Last week I had the fantastic opportunity of sitting down with Tyler Poteet from Power of Public Speaking to record an episode for their podcast.

In this interview I talk about my classroom practices and my approach to public speaking. I think it’s probably one of the clearest articulations I have of the importance of public speaking and how limited our approach is as speech communication/rhetoric professors.

I think that the most important take away from doing this is that we have incredibly limited venues for the discussion and consideration of what the public speaking course is. Compare that to English composition, where they have book series at good university presses about their teaching. We are just embarrassed about teaching it, and often take that out on our students through our class and grading policies.

What will it take for us to embrace the importance of public speaking as a serious course?