ABSTRACT

A three-year educational exchange project between Syracuse University, New York (SU) and Yerevan State Linguistic University (YSLU), Armenia, funded by the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), afforded a rare long-term, on-site opportunity to study the reception of Western-style methods into a post-totalitarian culture. To my knowledge, I administered the first longitudinal study of student writing in a post-Sovietnation university. A total of 194 students in this project chose to sign Letters of Informed Consent, generating 454 samples during the two-year assessment.1 The two main findings are (1) that it takes three semesters of sequenced and sustained instruction for students to understand and adapt the Western-style methods to their own situation, and (2) a startlingly consistent trajectory, with clearly identifiable stages of mirroring, testing, and mediated mastery, became evident over the course of those three semesters. Mirroring is used to describe the student’s entrance into the classroom community, denoting both the social and physical aspects of learning: the imitative learning in zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) and the “mirror system” that fires up in the human brain during social stimulation (Knoblich, 2006; Jaffe, 2007, p. 22). Testing denotes that stage when students begin to try out our methods and techniques (Phelps, 1988, pp. 218-241). Mediated mastery denotes that the Armenian students now understand and can modify the methods to serve their own ends (Vygotsky, 1978; Rogoff, 1995; Wertsch, 1991). I would clarify that Armenia is best termed a post-totalitarian state (not a postcolonial one). YSLU was founded during the Soviet era (in 1935) as a two-year teacher training institute whose main mission was to instruct Armenian teachers to teach in Russian throughout Armenia. During Armenia’s first decade of independence (1991-2001), English and other Western languages were a source of opposition to the Soviet Union and its imperative Russian. By the time I arrived as a Fulbright Scholar (2001), English had become one of ten languages being taught at Yerevan State Linguistic University.2 Therefore, after I returned from the Fulbright experience, I drafted a project not for the teaching of English at YSLU but for helping to

reform the totalitarian pedagogy lingering there. The ECA awarded $275,000 for a three-year project (fall 2003-spring 2006) to pilot in select YSLU classrooms Western-style democratic and writing-intensive methods, for example, written course guides and student evaluations and videotaped teaching observations for the purposes of constructive critique. A handy lens is needed to give international educators context for this study conducted in a former eastern republic of the Soviet Union. In The Rhetoric of Reason (1996), James Crosswhite describes the transformative potential of Western-style writing, contending that argument essentially means a “giving up of the ideas that one has a metaphysically fixed identity, or that one’s ideas do, in favor of a recognition of the selftransformation and learning that occur in reasoning” (p. 24). Crosswhite considers argument to be a process of inquiry that can “cultivate an intelligent citizenry” and enable “productive, nonviolent” resolution of social conflicts (pp. 17, 256, 294). The progress of Armenian students toward Crosswhitean “self-transformation” will be seen as explicit because they were starting from a radical point: the epideictic rhetoric of the Soviet Union. Ong described the ways in which the totalitarian rhetoric of the Soviet Union was magical: if one proclaims that the people love Stalin, they will. It was crammed with epithetic formulas: “the Glorious Revolution of October 26” (1982, pp. 38-39). Crosswhite explains that the purpose of such epideictic rhetoric is “keeping one’s intent hidden from one’s enemy” so those in power can strengthen preferred values without making explicit claims about those values so the audience could then engage in open argument about the values (pp. 108-109). The Armenian students were being asked no less than to move from the epideictic rhetoric of the Soviet Union to the productive, open conflict of Crosswhitean argument (p. 281). The material conditions under which this project was conducted will help to clarify its administration and the results. Research in the postSoviet bloc, especially former republics vs. former satellite countries, remains introductory for many reasons, including poverty, corruption, and ethnic conflicts. These conditions have virtually pre-empted longitudinal studies by US scholars. Harrington (2005) used technology to begin the long-term distance-learning “Global Classroom Project.” The small but growing body of short-term on-site research includes Rodman (1996), Stevens (2000), and Hagen (1998), who visited the post-Soviet republics on Fulbright programs. They detailed the ways in which the Soviet oral culture facilitated political, economic, and educational corruption. In the former satellite countries, either located on the EU boundary or now members of the European Union, increased scholarship is becoming available to English-speaking educators. Romania’s Minister of National Education, Andrei Marga, described ongoing comprehensive efforts to overhaul Romanian higher education to eliminate its “communist heritage,” from centralization to endemic corruption (2002, p. 123). The goal for Romania was similar to that of Armenia: “to stimulate the development of a civic culture, a culture of opinions, the need for which has been

intensely felt” (p. 125). Other recent studies confront and analyze the lingering oral (vs. writing) culture in higher education in Eastern Europe: Gilder (1995), Verdery and Kligman (1992), and Marin (2005) in Romania; McKinley (1995) in post-communist Hungary; Ornatowski (1995, 2008) in Poland. Clearly the former Soviet bloc offers an educational zone different from that of the West. Given the tough conditions in Armenia, this study was a truly pilot investigation conducted to help fill the gaps in knowledge about rhetoric and rhetorical education in posttotalitarian states.