This chapter contends that transfer of genre awareness can be improved in composition classrooms through understanding the rhetorics of popular music. Drawing on scholarship on transfer and genre theory, the authors present original study results and pedagogical recommendations based on their experiences leading upper-division student writers in the analysis and performance of musical texts. The chapter maintains a conceit based on the performative rhetorics of James Brown and Led Zeppelin. In addition to making the often-abstract rhetoric of transference and genre more accessible to students, the authors’ approach suggests the relevance of multimodal and interdisciplinary performative strategies in the theory and practice of transference and genre awareness.

The Use of Narrative in Undergraduate Engineering Education Many theories of engineering education identify methods to engage students and enhance learning that leverage mechanisms by which learning occurs. Most commonly, techniques such as problem-based learning, discovery learning, scaffolding, and hands-on or active learning have been promoted to enhance learning of engineering concepts and design methods. But less systematically studied are approaches that specifically address student motivation (and its assessment). One especially overlooked modality in this regard, despite (and probably also because of) its pervasive presence in instructional discourse, is the use of narrative. Cognitive psychologist and philosopher of education Jerome Bruner defined two modes of thinking that apply in this context: “logico-scientific” and “narrative,” (which are not mutually exclusive). The logico-scientific mode (and its attendant argumentative method) is clearly the dominant mode in engineering education for focusing on science, math, and logic to categorize and understand engineering principles and develop technological applications. But use of narrative can both improve motivation in learning and enhance mastery of engineering knowledge, and more important, it is ideal for helping students understand broader impacts (societal, ethical, historical) in engineering. The 20th century French philosopher Paul Ricoeur points out that narrative is built upon concern for the human condition, and ethical literary scholar Marshall Gregory contends that there is indeed no stepping outside of narrative contexts. Hence, by more explicitly and imaginatively using stories in engineering education, including case studies and cautionary tales, a more holistic approach may be achieved: one which happens to be reflected in ABET’s student learning outcomes. In addition, by exploring ‘missing narratives’ – voices and stories that are silenced or excluded in a given narrative – we can better understand the role of ethics and values in engineering designs and technological failures. We will discuss models for the use of narrative, and examine the results of the presenter’s use in undergraduate courses of disaster literature and science fiction (both reading and writing) to enhance the learning of engineering ethics, value sensitive design, and risk assessment. We will also discuss further roles for the concepts of narrative pedagogy in engineering (for example, having students tell stories of their own relationship with technology) and, in a broader sense, explore the potential for enhancing teaching and learning in engineering and the humanities through seeing engineering designs as narratives themselves.

I do not think of myself as someone who studies cognition but rather metacognition.1 I mention this because I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling more drawn to the latter than the former of these concepts, and it may be worth exploring why. For starters, cognition can be a mystifying term. At times the word just seems to mean thinking; at other times it entails emotions, non-emotional affect, and even assimilated social influences. So this word that denotes the thinking of a single person can also paradoxically connote the opposite of thinking and involvement of other people. But metacognition doesn’t appear more inviting to comprehension. After all, this word encompasses its already confusing root term and further complicates it with a prefix meaning among, with, after, or beyond. This turns out to be a troublesome set of prepositions. On the one hand, when we become aware of our thoughts, our perception might be said to be among or with those thoughts (i.e., together with them); this makes it difficult to distinguish cognition from metacognition. In such a state of mutual company, cognition appears to be knowable. Ann Berthoff (1984) seems to assume as much in her refrain “thinking about thinking” (p. 743), which was my first point of entry into metacognition per se. On the other hand, becoming aware of our thoughts indicates our perception’s state of being beyond or after those thoughts (i.e., separate from them); this makes it difficult not to distinguish cognition from metacognition. As Howard Tinberg (2016) recently put it, “Metacognition is not cognition. Performance, however thoughtful, is not the same as awareness of how that performance came to be” (p. 75). When Linda Flower and John R. Hayes (1981) introduced their cognitive process theory, it

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T essay offers a conceptual basis and strategy for teaching an expanded application of felt-sense theory to avoid a standardized approach to written argumentation. Such an approach adopts a limited notion of audience and fails to acknowledge important aspects of the rhetorical situation. In particular, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) now influence argumentation in primary and secondary school curricula and may thereby shape students’ composing habits, consequently determining how they are placed in college (Smith). My complaint about CCSS-aligned high-stakes testing is that it risks training students over many years to adopt a reductive and potentially unethical attitude toward audiences by privileging a monologic, agonistic brand of argumentation.1 My essay encourages teachers to take counteractive measures, especially postsecondary first-year writing instructors whose students have been brought up on CCSS tests. While I highlight the application of felt sense theory, to help explain my views, I also offer an heuristic example in the myth of Orpheus. I contend Orpheus could have avoided the failure of his one-tracked argumentative mode by means of a rhetorical/ethical application of felt sense. My strategy is not presented as an outright solution to the deeply embedded problems of over-testing and the removal of curriculum and assessment from teachers’ hands in American public education. Rather, I am offering just one counteractive pedagogical measure among others that teachers can implement.2 After examining problems of audience in the treatment of argument by the Common Core’s writing standards, this essay engages theories of audience from rhetoric and composition scholarship, reviews the concept of felt sense, introduces my proposal for its rhetorical applications, and offers a pedagogical model for reconceiving audience more ethically in written argumentation.