The New York Sophist

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?

The ancient question of what topics are appropriate for students to speak about, debate about, or write about is evergreen. I think about this at the end and start of every teaching term.

I see several approaches to this question that are well-warranted. It doesn’t mean that I agree with any of them though!

The Word Bank Model

Remember being in primary school and sometimes you’d have a test or exam that would feature a “word bank?” You were meant to take the words from the random collection in a box and use them to complete the test questions. It really helped a lot if you were stuck, and probably forwarded an idea of learning relationships and meanings rather than rote memorization.

The Word Bank Model as an answer to this question is when the instructor selects the potential topic areas, and the student selects from these areas in order to complete the technical or structural requirements for the assigment.

For example, in public speaking it’s quite popular to assign something like a “policy speech.” This assignment requires the student to propose and persuade an “audience” that a particular policy should be adopted or should be chosen over some set of competing policies either in place or in consideration.

An instructor might write, “Select one of the following policies: The Green New Deal, Medicare for All, Tuition-Free Higher Education, Assault Weapons or handgun ban. . .” etc.

That was a very American list wasn’t it? The point though is that the typical instructor should draw on things that are circulating, current and happening right then in the society so the students have ample discourse to root around in, embrace, and explore on these issues.

Most instructors might not feel comfortable wtih not “knowing the right answer” to some of these policy questions, but that’s ok – we are teachers of persuasion and rhetoric, not facts and truth. Instructor discomfort with such suggested topics is more indicative of instructors feeling like they are losing their classroom authority (read: authoritarianism) by not being able to definitively say what the right answer is on these questions.

The downfall of this model (there are many) is that the instructor is often only educated on controversial issues by the mass media (CNN, NBC, etc.) and does not have a grasp on the nuance or depth of these controversies, nor how to access the deeper arguments on these questions.

An invitation to a research librarian to assist the class on curating resources for these topics is definitely in order, as well as a strict ban on mass-market news sources as more than 20% of the cited sources in the presentation.

Controversy is the Source of the Topic

Even less control over the topics comes from the instructor choosing to teach the structure and habits of controversy itself rather than a particualr issue. The students are charged with finding a topic that meets the standards and definition of controversy that was defined in the classroom.

Whenever a controversy is brought up, research should be conducted by the students or participants as to what’s out there on it. This can be as broad or narrow as you want. For example, the vaccine controversy is not going to go very far as a topic for debate if you restrict it only to the scientific literature. If you expand the notion of what’s out there to include the mom bloggers and the religious folks, as well as the clean lifestyle folks, you have a debate there that becomes more about what evidence is good and appropriate, not the relatively thin and uninteresting question of “what’s the real evidence?”

Letting the controversy decide is a great way to show us how language pushes us around into the identities and positions that it wants us to hold as well. Being moved by an argument that goes completely against classroom standards of a “good source” is an experience that should be talked about as a normal part of education. Too often we get the articulation that only “stupid people” (whoever they are) will believe a position, and those on the right side of the issue understand the “facts” and “evidence.” These are all, in the end, preferred ways to understand the world and the controversy will, as it pulses along, give credibility to various positions that those opposite will be stunned by. This is what it means to argue – to be baffled by what counts in the words and meanings of your opponents.

This should also point out that those who support calls for “evidence-based debate” are not offering anything to rhetorical or debate education except a retread of a tire that just shouldn’t be driven on. Of course debate requires evidence – that’s not the controversy. It’s what counts as evidence that should be explored precisely because it moves from context to audience to situation. Contemporary debate coaches who make this appeal are simply guilty of equivocation.

The Quality Source or Professional Niche Approach

One of the defenses of teaching public speaking or debate is that it is a professional skill set that aids people in working on professionalizing. So why not have students select a controversy or disagreement from their major field and speak or debate about that?

This allows instructors to assign work for reading that might be off-base for the story they are trying to tell about their field or the topic of the course, but allows the students to discuss the differences between various publications, practicing using the thought processes, practices, terms, and culture of the field.

