prompt 2: being persuaded

Process narrative
We’ve been talking a lot about audience, ethos, argument, and persuasion—but we don’t want to ignore real-life examples and personal experience. Write about a time when you changed your mind about something. What convinced you to “change sides”? What did you believe previously? How did you come to your new conclusion? (Did someone present evidence or personal testimony, or were you emotionally swayed?) Your responses here do not have to deal with our course theme, but if they do, please share!

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I think any time I've changed my mind about something I've believed it's taken a long time. There is probably a tipping point at some time, but with any issue I can think back to all the new bits of information I received from different places and then maybe a moment when I decided to play a sort of believing game and just ponder if I actually held the opposing belief. From there I usually swing back hard, pendulum style, and it takes me a while to get back over to my newly forming belief. I eventually do though and once the pendulum has swung enough times the belief sticks.

So, an example, be it one that's a bit boring. When I first started teaching writing I didn't have any training, beyond having earned a B.A. in English, which was, at best, indirect. I did have some good mentors though who suggested things to read and it wasn't long before I was grasping at something and looked down to see I was holding onto the tip of a composition and rhetoric iceberg. I had gotten a close look at a tiny, tiny bit of the scholarship in my field and wanted more.

One of the first real debates I encountered in the research was about the incorporation of technology. Here I was, teaching writing to nontraditional students in an impoverished county in southeastern Oklahoma and though I loved computers and technology I just couldn't imagine taking away necessary time to spend on students creating websites and composing blogs or developing videos or audio essays or whatever technology-rich thing any given author was talking about at any given moment.

At this current moment I'm pretty heavily invested in teaching composition using a variety of technologies and many factors contributed to that change: I had the opportunity to see the work I do in first-year composition as rhetoric-based and how technology might support the development a rhetorical mindset instead of developing specific skills; I had the opportunity to see teachers use technology effectively, critically, carefully and teachers avoid technology when it would have been beneficial to the learning moment; I had the opportunity to be trained more specifically and thoroughly on how to use technology not once but twice; I had the opportunity to work with a different student population with different needs. After all these opportunities, and probably more, I began playing that believing game and before long realized that I had come over to the dark side permanently!