The New York Sophist

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.

We are told continuously through the pandemic that students are demanding an “in person” experience for their education. The university is not a remote workplace, and online education is not and never will replace the in person teaching experience.

This demand is often couched in the terms of market economics. Education is easily considered a product (I don’t even think there’s a metaphor here, at all) and students are customers there to consume a product. If they are unhappy, and they don’t enroll in courses, then there’s something wrong with the product and it should be adapted to what the customers want.

All of this makes sense if you accept that education is a product, and not the place that allows us to imagine, iterate (and reimagine and reiterate) the principles by which we would like to, should, or fail to organize human experiences in the world. What sort of product is that?

Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash

What sort of product or market forces can be used to evaluate the quality of a space that allows for the practice and development of human imagination?

This question, big as it is, is never considered. It’s never brought up. The university sees itself as responsible for making the best possible product for students to pay tuition for, and their satisfaction isn’t necessary connected with this larger question – a blend of rhetoric and ethics that we might term praxis.

What are students claiming is missing? Familiarity. The demand for the in-person educational experience is not a demand for higher quality. It’s demand for a recognizable quality. Very much like how Coca Cola reverse engineers water sources to match the Atlanta water supply (for good and bad) worldwide, and how McDonald’s adds and subtracts elements from food production worldwide for consistency and customer expectation, students want the classroom, for good or bad, for purity or impurity, to resemble what their expectations are. They want to feel comfortable.

This might not be such a bad demand if met correctly. After all, we want our students in a good mental and physical space to be able to find pathways to engage with the material. But this comfort is more of a strategy than anything else. They want the familiar classroom because in there they have access to a familiar politics of figuring out the class – what they need to do and what is mere professor bloviation, wierdness, or eccentric demand. After all, the familiar classroom is a market – students want to buy As at the lowest possible exchange rate, where they exchange their time and energy for points.

The in person classroom is not immediate; it is highly mediated by this philosophy of a currency exchange. On top of that, it’s highly mediated by the expectations that students and faculty enter that space carrying from film, television, and popular culture. As one of humanity’s most common experiences, being in a classroom has been saddled with expectations of all kinds, which modify behavior in comfortable, understandable ways. These modifications, along with the ultimate goal of “buy low” create a difficult environment to encourage any sort of radical engagement of the mind.

When we accept the student demand for the in person course as a request for higher quality instruction, or more immediate and personal instruction, we are accepting the claim on the basis of equivocation. The begged question here is who gets to determine quality? The question of mediation is settled; you can count on one hand the human spaces that are equivalently mediated like the classroom. We have no access to a classroom, or an in person educational experience, that can avoid the weight of expectation. We must understand that students prefer the in person class because it is comfortable, familiar, and well mapped – all the routes are known, and the steps are familiar.

The necessity of education to be a rupture, a transformation, or a classically revolutionary experience requires disruption of the familiar and comfortable in ways that are not distressing, but recognizable as different. Online education has done that to faculty and to students. And for those who have tried to do something that works for this forced environment, they now are wondering if they can ever return to the traditional classroom as it was. For those who tried to replicate the in person experience, this was the most frustrating and disappointing times of their career. What this moment can be is the recognition that the demands of education, a valuable education, requires deep skepticism about the role you have, the role you think you have, and the role that is filtering everything you say and do in a classroom, whether you are a teacher or a student.

Still struggling with this question.

The arguments for podcasting are a lot more persuasive to me: Audio is small, easy to produce at a high quality, easy to transport, upload, download, playable on any device a student could possibly have around them (including ancient computers) and you can do other things while you are listening to them, which is how most students study and work anyway, if you have ever watched them in the student center, or talked to them about how they work through a class.

Photo by Jaz King on Unsplash

Video is more attention grabbing, more dynamic. It mirrors the classroom more realistically as there’s a face to look at, there’s a human presentation in the visual as well as the aural, and there’s slides and reference material to look at during the course of the lecture. Most computers can play video, and all phones that the students have, with the rare exception, can play these videos. The videos are not portable, but that’s ok: Everyone has access to a free wi-fi somewhere or a plan where watching a streaming video is not going to kill their ability to use their phone for other activities that month.

Of course many are saying right now: This is not a choice, just make the video and then make the audio available separately. This is not an option to a rhetor. At least not to one who cares about the art! Both are very different approaches to both the audience and the topic. The way I deliver, organize, and prove with just audio will be very different than with video, but both will be of the same quality in the end – hopefully attention grabbing, mesmerizing, and great. Of course, the audience gets to judge that, not me.

The trick with video is I think that the big advantage is being able to put up a slide, an image or some text in the background to support what it is that you are trying to say or get them to understand. With audio you can’t do this at all.

But audio presentations are much more intimate and conversational. You aren’t performing so much your presentation to the class, you are having a one-on-one conversation with the listener about an important idea.

I think what I will have to do is make both. It’s time consuming, but over this holiday I will have nothing but time. The term is nearly over, and the late start gives me a chance to produce both types of lecture for my courses in the spring. I think I’ll just listen to the art and let the audience decide which they like better.

Well another week, another slew of video lectures to record. I much prefer doing it this way to doing it on Zoom live or something. At least this way I can say everything I need to, and the students can use it more as a reference rather than a one-off “I attended” check box sort of thing. By the way, it’s not their fault they would think of a class that way; it’s all the bad teachers they’ve had who trained them that you should get credit for being present that are responsible.

Pragmadialectics -I think it’s important to know this theory, but I’m not even sure I fully understand it. Sometimes trying to explain something to yourself might be considered to be pretty good teaching. At least I hope so.

All comments, thoughts and questions welcome, as always!

My last post was about losing the thread, and losing the focus of what the course is about in the sea of technology available to us. I pretty much lost my way 2 days ago working on these very nice powerpoints for my courses.

I realized I was spending hours on one reading. How was this going to help anyone understand the readings, or the point of the class? Where was the value? What was the aim or purpose of that instruction?

I decided I needed powerpoints because that’s how online teaching looked to me from other sources. I realized that if I were in the classroom, I probably wouldn’t have made any for this lecture. I would have written terms as needed on the board or typed them into a blank word document on the screen.

I decided instead to adapt what I do to online and just put a blank document behind me to write things on. I think the result was pretty good in terms of a lecture that wasn’t too polished, and had many access points of engagement for students. The only concern I have is that it’s a bit long – I’ve been shooting for under fifteen minutes, but in this case I felt like it was warranted to go a bit longer.

This video is about 30 minutes which is one of my longer ones for teaching, but I chose to do it this way in order to capture the interplay of the various readings for the unit. I think a longer video is ok depending on what you are trying to do. The only time it wouldn’t be ok is if you think that since a normal class is an hour long, your video has to be an hour long. It’s probably better to do videos on concepts that last around 7 to 10 minutes (but much closer to 7).

I could have broken up this talk into 3 talks but the interplay would have been missed, and what the aim here is to get the students thinking about how the readings interact. Perhaps the next unit I’ll break it down more by reading and try to hit that sub 7 minute mark on those.