Not sure how you spent your Easter, but . . .

I think about teaching a lot, even over the Easter break. I like watching instructors on YouTube who are not from my field. This is quite easy to do as rhetoricians, who constantly write and talk about their engagement with publics, democracy, and argumentation, never appear on YouTube to share their views. Apparently democratic theorizing is alive and well in the pages of paywalled journals and Hilton hotel convention centers.

This strange annoyance aside, I think it’s a great marker of being a good lecturer if you can deliver a good, valuable, and informative lecture from the position of an audience member who has no idea how to even engage the topic at your level. The example I’m thinking of from my field is the argument by James O’Neill that experts in speech and debate should be the only judges of speech and debate: Anyone can tell which singer they prefer in a singing contest, he writes, but only the expert judge can tell you who was actually best.

He makes a similar argument involving livestock – relevant for me as I’m headed to Wisconsin on Thursday to give a lecture to the campus community on some topics I am studying myself. How do I make the lecture valuable for people who are not interested in the topic my way?

This question is of course solved by audience focus. Audience solves all issues when addressing value and meaning in speech. Once you have in mind how to constitute that audience, what they share in terms of value and narrative, you have a very good shot at not being boring.

O’Neill misses this as the value of the expert judge is to show the audience why something is best based on the unique and practiced perspectives of the judge. This is the best part, not the indication of “actual best.” It’s about the communication of best from the expert to the audience.

All of this lead-up is just to show you an amazing lecture I watched over Easter break about Chernobyl, from the perspective of a Nuclear Scientist. He’s lecturing to his class about it, which is an introductory course in Nuclear Physics (I’m guessing).

Although the students have had adequate practice in some of the physics and equations necessary to understand what went wrong at Chernobyl, the instructor still delivers a great session where understanding is held above discipline or the “rules” of instruction. The importance is to understand how to think like a reactor operator, and how to understand why particular elements of the reactor, on a day-to-day basis, are built the way they are and why those parts are there.

It’s a great example of being accessible to the students while maintaining relevant authority in the classroom. There are no obligations here; the students “already know” how to calculate this and that about the elements involved. He’s treating them like future colleagues, people who already know how to do it, and just need some guidance to show them how to understand.

Even small gestures in the classroom like this can mean a world of difference to students in feeling like the subject matters, that their engagement in it is important, and that the instructor is a trusted guide, not a disciplinarian or judge of failures. Student hesitation in engagement is quite tough to crack, but this professors professionalism and kindness in the classroom is a great model for how to engage it successfully.