Here’s a new episode of my podcast, In the Bin!
On this episode my friend Dan and I discuss the continued influence of the ideas of Stephen Toulmin, author of many books but most notably Uses of Argument where he introduced the world to what we now know as the Toulmin Model of Argumentation.
Listen here!
I’ve been doing some reading into the long tradition of the oral exam, something we’ve given up on in the United States. In many other countries the oral exam isn’t just normal, it’s expected. Some countries even require an oral exam to graduate from university.
The standard format is a series of questions that are predictable and that you can prepare for, with the occasional follow-up for clarification or depth from the student. Sometimes they can take an hour or perhaps a few hours if it’s for something as important as conferring a degree.
I’m not sure why we gave up this tradition in the U.S. It seems to be a good time to recover it due to the immense panic we have over interviews and the immense panic we have over assessment in higher education.
Not much needs to be said about interview panic. All you have to do to get a sense of the level of concern is google “interview tips” or something like that. You’ll be quickly overwhelmed with the desire of others to help you (for a small fee of course).
Assessment might be less familiar to readers. It’s the realization in higher education that grades do not correspond with student ability. That is, a student could make an A in a course and have no idea how do do any of the things that the course is supposed to teach them how to do. I don’t know why higher education is just now realizing this; this is the obivous result to me of a system that focuses on obedience, discipline, and following arbitrary directions (everything from how to turn something in to how many spaces must be between punctuation and the next letter) over anything else. The university experience is one that primarily consists of being belittled by instructors for not following 17 pages of formatting guidelines in a document archaically termed “the syllabus.” It’s anything but that, if you look into the history of the term.
Oral examinations are a chance to hear and see the student express knowledge and express familiarity with the course as a whole. It can be imagined as a presentation, but that’s not the best way to do it. Instead, imagine it as a conversation about the course. One that you and the student can have together privately, or you can have it with the class observing in order to help them learn and see how they could phrase or think about what they got out of the class.
My model for an oral exam is pretty simple:
There will be 2 major questions – both are about something that the course is expressly about. Up front in my courses I tell the students directly what the question is that the course is meant to explore.
The third will be something the student can choose from. I might give them 2 or 3 choices around an issue that came up in class, came up for them in previous work across the class (for example, in my current course on argumentation, all the students are clinging to structural concerns as the heart of any attempt to say what argumentation should or could be. That would become an issue later on to offer in an oral exam question).
The most interesting part of the oral exam is that I will write names, concepts, titles of readings, or theories on notecards. I come up with as many as I can, then I ask the student to choose 10 off the top. They have to speak about each one for about 3 minutes. They are permitted to discard 2 and draw again. This could be the entire exam, and might be a good way to do oral quizzes, or a way of checking up on student retention and understanding through the term.
Although there’s a lot of research out there on oral exams, it seems particularly embarrassing that in my field, speech communication or rhetoric, there is little to no discussion about this. We rely on objective fallacy quizzes, final seminar papers, and the like without any appreciation at all for the irony. Why do we not showcase the capacity and power of oral communication not only to assess what we teach, but across the university as the best way to get a glimpse of what sort of capacity our students have after taking our courses?
By now regular visitors to the blog should be aware of my twice a year sojourn to Cornell University to introduce a fairly good number of Cornell students to the art of rhetoric. Of course since they are alive human beings in their 20s who are in college they have been practicing rhetoric for quite some time and quite successfully. But naming a thing is often a transformative moment.
It’s become a pretty fun and cool ceremony for me of all people to return to the site of Herb Wicheln’s career and introduce a bunch of people to the formal theory and study of rhetoric. It’s odd that nothing of his legacy survives there outside of some archive which I suspect doesn’t get called on much. One day I’ll have to go take a look.
I always try to account for and capture these talks as I’m interested in how they vary. YouTube has a good number of the one’s I’ve recorded. Here’s the most recent one, delivered February 15th, and it’s not really edited that much. I took out some of the sidebars and other random conversation during the class break and stuff like that. I tried to preserve the conversation as it was, both the mistakes I make in the talk and the discussion afterwards. It’s audio only, but everything is here. I wonder if people prefer the audio to the video. It seems an audio lecture is easier to take in than a video one sometimes (plus we are all burned out on video chats).
Thoughts and comments welcome!
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I made the choice to change my debate course to something more active from something where we discuss and analyze the role of debate in society through the meta. In the past, students would discuss, write, and speak about various debates in a hope to evaluate the role and purpose of the discourse we call “debating” in society. I started off with a survey of the spread – very much like a fungus or mold – of the U.S. Presidential debate format around the globe. Part of this is the work of the Commission on Presidential Debates but another big realization of this gross growth is that politicians recognize what a beneficial format the U.S. Presidential debates are for them. They can say whatever, they can hide, they can claim they looked great through a future supercut. It doesn’t benefit any of us at all.
I moved away from this to something more active – a series of debates that students would perform. I felt that experiential learning would be the way to go in online debate. But I have never really taught debating in an asynchronous online format before. It’s all kind of radically new, and making me think differently about how I teach debate – particularly the assumptions I make about what’s available to us when we enter a debate.
The idea that there’s no space and time to practice arguments is one issue that I think I can address by being more lenient in terms of when a “final” speech will be due. I think that the idea of constant revision, or low-stakes debating, is the way to give students the time and space to become comfortable with their own voices and their own approach to practicing advocacy on various issues. The entirety of college becomes practice from this perspective, if you think about it. I believe that adopting a serious process of revision and practice is one of the most valuable things that a rhetorical education can give to people. So now I’m considering adopting it into all of my courses regardless of modality.
I’ve been teaching through video, and here are a couple of the lectures I’ve done so far on debating.
I just love the thumbnails that YouTube chooses for my videos
These two videos took a bit longer to produce than the standard in-class lecture. I think it’s something that I am still not adjusted to – the idea that I can’t base a lecture on the presence of students in the classroom. They provide a lot of material and a lot of indicators of where to go next when giving a lesson. Without that, I just have to look into the camera and hope they are following along well enough.
This is an argument for making much shorter talks and then gauging student opinion on where they are through some short assignments designed to measure what they got out of the video. The next one can adjust to that. I have my online public speaking course arranged like that and it works pretty well.
We are a couple of weeks away from the first debates, which will be audio or video files posted asynchronously, with plenty of time for the other side to respond. At the end I hope to edit them all together to seem like one debate, but we’ll see how well that works. It would be nice to have one contiguous file to listen to later and see if people could tell that the debate was not done in a traditional, aka “in person” format. I think they’ll be able to.
Teaching in asynchronous online format courses that have been traditionally predicated on being in person and next to one another is not a novelty, but something we should explore and create resources to address now. We are going to be using it a lot more in the future, more than we can imagine now.