finding "identity" vs. finding identity in common.

Finding identity in common requires dissonance. The mode of invitation is different, and the compositional strategies are different. Connectionist skills need to be cultivated alongside analytical skills. Writing in wiki, students wrangle with objectivity/subjectivity issues from the get-go. And, at the same time, they gotta let go! Because initial forays into a shared medium require some degree of subjective commitment, a "self" must be factored in--ironically, it is more "authentically objective" to weave a self into a wiki post. Put another way, forming a commons requires more than observation it requires participation, and compositional strategies of fascination, attention, and even intoxication. Then you get engagement.

In a listserv discussion, I made the acquaintance of a colleague and good friend o Morgan, Roxanne Kirkwood. Roxanne's closing thoughts regarding the classroom itself as the primary scene of civic engagement struck a chord with me. She also qualifies the significance of performing and facilitating civic engagement "one student at a time," when she says that these engagements fail to "capture the heart of civic engagement." I think, however, of the root -thymos (heart) at the heart of enthymeme. This rhetorical form, for Aristotle and others, is at the heart of what rhetoricians do, and, just as a kernel communicates between hardware and software, enthymemes can function as the kernel communicating between the students "motives, interests, and areas of concern" that Jill rightly identifies as the source of possible civic rhetorics that would be anchored, in some way, to our classrooms. But unlike the kernels of computer science, the kernel of enthymeme-ing seems to be human passions. So for teachers, engagement begins with listening to the ruckus of students sharing and testing these basics of community literacy. So, teaching civic rhetoric "one student at a time" is at the heart of civic engagement!