I’m not having any fun teaching public speaking this semester – first time that’s happened in many years.

The reason is that the students are incapable of interacting at the level that makes the class work. They do not see the value, or how-to, or why they should do anything but passively listen to me ramble on about the readings.

This is pretty clearly an effect of Zoom High – I often feel like the class is an in-person pantomime of a Zoom class, everyone with their cameras off, doing their own thing during the class time.

In my upper-level class I’ve turned it just into a writing workshop, and that is enjoyable. Talking through and about the process of writing. Makes me feel that I should have been a rhetoric composition person. But debate had other plans and ideas for me, as it always does.

As I re-imagine public speaking to serve these students better (rigor, regular assessment, lots of activities weekly – all as a way into approaching hermeneutic practice, i.e. “What does this text say?”) I am reminded of the many times I’ve thought to myself that public speaking and debate are properly considered composition.

The history of American composition is the soil of all the great crops of the modern university: public speaking, debate, oral interpretation of literature (read: IE or interp), literary criticism, and literature studies. Looking back on how things were taught, these branched off as ways to help students understand that they too can write and should write, and before that – they too should and can speak, perhaps are obligated to speak as part of being an educated person.

There are race and gender restrictions on this of course when you look back far enough. However the principle of it I think can be wrenched from that disciplinary, oppressive, exclusionary history as it has for composition and writing programs. There’s a lot of great writing about it out there that is ignored by the literature folks, who pretend that literary studies fell from the sky, pure and ahistorical (could just be an effect I have from working at Smooth Brain U). Composition is obviously the beginning and the end of most every discipline, in my mind, i.e. “putting things together in a way that makes sense.” Disciplinary battles are about shifts in style, which have been tracked by Michel Foucault (most notably) as the arbitrary shifts in epistemology that make up our intellectual history.

How would public speaking become composition? I Think that I should teach some sort of writing of speeches, some compositional method first, then the speeches should be branched out from that – in other words, they don’t really know what to say and traditional composition will help them generate a text to speak about. The creation of the text will be the ordering of perspective needed to help them have a base from which to speak to others, and then that speech can be critiqued in relation to the text, audience, situation, context, etc.

Argumentation is already structured this way, and the debate class has built in firewalls for this kind of thing with the policy debate tradition of “carded evidence,” one of the many attractive reasons to use that competitive format as the basis for teaching any debate course at the university level (and of course high school, if you are in that world and found this post). This is also related to an old argument I’ve rehearsed many times: Public speaking should be taught like a debate class. This is another way of reposting that old concern. My current public speaking course is sort-of this way now but not working because the element of composition is missing.

This is a wildly different approach for me but it might work – more importantly I think it’s a good way to patch up the cracks in the foundation left behind by Zoom schooling during the pandemic. The other frightening thing here is the idea that each class coming in will have different foundational issues since they experienced Zoom schooling at different ages, the gaps of which are uncertain. For example, is the gap between 13 and 15 years old wider, deeper, more significant than the gap between 10 and 12? Looks like I am going to find out, barring the implosion of higher education on the whole.