What will it take for us to accept that the public speaking course is a composition course, and we should be in frequent, deep, constructive dialogue with those who teach composition and work in writing centers?
The pandemic, and the quarantine, have shown that public speaking instructors who have not invested in, or looked at, composition theory or discussions of composition pedagogy are in real trouble. They rely on discipline and modality, and call it content. This is not content. These are rules. We have rules for outlining. We have podium rules. We have rules about note card use. We tell people not to lean. And we have little more than disdain for the topics that students choose – lots of rules about that.
Modality is set forms – not even genres which at least would be kind of interesting. The How-To speech. The Persuasive speech. The Informative speech. The Ceremonial speech. Teaching these modalities helps no one. Where is the theory, where is the method, where is the process? How can they draw on this course when they are thinking about an idea in order to reach other people?
The only thing that is taught is fidelity to form, fidelity to types of information, and fidelity to a conception of audience as a flat, stable, construct with very little critical thought behind it. We have some good theories about audience; they don’t make it into the textbooks, and those who understand the theories best, and could teach the theories well, refuse to teach public speaking – it is seen as punishment by most people in communication departments.
Discipline is teaching people comportment; the famous refrain of the bad public speaking teacher: “If they can’t write a proper outline how are they going to have a job?” “If they can’t stop looking at their phone, how can they have a job?” I bet if we spent half the time we concern ourselves with these imagined job aporias on actual method and process for composing thoughtful orations for real people, our students would be just fine in whatever job they get.
Public speaking is teaching what someone who is a public speaking instructor thinks that all jobs require. This sounds disastrous. Why is there such little attention on the art of speech?
The entire course is based on outlining correctly, doing visual aids correctly, and paying attention correctly. Note that the definition of correctly, and the corresponding grades and point values for correctly are not there to help anyone, they are just easy to evaluate. It’s easy to put a point value on the number of times someone looks at a phone. It’s easy to count someone late after minute X has expired. But it’s very difficult – and controversial – to tell someone “you didn’t provide enough evidence to make that claim believable for people who don’t share your life experiences.”
The easy answer to this is: Who cares if they have a job? Not my field. My field is speech, rhetoric, oratory. I’m teaching that. This would provide some orientation back toward the art we are supposed to be teaching, that of making compelling, interesting speeches.
Another easy answer: Anyone who has spent 5 minutes in a corporate meeting knows that everyone is on their phone and tablet the whole time, because that’s how we get information, take notes, and pay attention these days. Some research and attention into the actual requirements of jobs would be nice. Also, maybe we could teach students how to recognize and adapt to corporate cultures when they find them? The tools of rhetoric are quite good at helping people identify and adapt to cultural practices.
A third: What exactly is the value of public speaking? What’s the course about? It can’t just be about following rules, can it? What is it that speech courses should be about? What perspective, what chance do they offer for students? This is the heart of the issue. I think that the answer is that public speaking is one of the few creative, generative, and inventional courses left on campus. It is rare that a course, by design, is meant to take what a student beliefs and make that belief easier to understand and maybe even compelling to those who might dismiss it at first hearing.
These questions should be on the minds of everyone who teaches public speaking because the essence of the course is expression. We don’t discuss it; little is published on the pedagogy of public speaking courses (but lots of assignment tips are out there and textbooks about outlining). There isn’t anything really on the art and value and essential need, value, and act of expression. Every single public speaking course instructor out there assigns work that involves expression of ideas with the human voice in front of others. They have to do it at least once during the semester. I would hope that this statement would be true. It seems hard to imagine a public speaking course without speeches.
But we do have courses with no philosophy, no content, no matter, they don’t matter. If you can’t have someone stand at a podium, if you can’t have someone in front of a group of disheartened people who feel obligated to clap, if you can’t have them stand in the “front” of a classroom, you can’t have public speaking. This is the level most public speaking instruction lives at. It lives at the level of “you’re not following the rules.” But in a world where all the rules are non-functional, save stay-at-home and wear a mask when you go out for essentials, that’s not helpful. This should be rupturing our normal practices, but it’s not. We don’t have practices. We have rules for students to follow when going through the motions in the classroom. We don’t have a process. If we did, that would be evident in how to move a course away from the classroom into some other space, some other form of the “classroom.”
The only elements that survive the online shift are elements that help nobody with the art and practice of speech: Formal outlining (again, discipline), standing in a way that communicates the authority and confidence of someone who doesn’t exist (university created models of authority, i.e. “authorized” modes of expertise). Formatting and turning in arbitrary documentation that should prove that work was done, handed in at arbitrary times, and all that.
What public speaking, without the guidance of colleagues in composition, becomes is an exercise in individual self importance. “These are my words, this is my belief on topic X, I have the freedom to express it, and you have to sit there.” In this environment, the only ideology reinforced is the one where we believe we can’t persuade our opponents, and we just have to hope, or wait, for them to die. Our public speaking practices encourage the belief that persuasion is more ritualistic than it is achievable. It’s something we have to go through, that we have to do as political ritual, but in the end people “are as they are” and can’t be convinced otherwise.
Professors regularly ban topics that are too controversial, or that feel like minds can’t be moved on them. This very act indicates the vapid futility of the typical public speaking course. If you assume minds cannot be changed, what is the purpose of giving a speech? If you take the most controversial topics away, what exactly are we practicing with? I always imagine cooking class with the plastic foods that come with preschool kitchen sets, or entering a chemistry lab where the students are conducting experiments with pieces of paper labeled “sodium” and “sulfur.” In these courses, the real thing is used. Why not public speaking? Why not something where they will have to engage others at some point in their lives, when the stakes are high, and say something meaningful? Something important? Something that has the capacity to move?
In composition’s rich pedagogical literature we can find the conversations that will help us realize this, if a global pandemic can’t do the trick. I hope so. We need to. We can’t keep going on just teaching outlining and the master’s transitions. At some point our students are going to want to say something to move other minds, to impress, to get people thinking, and they should be able to pull from the experiences we shared in public speaking courses in order to draw upon some process, some moment of or with expression, to find a way in and a way through that desire. We owe them much more than that, but this might satisfy a minimum ethical obligation of a professor who is assigned a group of people under the pretense that they are going to help them learn how to form their thoughts into public address.
I write this out of disappointment not with anyone in particular, other than myself. I thought I had managed to avoid a lot of this. But the pandemic, and the move online, shows that I am mired in it. A much more radical approach to public speaking must be discovered, and my cursory engagement with composition theory is hopeful if unrealized in my own pedagogy.
Less direction; more reflection – this phrase comes into my head a lot when thinking about the next public speaking course. I should direct less, and reflect more. Students should be directed less, and reflect more. Multiple iterations on a topic for a variety of contexts. Three or four people engaging the same question. Have the students generate the questions from the realms of doubt, not from the realm of “appropriate speech topics.” Spend less time on outlining (hopefully no time) and instead encourage note taking. Teach production for various netcasting modes.
Lots of ideas, but nothing yet that seems to have the power needed to chip away at this ideology, this ritual practice of teaching oration in the terms of “what oration is supposed to look and sound like at the college level.” Hopefully soon.