential questions” so important to the ongoing discourse of the discipline. Wiggins and McTighe define an essential question as a
question that lies at the heart of a subject or a curriculum … and promotes inquiry and uncoverage of a subject. Essential questions thus do not yield a single straightforward answer (as a leading question does) but produce different plausible responses, about which thoughtful and knowledgeable people may disagree” (342).
“Uncoverage,” in the context of UbD, is a “teaching approach that is required for all matters of understanding. To uncover a subject is to do the opposite of ‘covering’ it, namely to go into depth” (UbD 352). Going into depth is what we must do if we are to catch the subtle yet profound impact that symbols have on our very existence. As Burke elaborates on our nature as symbol-using animals:
The “symbol-using animal,” yes, obviously. But can we bring ourselves to realize just what that formula implies, just how overwhelmingly much of what we mean by “reality” has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems? Take away our books, and what little do we know about history, biography, even something so “down to earth” as the relative position of seas and continents? What is our “reality” for today (beyond the paper-thin line of our own particular lives) but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present? (Language 5)
In order to grasp to full extent of symbolic action we must build towards some semblance of symbol wisdom, which will entail a lifetime of study, as Burke makes clear, “to meditate on this fact until one sees its full implications is much like peering over the edge of things into an ultimate abyss” (Language 5)”
Using the “big ideas” approach encouraged by UbD, we can highlight some of the major building blocks of understanding required to study language as symbolic action. The ideas of meaning, design, power, and systems are imbued in all of Burke’s work, from Counter-Statement (1931) to Dramatism and Development (1972) and beyond. These key terms can be found in meaningful patterns that connect the wide range and scope of Burke’s inquiry. They help to connect the dots between core concepts, principles, and theories. “Meaning” becomes the focus of Burke’s well-known treatment of words as “terministic screens.” Terministic screens act as filters. They are reflections, selections, and deflections of reality: “Men seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality” (Grammar 59). “Design” opens up the entire practice of addressing audiences with a message. In essence, design is the pragmatic process of adjusting “ideas to people and of people to ideas”—to utilize Bryant’s take on the function of rhetoric (413). In “Rhetoric—Old and New,” Burke sums up the old rhetoric’s focus on persuasion as “deliberate design” (203). New rhetoric would stress identification, where establishing a connection with an audience modifies the design of the message. “Power” has a wide range in the realm of symbolic action, from symbolic inducement, the power of words and terminology, to intentional persuasion and the use of rhetorical force to dominate an opponent or oppositional state, as in politics. “Systems” refers first and foremost to symbol systems and the need for multimodal discourse. However, as Burke’s system of criticism is socially orientated, studying language as symbolic action entails social systems, economic systems, and ecological systems—and this aligns with the basic premise of Education for Sustainable Development’s “three pillars” approach which has as its main tenets the interrelations of society, economy, and the environment (McKeown and Nolet 7).
This exploration of the emergence of a new rhetoric and its pedagogical focus has emphasized Burke’s relevance for developing a deeper appreciation of humans as the symbol-using animal. From Burke’s initial musings in Permanence and Change about motives, symbol-use, world views, and civic responsibilities, to the fully realized dramatistic nature of human relations in A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, we can study his only actual article on education (LAPE) to discover both the essence of dramatism and find the inspiration to develop a dramatistic pedagogy for contemporary classrooms. I have developed a conceptual framework for a dramatistic pedagogy that serves a dual purpose: one, to highlight key concepts required to enhance communications skills and to develop critical awareness of human symbol-use that has the potential improve human relations; two, to help readers connect the dots between Burke’s ideas when reading his many books and articles. As Holland so eloquently put it, Burke’s “writings constitute an intricate interrelationship of concepts cutting across many of the traditional subject-matter areas, but close examination reveals that the points form a coherent whole” (183–184). By using the 6Cs as “rhetorical competencies,” educators can contribute to the revival of rhetorical education that began in the 1950s. I believe the greatest teaching that Burke has given us is the imperative to render our differences productive rather than destructive (Clark 63). Using education as an “attitude of preparatory withdrawal” will help teachers and students alike to build a better life for all through the development of tolerance and deep listening skills, thus increasing our ability to entertain each other’s perspectives and world views (LAPE 273). As Rueckert so adequately put it, “anyone who has been reading Burke from the thirties knows that his motives since Permanence and Change have been profoundly educational and humanistic in the best sense” (283).
Appendix
Works Cited
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Citation:
Cole, Jarrett. “Dramatistic Pedagogy.” Winnsox, vol. 6 (2025).
ISSN 2563-2221
