Rhetorical agencies are both limited and made possible by different discourses
and their communicative practices (Trippestad 2014 ). Discourses represent funda-
mental conditions for communication and performance. Within them lie authority,
genres, expectations and commonplaces that make communication effective and
possible for the rhetorical agent. For an agent it is possible to choose strategically
within the many possibilities of a discourse. Discourses can allow for rhetorical
creativity and, therefore, for possibilities of developing or changing the discourse.
A strategic agent can be enabled to strategically choose between discourses when
discourses are recognised and their functions understood.
To be a rhetorical agent, as a teacher, means to have the ability and capacity to
influence others. Yet there are limitations. Language, traditions, texts and com-
municative practices can all enhance or limit the capacity of a rhetorical to influence
others. Teachers typically will be inscribed in a multitude of political and peda-
gogical discourses and therefore, express different and competing agencies in direct
conflict with each other—sometimes undermining their possibilities and sometimes
strengthening their positions as agents. This article tries to identify and discuss
some agencies that are central to teaching in discourses of globalisation in
influential educational texts. What controversies, dilemmas and paradoxes can be
identified?
24.3 Global Teacher Agency and the Emerging
of a New Open Society
Peters ( 2010 ) argues that an open science economy is emerging in the knowledge
society where science and knowledge are emerging as global public goods. A new
public sphere is in global creation. Open source models of knowledge, science and
education have emerged as new and positive trends in the light of the crisis of
neoliberal globalisation. Policies and innovations of open source, open access and
open publishing are themselves subversive and are challenging commercial busi-
ness models of authorship and publishing, and are raising new questions on content
development processes. New digital technologies create changes in production and
consumption. In the scholarlyfield, this open science economy allows for the
integration of new electronic research models, open journals, cheap distribution and
global access, to mention a few. It allows coproduction, real-time and dynamic
update. According to Peters, this marks the existence of a new global public good
that emerges out of global science and knowledge, which furthermore rests on an
ethic of coproduction and sharing of goods, services, opinions and knowledge.
To be a rhetorical agent of science, of global sharing and the distribution of
knowledge, is raising new ethical and democratic demands on teachers. It is an
agency based on new technology, policies and economies of openness. Peters ( 2010 )
introduces the concept of“techno-political economy of openness”in his article. He
promotes the importance of three elements, which are overlapping and historically
360 T.A. Trippestad