ABSTRACT
Feminist scholars Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch have underscored “tectonic shifts” in rhetorical theory, practices, and histories that have produced specific transformations in the rhetorical landscape. These shifts include “breaking through the persistently elite, male-centered boundaries of our disciplinary habits” and “re-forming that terrain to create a much more open and expanded view of rhetorical performance, accomplishment, and rhetorical possibilities” (29). The transformations, along with scholars’ challenges to what counts as rhetorical education, are highlighted in the chapter, which investigates writing instruction primarily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States. The chapter begins by summarizing research on rhetorical instruction available to privileged white men at elite schools. It then extends this discussion to scholarship on other forms of curricular and extracurricular education available to students. Within this framework, the chapter briefly reviews technological, religious, and social changes that shaped these forms of education.
