Applying Literature to Artifact

The video “Changing Education Paradigms” by RSA Animate, narrated by Sir Ken Robinson, is deeply rooted in non-discursive rhetoric.  Even the way the video portrays its messages, with the drawings functioning much like dry-erase markers and boards, is a non-discursive choice.  The non-discursive rhetoric used in “Changing Education Paradigms” includes pictures of students, adults, government and/or business officials, important or significant buildings such as schools, text or speech bubbles. and more.  Other non-discursive rhetoric include the different sizes and colors of text, punctuation marks, and symbolic images such as chains, clothes usually associated with a certain culture, or ripped documents.  The decision to time images with words of Robinson’s speech instead of just timing words was a non-discursive decision.  Using non-discursive rhetoric allows the video to move at a fast pace without confusing the listener.  The content of the eleven minute video was spread out within the last twenty minutes of Robinson’s original one-hour lecture.

This type of video, where spoken discourse is matched to images and texts through a video format, is a mode.  Eric Jenkins argues, “Modes are collective, emergent phenomena that express the circulating energies of contemporary existence rather than re-presenting the interests of particular rhetors” (443).  While the video is certainly tailored to Sir Ken Robinson’s opinions, the concept of the video could be used to present a variety of different opinions and different topics, from tutorials of how to work Windows 8 to an explanation of the Great Depression.  He later states, “. . . digital media have made a plethora of modes more apparent and have fueled their spread, many with significant rhetorical consequence” (462).  This particular mode’s consequence is making shorter videos with a great deal of heavy-hitting content.  Presenting the information in this mode is a decision that allows watchers to have a baseline of what to expect, and lets them identify when a technique is unusual.  

The main difference, the separating factor, from other videos in the mode in “Changing Education Paradigms,” is that it appears to draw the images while Robinson is speaking.  While this certainly is not unheard of, it is still unusual.  Most videos in this mode jet through several messages, so putting “Changing Education Paradigms” within the mode means the reader expects to hear different, but related, messages.   To effectively achieve clarity in this video, they break down the speech with text and images.

The text is presented in two different colors:  black and orange.  Black text is usually smaller, while the orange text is used to highlight the important parts of what Sir Ken Robinson is saying.  For example, when discussing what divergent thinking is with the example of “How many uses can you find for a paper clip?”, he uses the orange marker to write how many ways people could think of and the black to write anything but the numbers. Highlighting important words or numbers is perhaps the simplest form of non-discursive rhetoric used in the video, rivaled only by the size of the text, where the more important words are made bigger and the less important words made smaller.  A more complicated use of non-discursive rhetoric is found in the various drawings contained in “Changing Education Paradigms.”

The images in “Changing Education Paradigms” change in rapid succession.  The non-discursive rhetoric within “Changing Education Paradigms” allow for a better understanding of the message in the video.  Without including multiple images, the watcher would have to interpret a lot of what Robinson says.  For example, when Robinson is discussing the epidemic of attention-deficit/hyperactivity-disorder in America, he says, “We shouldn’t be putting them [students] asleep, we should be waking them up.”  Without the picture that depicts the young student having something claw out of him with a music note, the watcher may not comprehend that Robinson is encouraging the students to “wake up” by doing something in the arts, or at the very least, creative.

The image is somewhat graphic, since the student is ripped in half and the ‘inside’ of the boy comes out singing.  There is no blood or sound effects, which makes it seem less graphic and more humorous.  In the part of Brian L. Otts and Greg Dickinson’s essay, Visual Rhetoric and/as Critical Pedagogy, that discusses teaching visual rhetoric as part of everyday life, they write, “The visual is a constitutive part of subjectivity and an embodied understanding of rhetoric” (397).  Readers of the image may not come to the same conclusion, but they are likely to come to a conclusion automatically after seeing the image.

Another image rich with non-discursive rhetoric occurs when Robinson is speaking about the student getting distracted at school. The image depicts a young boy looking drugged, with the words ‘Ritalin 10mg’ underneath his seat.  There are tons of advertisements and technology to his side, and a teacher stands in front of him, telling him to “Take your pills and focus!” while pointing at the board.  The boys reply is, “On what?”  He is distracted by the craziness going on to the side that he is not sure where to look.  In their introduction to their article, Ott and Dickinson write, “For the last 40 years now, the Western world has been undergoing a seismic, even paradigmatic, shift--the transition from modernity to postmodernity.  Like all paradigm shifts, this one is driven . . . by advances and changes in communication technologies” (391).  Students are overwhelmed by the choices of where they can focus, which is what this particular picture from “Changing Education Paradigms” addresses.  

Only having the spoken discourse might confuse the listener, but only having the image might confuse the watcher.  Without the images, it would be impossible to put Robinson’s lecture into this particular mode.  Without Robinson’s lecture, the images lack context.  Jenkins writes, “Rhetorical scholars have addressed this polysemic character of images by grounding them in a specific context” (444).  Images tend to have many meanings, and without the speech to clarify what the author meant, the previous two images could have been interpreted in several ways.  It is the combination of discursive and non-discursive rhetoric that allows a watcher to fully comprehend the message faster than one of these methods alone.