Such debates in class are also the heart of the model of undergraduate research, something every administrator pushes and pushes without much of a concept of what that really looks like. I had an undergraduate student who did some research for a professor that primarily involved buying him a yogurt and a banana every day from the cafeteria. Why a symbolic appointment when you can have the symbol and the work for everyone during class? Opting in shouldn’t be the model for the most important bits of education. This extends to the model of the contemporary debate team as well. If debate is such an important way to learn, why limit it to those who the coach thinks are “good,” whatever that means?

Good Citizens Can Advocate

It seems like the controversy driven model, but this model is one where larger questions about the normative, ethical, or valuable tasks or perspective on things like social issues, governance, or culture are explored. Instead of “Should we withdraw our troops from this or that place,” the topic becomes “Should governments have a standing army?”

This is a much more philosophical approach at first glance, but I’d hesitate to say that. Instead, think of this as an accounting exercise for the students where they are asked – possibly for the first time in their lives – to provide a detailed accounting for the principles of the right or the good they rely on as citizens. These are the hidden and unarticualted principles of the good they rely on for all political choices and decisions. And now we have a chance to make them plain; to investigate and examine whether they make sense when articulated socially.

Students can bring up controversies which the instructor then treats as the begged question, i.e. “What prior question must be answered before we can address this question?” Here’s an example from an assignment where I turned my whole public speaking class into a big debate

New York City should be a sanctuary city (this means that the city authorities will not cooperate with the Federal immigration authorities on any requests to detain possible undocumented people).

So the begged question is: What is the appropriate relationship between the local and national government? Or: What is the appropriate relationship governments should have to people?

You can of course derive other ones, but you can see that hidden within an answer to the sanctuary city topic there is this larger assumption there that the entire meaning of the argument or position rests on (Toulmin would call this backing for those of you still gnawing on that old chestnut – it’s December so chestnuts are the appropriate metaphor).

The practice of being a citizen should be connected to the idea that expressing your view on issues based on your own experiences is normal and welcome. It is also normal and welcome to listen to the views of others who live in your polis, whatever that might be defined as. And it’s normal and welcome to change your mind, several times, as you incorporate the lived experience and beliefs of those who share that space.

How do we encourage and get argument innovation? By allowing students huge amounts of latitude in how they articulate connections between their own experience and what they hear and read in courses. We should not be choosing topics for courses or limiting what can be said; this is the true heart of academic free expression. The ability to express ideas freely is to show one’s work, and if you are not permitting students to do this regularly within courses, you are not teaching.

“We are all teachers of writing,” is not only a good principle of education, or a good mantra of focus for teachers overwhelmed my the irrelevant minutae of state requirements and Common Core, but it is also a political statement – it’s the phrase of victory of rhetoric and composition, who conquered the educational world with this phrase. In many ways, it’s a rhetorical meytonomy – container and thing contained. This phrase speaks for the entirety of how we see and evaluate education. There’s no escape from the prevalence of writing in education, and there’s no escape from the consideration of writing as education.

Photo by William Moreland on Unsplash

In speech communication rhetoric, to say we’ve dropped the ball would be to understate how poorly we have fared in expressing such importance for public speaking, argumentation, and debate. I think perhaps it’s because most of us don’t believe public speaking, argumentation, or debate matter at all. Public speaking matters because it funds our departments. Argumentation is an elective that fills seats regularly. And debate is an esoteric after-hours sport that occasionally allows the name of the department to circulate on internal PR lists, making sure that the Communication department blips on the Dean’s radar rather regularly. That’s pretty much the extent of the vision of speech communication rhetoricians, whose attention is so thinly distributed across other fields that they can’t be bothered attending to the heart of their own.

Recently it has become a universal claim of fact that the United States, and the world, have lost the ability to engage one another civilly. Not a week goes by that you don’t see an article or a new book that claims that we have lost the once vibrant and common practice of engaging one another with civil and calm tones, evaluating evidence, and allowing reason and rationality to guide our way.

