Natural Ethos vs. Mediated Ethos in the DE Classroom

We are all word-finders; we seek to interpret texts and we seek to be found within our texts.  In the online classroom, the text is the only way to be present.  In this piece, Lynn (2000) wonders if she is in attendance in her online class.  She asks, “In our pursuits as word-finders is ethos both ‘lost and not.’?”  Socrates act of covering and uncovering of his head signifies the complexities of ethos and its tangled relationship with language and self. Lynn asserts that there are ethical concerns with such separation of speaker from text; Isocrates addresses ethics by directing attention to the rhetor (based on the manner in which one lives). Aristotle believes it is not about being good as much as it is about appearing good to the audience; ethics grows not from the person’s life but is created in the act of speaking.   This makes rhetoric the act of constructing ethos.

Similar to death of the author debates, Lynn asks if the teacher even exists.  She provides a working definition of her own ethos as “a flexible conception of discourse relationships between writer and text and the character revealed within that relationship.”  In DE scholarship, this is much discussion about maintaining a student-centered classroom and being a “guide on the side.”  So, a new instructor might wonder if the instructor even exists, or more importantly, should the instructor exist.  Lynn asserts that students read and construct the instructor’s ethos in the classroom, but she questions the attempts by students to represent themselves as a different gender or race in classroom interactions; she believes that it is an ethical issue that requires more research into the concept of a natural ethos.

This is a very insightful piece and it brings up a perspective of online education that has yet to be explored.We all have multiple personas and conflicting identities, but if there is a “natural” ethos, how can it be defined?  And when we get into the classroom how might our “mediated” ethos appear and how should it appear?  I see some serious implications for those English instructors, like myself, who are caught teaching pre-packaged course content.  In this sense, it may be difficult to align our natural ethos with our mediated ethos which likely has a great deal of unknown pedagogical and ideological implications as well.

References
Smelser-Gackler, Lynn. (2000). Looking for the Teacher: Ethos in the Online Classroom. Journal of Literacy and Technology 1(2): Spring 2001.