Sprawozdanie/report: The RHEFINE Conference (24-25.02.2022, Zagreb, Croatia and online)

Abstract

The RHEFINE Conference took place on the 24 th and 25 th of February 2022 at The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Zagreb University and online. The conference's theme was Rhetorical Research and Didactics. It consisted of two keynotes that opened both days of the conference, 18 papers presented by international scholars, a roundtable on rhetorical curricula, and parallel workshop sessions on different rhetorical skills and ideas.The conference was opened by Diana Tomić, the leader of the Croatian team of the RHEFINE project, the dean of the Faculty, Domagoj Tončinić, and the head of the Department of Phonetics, Gabrijela Kišiček. The program's fi rst point was a keynote by Kris Rutten (University of Ghent) titled The rhetoric of cultural literacy. He argued that we live in a cultural crisis and explained how cultural literacy is rhetorically constructed within contemporary cultural policy and practice. He discussed the educational implications of a rhetorical approach toward cultural literacy.The fi rst session, Rhetoric in an educational context, started with Petra Aczél's (Corvinus University of Budapest) Future-Proofi ng Rhetorical Education. She advocated moving from the product-centered view of rhetorical education that focuses on the speech itself to the position of rhetorical sensitivity, so the teaching of rhetoric should be skill-oriented and aim to build rhetorical literacy both from the role of the speaker and the part of an audience member.Next, Sanja Kišiček (University of Zagreb) talked about Creating a Collaborative Student-Centered Culture in Higher Education and pointed out the role of a teacher as a designer of the learning process, which in the collaborative education is the role that they share with students. To develop an open culture in the classroom, she presented fi ve components: building community, public speaking, education technology, planning for success, and alternative assessment.Zdravka Biočina (Zagreb School of Economics and Management), the next speaker, in her presentation Epideictic oratory as an educational tool, talked about