Kroll and strep throat

I believe after Tannen, my favorite author on argument is Kroll. I like reading his papers. It may be because he relates his writings directly with teaching. Kroll’s aikido samples connected to rhetoric were very unique and explanatory.
The idea of stopping the aggressive behavior but not fighting back is the secret for “arguing differently”. As Kroll stated, when we do not fight back we use the other sites energy against them. I believe Tannen was making the same comment in that when people fight at television programs it does not reach any solution, but if you choose not to fight back then you do not leave any room for them to argue with you in an aggressive way.
One of my professors at MU told one of her anecdotes. She was the manager of a bank and she needed to take care of upset and angry customers all the time. This was not an easy job for her with constant yelling and blaming. One day when she had some throat problems a very angry customer popped up . The man was yelling at her but as soon as she opened her month with her weak voice the man calmed down and started to listen. They could arrange a common solution.
The conclusion she made was: After that day whenever I had an angry customer, I had a bad throat.
So she was not fighting back but she was stopping his fight.

Reconstruction Strategies

I wrote on my personal blog about looking more into what Kroll called 'Reconstruction Strategies'. For Kroll (and Anthony Weston, whom Kroll quotes heavily in this section of "Arguing about Public Issues"), there are some public issues that are to contentious, too inflammatory, too personal for it to even be possible to employ traditional deliberative strategies. Therefor, it may sometimes be necessary (and productive) to reconstruct the issue in a way that can open the possibility of dialogue and conversation.
Kroll acknowledges early on that this strategy doesn't often lead to hard and fast conclusions, it's not the way to solve problems. Rather, this method is something that can create common ground for two diametrically opposed sides. Instead of focusing on issues and topics that two sides will never agree on (Kroll and Weston use the Abortion controversy as an example), it is productive to find commonground where two sides can agree. From there, it may be possible to find another tract of commonground. From there, another. Etc.
Remember now, Kroll is writing specifically about ethical arguments, ones that are rarely ever completely resolved in the first place. Therefore, we must take these reconstructive approaches for what they are: mediation and deliberation strategies that promote creativity, critical thinking, and harmony. Yet, part of me thinks that reconstruction can work, if not to solve problems, then to at least begin the (sometimes most frustrating aspect of reconciliation) process of getting two sides to talk.

Think back to your last contentious argument/debate/conversation with a friend/acquaintance/enemy: was there any commonground you could both have stood on? How could you have restructured the argument so at least there was something you could agree on before completely disagreeing thereafter?

Reflecting...

Since we've got some time before our next session, I decided to put the Kroll readings on the backburner for a few days. This post is going to try and make some sense out of the wonderful conversation we had on the first day of class.

For those who haven't read Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors we Live By, I would certainly recommend it. Some of the other metaphors these two theorists examine include: Love as war, Social Organizations as Plants, and Love and Life as a Journey. Lakoff and Johnson trace cultural roots of these metaphors, and indeed examine them in an American context. Since class on Thursday I've been thinking a lot about why this particular cultural context leads to so many metaphors that stem from violence, aggressiveness, and war. What do you think? Do conceptual metaphors in Japan revolve around Peace? Do the ideas for this course stem from non-western traditions? Will we learn more about this from Kroll?

I also looked into the Climate Study that Donna mentioned as part of the Difficult Dialogues program here at Mizzou. There was no mention of the study on the website, so I emailed them asking for a copy of the study that concluded the two contradictory statements about Christians on campus. Hopefully something comes back, and I'll certainly post it here if it does. However, this portion of our conversation got me thinking about how practical our inquiry throughout the semester could be. Yes, there are Peace Studies programs, there are Conflict Mediation programs, there are non-violent rhetoric courses out there. But only a small percentage of students wind up in courses like that. If Arguing Differently leads our small group of (soon to be) faculty members to adapt more non-aggressive argumentation styles, and Difficult Dialogues is actively promoting faculty development programs that train teachers how to incorporate this type of mediation in their classrooms, that is many, many students who will be exposed to this kind of pedagogy and philosophy. To me, this course can lead to important changes in the way our collective conscious sees argumentation.

Wow. Way over 250 words. I hope these ramblings didn't 'set the bar too high' :)