Implications: Research and Beyond

Since I've been walking (in grad school anyway) I've always been affronted with the same question: "ok but what are you arguing?" My work never has seemed to be quite certain as to what it was trying to say, what it was supporting, what it was trying to put down. This inability to effectively describe, in a succinct way, what I was specifically arguing, has always made me a bit self-conscious about my scholarly work. I never knew what to make of it. I felt like I was saying something. I felt like there was a logical progression. I felt like there was a payoff at the end. But no. Time and time again I received the same feedback.
Reading the piece by Kastley makes me less anxious about my writing.
To me, the idea of inquiry is an inherent one. I've always been curious (to the annoyance of my parents to be sure) and I've always wanted to know more about how others make sense of things. These characteristics helped shape my writing style, and led me to producing pieces of work that elicited that familiar comment. All along I felt like my education had done me a disservice. How could it be that my expensive, private, liberal arts college could have let me down so badly? How could it be that the type of writing I was most comfortable with and most adept at, didn't mesh with what was expected of me in graduate school. Curses on you Gustavus!!!
Slowly, my mind is being (re)changed. I'm starting to see how my education ( a good one to be sure) has led my mind to work the way it does, and that it's not a bad thing that it works the way it does. My scholarship (if you don't mind me calling it that) asks more questions than it answers. My 'argument' is often lost because it never looks like the kind of argument that some academic types are used to seeing. I usually employ a strong narrative in my academic writing, something that can help my readers (and my potential arguers) recognize the difference in me. For the past few years I was starting to wonder if I would ever figure out how to write good academically.
My challenge now is how to understand and push the limits of those power structures that govern academic discourse. I agree wholeheartedly with Haleysrundown, when she talks about the conservatism of academic discourse. It's expected that a 'good' article will rely heavily on research, an act that reaffirms the ideas, the methods, and the arguments of those before us. This act is itself a conservative act. For me (and Hayley and others) testing the limits of what we can do with our academic prose, while still playing by those conservative rules, is the greatest implication for an inquiry-based construct of argumentation.

Implications: In the classroom

Kastley addresses the 'real-life' implications of seeing argument as inquiry towards the end of his article. To Kastley, when students are taught to conceive of arguments in a formulaic manner, when they see what they're doing as a charade, cynical lessons are taught. Lessons promoting subterfuge, deceit, false-pretenses, and agonism all work to pollute the democratic ideals that argumentation should promote. More insidiously Kastley warns, that when a structural conception of argument is taught and lauded, "reason and argument become the cover for the operation of powerful lobbying groups indifferent to the consequences of their actions for others" (239). A blind adherence to a Toulmin-based concept of argumentation can lead to the reentrenchment of unequitable power balances, fear of difference, and inability to respond to a changing world.
Teaching argument as inquiry, then, can unsettle some of those issues by allowing students to be critical of argumentation and its purposes in our society. Instead of reifying these power structures through their argumentation practices, students can begin to question the purpose of argument. They can question what the goals of argument are. They can question how and why argument functions they way it does and to what ends. Kastley sees the need for "a rich and complex sense of the opportunities and limits of argument" (239), and the more we can push these, the more likely argument will be allowed to function democratically as Kastley envisions. In this view, the ideal implications are to unshackle our students' minds, give them the tools they need to push the boundaries of their particular assumptions, and allow them to work productively with people who are different.
Not long ago I would have said "but we'd be doing our students a disservice, they need to know how to argue to make through college." While it's true that academic discourse is extremely conservative and resistant to change (see Haleysrundown's previous post), I have started to see how an inquiry-based approach would not only benefit students in the pursuit of their degrees, but also instill in them skills that do not easily come from an argumentative mindset. Specifically, having a curious mind is something that this model can offer to students in a productive way. As much as any formulistic set of argumentation skills is important, being able to develop questions, find ways to better understand those questions, and let those questions lead to further questions in a productive way is something that no college student should be able to pass on without. The implications, then, for challenging the paradigmatic model for academic discourse, are great. There might be some disagreement (nay, hostility) in emphasizing these types of skills from our students, from other academic units, from society at large, but Humanistic inquiry may be what balances this troubled world.