Rhetoric and Public Controversy

Catalog description

Debates, arguments, and other forms of communication in public life often address various kinds of ongoing controversies. Resolving those controversies often influences our collective social, political, and moral decision-making. This course provides students with concepts, vocabularies, and practices necessary to study historical and contemporary public controversies. Understanding how to use rhetoric collaboratively and constructively for the public good is therefore valuable in both evaluating and helping to resolve controversies. CAS 375 will allow students to learn about well-known and lesser-known controversies that affect social and political life in Pennsylvania, at Penn State, and throughout the nation. Students will do so by examining primary and secondary texts (or historical documents as well as academic research). The course requires students to collaboratively research controversial topics of their choice, thereby enabling them to practice both analytic and communicative skills that help to promote constructive public discourse. In these respects, the course offers students an academically rewarding and civically engaged experience. Different versions of CAS 375 will vary depending on the specialties of individual instructors within the broad and diverse scholarship on public controversies. All versions of the course, however, will be designed according to common learning objectives and major topics in order to provide students with substantive points of academic coherence and consistency across slightly differing iterations of the course.