The Classroom as a Public Space


A blurry photo of one of the classrooms I teach in

I engage in a fantasy that the classroom functions as a public space. That is, the classroom in micro can be seen as the way people would interact in macro.

But the classroom is a very protected and isolated space. There are very clear roles for everyone to play and very clear structures of control and obedience.

The furniture and surroundings indicate that you are in a special place, a place marked for being what it is – like a doctor’s office, hospital, or institutional building like a court.

If the function of the public speaking course is to prepare students to attend to the demands of a distracted, sharp, busy public of transient bodies, how does the classroom promote this?

I am starting to think that perhaps it doesn’t, and it might be up to faculty to try to alter this environment to make it provide a bit more for the students so they can learn the most important lessons from a public speaking course.

What are the most important lessons? Here is the beginnings of a list I am working on:
1. That facts do not speak for themselves.
2. That the truth is not obvious nor immediately convincing, and needs a huge amount of help.
3. That what works for one audience will not work for all audiences.
4. That knowing more than others gives you more responsibility toward them, not less.

I know there could be many more and should be many more applied to this list, but in the traditionally arranged public speaking in a classroom these four are violated quite a bit. The students speak to a very limited and very familiar audience. They speak using a lot of tropes and shortcuts of reasoning that work very effectively for their very specialized peer composed audience. And the audience and the speaker often conclude together that “those others” out there in the world are just too stupid to be concerned about, unless they can get you a job or are at another university or college somewhere.

The answer to this problem for me is to “publicize” the classroom – with a dose of some more complicated audience theory (I’m considering a bit of James Crosswhite and some of Benedict Arnold as well for starters). How do we publicize the classroom? The easiest way might be broadcasting speeches through networks like Skype or stickcam. There are probably other alternatives that are asynchronous, such as youtube or blip.tv. The focus and the point here is to give students’ speeches a wide audience of people in and outside the university so they can have a bit more engagement and practice with that “public” audience that the traditional classroom marks as out of bounds.

The End of the University

Not in a teleological sense, but otherwise.

This guy thinks that the University will be irrelevant in a few years. The only question I have after reading this article is where or what would the motivation be to create all of that great digital content if the University folded?

Clearly what he means is the buildings, campus, physical presence model will no longer be relevant, but then again perhaps I’m being too charitable?

Eliminate Public Speaking

I used to range from laughter to anger when I heard people talk about the need to eliminate public speaking as a requirement from university curriculum. However, there are several recent events that have given this argument new life in my mind.
The first is that students operate with different evidentiary and proof principles than most instructors. For them, most research is good and they have little desire (not ability as most instructors attribute it) to go into evidence standards and evaluation. The reason is quite simple. With the proliferation of information available to them, there is little reason to trust the old publishing house model of trust. They look instead for texts, arguments and documents that already support their view of the world, or the view they seek to represent in class. Traditional public speaking does not adequately account for easy access analysis from many voices. It treats the public speaker (rhetor) as a singular unidirectional source of information who then disseminates the collection to a waiting crowd (I always think of this model when I am feeding my goldfish).  The students, since they are plugged into the internet most hours of the day, don’t relish or have interest in this model of information as during the speech they could conceivably look information up and get a deeper read of the speaker’s thesis.
Secondly, the students are not interested in a unidirectional, domination model of communication. The students casually interrupt the speaker, pose questions, and the speaker often times abdicates the position of authority during the speech to hear voices from the audience. I found this appalling at first, but the students always rank these speeches highest in quality and most interesting. 
Finally, our students are, for the most part, very comfortable being in front of a large audience. They have facebook accounts, blogs, youtube channels, etc.  Many don’t mind the idea of millions of people watching a video of them doing something. They just think about the embodied audience as much more of a threat than that vague audience out there somewhere. I wonder exactly what incident in life we are preparing them for when we put them up in front of a group of their peers to talk about the creation of chewing gum, politics in Saudi Arabia or campus dining hall conspiracy theories. I think these moments will be less what they do and more what people have always imagined the public speaker doing.
So what’s the solution? I think that structuring the public speaking class like a debate/criticism class is the answer. The reason why is because this model is much more prescriptive in how to engage with other ideas and less descriptive (i.e. “The successful speaker does x, y and z before arriving at the venue.”) The pace of their daily lives could be understood as a sequence of mini-speeches and as James Crosswhite has argued, we are always a part of some audience all the time. So why localize and freeze the matter and experience of daily life into an odd eccentric model of communication?
I am going to be reworking my syllabus around these ideas and around the idea of advocacy instead of speaking. I’m not sure yet what that involves, but I forsee it being more localized, tethered and connected to the present moment than assignments that fall out of the sky.  I’m curious how the research component will change, and I’m most interested in how we can pedagogically account for and work in the very different proof and evidence standards that students have.

Planning the Talk

Here’s my idea so far:

Central Question: What is the proper relationship between debate and rhetoric?
Petitio: What relationship, if any, do they have now?

Lead in with some of the Deborah Tannen critique of argument and debate. Posit that debate and rhetoric are distinct, and that this distinction helps them help us.

Object for analysis: Jon Stewart’s appearance on the late CNN show “Crossfire.”
Show about half of it – then the questions are:
1) What is the model of debate posited here?
2) What is the model of argument here?
3) What is the role or model of rhetoric here?

The dreaded “Talk”

A week from tomorrow I’m giving a talk at Queens College on rhetoric and philosophy, and I’m not sure exactly how to do it.

I think the “talk” is a dreaded activity by most members of the audience. I think that people giving “talks” think of the talk in the terms of the audience, and then deliver something that meets some if not all of those dreadful expectations.

I’m trying to think of a way around it and a way of making the talk a bit more interactive as well as appear to be something that everyone has already thought about before – the theme in my head now is that the world fails to explain itself, and these two discourses are attempts to get an explanation.

On top of this I’m preparing talks for my trip to Japan in June to do lectures, and I hope that from this talk I can get a sense of how well or poorly my innovative methods do. I also should keep in mind I think the particularities of the Japanese audience as well.

I may video the presentation and put it up here because in reality it is a secret appeal to start a debate program at Queens College. Hope you can keep a secret!