A quick glance at history, particularly American political history would immediately defeat this belief. The vast history of U.S. politics has involved muscle and weapons in the persona of street gangs that were regularly courted to perform voter intimidation and violence against groups who parties thought best out of sight, sound, and mind. But historical reality has never been very influential to human minds. Why are we not using this claim of the loss of civility as a way to boost our courses in the university, community, and country?

It’s a given that any course requires speech. Even if professors are not assigning formal presentations as class assignments or assessment (hard to imagine), the need for class discussion, participation, and verbal engagement is a given in every American higher education classroom.

Yet public speaking frames itself as some odd historical reenactment of the 19th century model of city hall, the Chautauqua circuit, or some fantasy of civic engagement where anyone could stand up in front of 20 people in a room and speak about anything they like without interruption. It’s an homage to historical fiction about the United States in the tune of Normal Rockwell at best, and at worst it could not be better designed to ensure our students do not and can not participate in meaningful contemporary politics.

The Argumentation & Debate course suffers from several problems, first being the conflation of two distinctly different rhetorical forms. We would never teach a course called Zoology & Botany or Poetry & Novels. There would be some distinctions that would take up most of the class time if we did. Not so here. More to come on the importance of dividing these two forms from one another.

Debate – confined to the late-night session in the basement classroom of the communication building – is just as important as writing for all university students. We are all teachers of debate in the sense that we are all preparing our students how to present conviction to uncertain others, and how to evaluate the speech of a convinced person in relation to the speech of someone convinced in some other, exclusive way.

Debate is not an afterthought to consideration and research and neither is writing. Both are ways to explore meaning and certainty. Debate often will leave you less convinced of your initial position even if the listener is more convinced of it. Debate also calls to account notions of fact, dissolving them into evidence, and further dissolving them in to support. This softer read on proof is essential for critically thinking your way through political, social, business, and scientific problems.

Debate, like writing, isn’t final, but in the realm of expression. When you argue you express a commitment, but it’s not a permanent identity. You are expressing what you feel and think at that moment, given the context and situation around you. Debate involves risk but no catastrophic loss. If you are proven to have a bad idea, perhaps it was your advocacy that allowed exploration of a seemingly good idea to the point of reconsideration. Without an advocate for a position that might not be great, we cannot fully explore ideas on their own terms, and always accept them with the blind spot of our initial approach. Debate forces us to defend the obvious with well-formed words. When we teach writing we are always asking for more explanations and more detail from the writer. We don’t want to see what’s true; we want to see how it gets there and how it is made.

Writing is the most common form of evaluation in higher education today, and students are doing more writing than ever with their devices. They are negotiating the space between expression on the page or screen and who they imagine that they are. Debate does the same thing, but with the voice and immediately with others. Teaching students how to debate an issue is not teaching them how to fight, get loud, or shake their head at their opponent. It’s teaching them that taking a stand is an essential part of being human and ironically, losing a point doesn’t lose the self, it helps create it. Debate is risky because it is creative. It’s constitutive of self in surprising ways. It helps us figure out how to know what’s out there. Just like writing, it’s a practice that helps us understand our mind’s relation to self, the world, and what we think is worth sharing.

Not sure I can cover everything in one post because I haven’t really thought through it all, but here are a couple of ideas that I got after attending my first University Senate meeting and getting a taste of the University discourse there. I believe that the two I’m going to suggest here are the biggest and most important re-considerations for teaching but that might change after I finish off this series of posts (tagged postpandemic teaching if you just want to read these posts together).

The background: Discussing teaching in any pragmatic or practical manner at the university isn’t possible, because we do not have a professional discourse of teaching. What I mean by that is that when someone offers criticism or critique of a teaching performance, it is read as a personal attack. This might not be true at all universities, but it’s definitely true where I work. Since there is not a conversation about teaching, or principles of considering teaching as-such, any critique or commentary, no matter how well-meaning, is taken by the teacher as an attack on their quality as a person.

Most graduate pedagogy avoids talking about teaching in any meaningful way. There’s little to assist the graduate student in teaching except a basket of “what’s worked” whispered unwillingly by a faculty member who would much rather be talking about some esoteric publication opportunity with their grad student. This carries on into the professorship, of which a significant portion will be dedicated to teaching.

