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I. Introductions: Four-Question Interview (followed by the Name Game)
  1. What made you choose this class?  What do you think you might want to talk about and address this semester?
  2. What do you do besides study?  Hobbies?  Talents?  Deepest wishes?
  3. What is your pronoun?  
  4. YOUR OWN QUESTION
Feel free to write down your partner’s answers as you will need to remember what they tell you. You also need to make sure that you get the pronunciations correct!
Please do this in writing to be collected at the end of class. Alternatively, you can also shoot me an email with your answers using your cell, laptop, etc to carmen.kynard@tcu.edu.

II. Name Game
The name game is an activity that we will do for the beginning of the semester.  At the start of each class, 3-4 people will have to go around the room and say everyone's name.  This activity is meant to form community.  This is a class where you need to know everyone's names and interact with them significantly.  This is something to be taken seriously---hence, we start this course by making sure we know everyone's names!  In the minutes before class starts, push yourself to ask your colleagues their names, interests, majors... and then, after that, holla atcha peoples in the room!

January 14

Welcome to the First Day of Class!  Today, we review the syllabus and get to know one another.  We will begin some early conversations about AAR and get outselves ready to do some work this semester.
​III. Overview of the Course Website and Syllabus (click here for PDF version)
  • Please remember that there is an agenda like this for every class.  If you miss a day, look at the agenda.  Do not send an email asking what you missed.
  • Please also get in the habit of pointing out website typos to Carmen.  Let's get in the habit of doing this for one another since we will all be designing websites in this class.
  • Write the password to the course website on page 9.
  • Apologies that some of the images on the photocopy version did not reproduce well.

First Day Example of a hype presentation 

In 2001, Jones recorded and released "Your Revolution" which critiques misogyny in Hip Hop. When the poem was played on a radio station in Portland, OR, the station was fined $7000 by the FCC because the poem was called "indecent." Jones fought the fine and the "freeze out" of her work by appealing it. After a two-year wait in 2003, the NYCLU and ACLU joined the appeal and won the case. 
These are the kind of questions that you will address when you present your African American rhetorical performance:
1. Who is the rhetor?  (click here for her website and bio | click here for more about this song/poem)  
2. What is the rhetor responding to?  What does her world look like?  How is she intervening?
3. What did this performance/presentation do?  For the rhetor?  For audiences?
4. How does this rhetor and their performance relate to a specific theory we have discussed in the class?
5. How and why does this rhetor's work/body/image/sound/presentation still circulate today?