Always a bit of whiplash to read the brilliant work in composition studies. I really shouldn’t do it; it depresses me when I compare it to the seething vista of nonsense that counts as pedagogy in speech communication. There’s nothing but discussions of how to grade, how annoyed they are at students, and how teaching public speaking is beneath a scholar of their importance (don’t look at the Taylor & Francis journal circulation stats if this is you, you’ll be very upset!).

Public speaking is a composition course, it’s a course that investigates the question of how to produce meaningful texts for audiences. This no doubt involves a ton of other questions, such as ethics (when, where and how should this be done, if at all?) and epistemology (how do we know we mean something; how do people constitute, reject, and receive meaning?). For some reason, we wait till some esoteric high-level rhetorical theory or criticism course to engage all this. We should be engaging it in public speaking. 

The problem is two-fold as I see it. First, we (communication professors) have discounted public speaking as unimportant (or “punishment” as one scholar I heard call it). So we don’t consider it worthy of our theory, criticism, or other “high level” rhetorical practices. 

Also our field has found it appropriate for some bizarre reason to excommunicate debate and forensic activity to the basement, or some remote place away from the department, placed it in the hands of sports enthusiasts rather than educators, and has built as many barriers as they can between the department and the forensics program. The attitude in most departments is: “We really are proud of what you are doing, but please stay out of the conference room during the day.”

This has the effect of eliminating any valuable pedagogical crossover between those who directly practice performances, under various conditions, for audiences who are there to evaluate and improve those performances. Although saddled down a bit too much by competitive norms (a problem with any vanguard audience) this kind of reiterative, practice-oriented pedagogy is invaluable in a course that is presumably about the question of how to create meaningful texts for audiences with your body and voice. 

With both of our most powerful resources as a field held at bay from the course that sustains us, funds our graduate programs, funds our departments, etc, what are we left with as the content of public speaking? Outlines, works cited pages, attendance, and mobile phone use seem to be the most frequently graded things in public speaking. 

A very bad narrative of persuasion is in there too: Facts are all you need. Ethos is our cool word for “expert.” If an expert says it, you’re an idiot if you don’t listen to them (history shows this to be a very bad idea). Pathos is our cool word for feelings; make sure you get angry at racism and essentialism when you see it (don’t worry, it’s obvious what it looks like). Logos is logic, which pretty much means use facts and believe facts. Occasionally there’s a fallacy quiz (maybe just one; this isn’t argumentation after all!). And that’s about it.

What the course should be is an infusion of our best theories and our best pedagogies. This means that we should be teaching crucial concepts to students in public speaking such as the pentad, second/third/fourth persona, identification/division, quasi-logical argumentation, universal audience, constitutive audience theory, topoi, the commonplaces (the work of Michael Leff is valuable here for selecting readings for class), and so on – the works. And we should be engaging them in the dynamic, reiterative, interactive energy of our forensics and debate instructors. Amazing transformative education comes out of moments of peer engagement – writing center pedagogy relies on this axiom as an article of faith – and we have a very unique resource for this through forensics and debate. This is of course if we really want to make better speakers and give up our perverse pleasure of telling stories about how bad the reasoning is among our public speaking students (I hear these stories all the time; I think they are meant to be humorous).  It’s telling that public speaking instructors never share stories of excellent, mind-blowing speeches. Compositionists often share parts of essays in their research from students that are pretty engaging. We don’t do any public speaking scholarship like that. 

I did write here a few weeks ago that I was going to be proposing some public speaking ideas, so this one might be the first: 

The aim of the course is to practice the creation of texts meant to mean something for audiences.

That’s the best way I can summarize this starting point. I think there are a lot of petitios here, which makes it not a fallacy, but a rich site of inquiry. What is a text? What does it mean to create a text? What does it mean to mean something? And what is an audience?

From those simple begged question alone, an entire public speaking course can be created. Make those the headings. Select 2 or 3 readings for each. Have the students speak about the readings. And at the end of each unit, time to reiterate a speech they have been working on all term. 

Sometimes I’ve had a class all speak about the same topic, sometimes I have them change. I like this model, as we are working on a piece (eg. forensic competition) and making it better. I think that’s a great invitation to bring in those practices and make public speaking valuable. We need to do something. Most of you out there reading this think public speaking is a waste of your pedagogical and scholarly talents.

I can only agree with you. Let’s make it a course worthy of our field, not some right of passage we put graduate students through.