The aim of these re-considerations is to attempt to create a discourse about and for and of teaching in order to be able to have such conversations the way we do about curriculum, requirements, credits, and (in our departments) theory and practice. It should be able to move throughout the university by establishing its own principles and it’s own language that is marked: “This is the art of teaching.” We want it completely divorced from the notion that pedagogy is some place of private, soulful struggle best handled in isolation as the fault of failing individuals who should just “know how to do it.”

I’m thinking of pushing for an open forum on teaching with no agenda, where at a regular time people bring their experience and frustrations with teaching into the same room for some time to toss out issues and discuss solutions. This would organically, over time, generate some conversational and discursive norms, which could be expanded to the University community.

Principle 1: Teach Things that Can’t be Looked Up

Teaching online should have caused us all to experience how easy it is to look things up online during lecture, class, or discussion due to the overwhelmingly powerful access to information we enjoy while connected to a University. Even those who do not have University library access have an incredible ability to find information.

Things like grammar rules, historical facts, scientific discoveries, and the like should not constitute a majority of course information. What should be in a course are things that cannot be looked up or referenced. What these would be are practices in defining and redefining problems, critical appraisal of information, formulating and judging solutions to problems, and the discussion of exclusive or comparative advantages. Courses should be about the guided practice of things that cannot be looked up.

The only objection to this principle is that this is “hard to grade.” It’s a lot easier to grade very clear and easy things like following grammar rules or instructions. My point is that we need to reduce our time and concern about these things, unless they foreclose communication (i.e. you can’t access or understand at all the product delivered by the student).

When students go to the workforce they will be able to look up what’s expected in terms of rules for formatting and presentations and such for their workplace. What they won’t be able to look up is how to reframe a serious issue facing their department, leading to the saving of that business, the jobs of colleagues, and future leadership challenges handed to them after they have such success. Let’s prepare them for what can’t be looked up – judgement and appraisal.

Principle 2: Multimodality

It should be pretty clear now that the in-person classroom is a very poor, very weak place to pin the center or the heart of the pedagogical experience. What the pandemic has demonstrated is that the best pedagogical experiences are distributed across modalities – some amount of in person, some amount of asynchronous recording, some about of live video (streaming or conference call), some amount of text, and some amount of student cross-conversation in the course facilitated by various technologies (such as texting or social media).

The trouble here is conceptualizing this as additional labor instead of additional access. The principle does not call for professors to triple or even double their labor. On the contrary, the principle suggests we re-imagine the centrality of the in-class time as a resource that can be packaged and delivered in different ways, changing the nature of that one experience into this multi-layered one.

One thing I’ve recently done (over the past few years) is audio record my classrom and post the audio file to the LMS. This provides students another way to engage what happened in class that day. Perhaps they were in a bad mental place, emotionally fraught, sleepy, hungry, or feeling ill and missed some of the class. They can listen to it and get a different relationship to the “text” of the class which they will “interpret,” or “criticize” in a future assignment. Even those who are attentive and engaged in the course benefit from having recordings to reference in the future to jog the memory, or more likely, create a new memory or relationship to that memory and the person who was there, read by this new person listening to a class they attended, and commenting on it at a different point in the term.

This is just one example of how positionality and audience can create various levels of evaluation and consideration through time as the semester moves on. Blogging the course, or having students share the responsibility of creating a course narrative in Google Docs would be a way of doing this as well, particularly because the history of edits is freely available.

These two principles are large perspective principles of how the pandemic should influence the future of university teaching. This is just an initial foray into the topic for me, but these loom large as governing ways to approach our courses in the years to come. Adherence to both shouldn’t just be to bring pandemic teaching up to some pre-pandemic standard – they should supercharge pedagogy for the uncertain future ahead. Adherence also should help prepare us for the next pandemic, natural disaster, or human-caused event such as war or financial collapse which, no matter the scope or scale, will impact the normal operation of the university which, like it or not, depends on the presence of good, regular instruction of students.

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.

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.