Critical epideictic pedagogy: Finding rhetoric and reinserting Freire into critical pedagogies

My dissertation offers a re-vision and melding of critical pedagogies and epideictic rhetoric in an attempt to show the critical educative function of epideictic and how a critical pedagogy operates rhetorically. I define epideictic as any rhetoric that helps shape or critique cultural beliefs, values, and practices, and I show how the common understanding of epideictic in educative settings as a means for upholding orthodoxies limits epideictic's educative potential. Specifically, I look at how the Christian genesis for Paulo Freire's writings has been largely ignored in the field of Composition and how understanding religious rhetoric as epideictic rhetoric enables compositionists to more readily adapt and use Freire's theories in our classrooms. Not only does translating the religious rhetoric found in Freire into epideictic rhetoric allow the religious aspects of Freire's pedagogy to be applicable to any educative setting, it also opens up a conversation about how to use rhetoric to help teachers and students understand the purposes of critical pedagogies. By focusing on epideictic, I add a substantive and tangible focus on writing and rhetoric to critical pedagogy.