Teaching Public Speaking as Composition

Citation
Leff, Michael. “Teaching Public Speaking as Composition.” Basic Communication Course Annual, vol. 4, no. 12, 1992, pp. 115-122.

Summary
Leff begins with the admission that this essay is not based on any close attention to the state of the field or systematic study, but rather is grounded in personal experience. Opens, then, with the experience of being named director of the fundamentals public speaking course, after not having taught it for 20 years. Upon refamiliarizing himself with the course content and materials, was surprised to see that it was more or less the same - even though, in 20 years, there had been a lot of change in the rhetoric studies' theory and criticism. The graduate curriculum was very different to reflect these changes, yet the undergraduate and fundamentals course was virtually the same. Why?

Especially in comparison with the first-year composition course in English, which has evolved along with the field of composition studies. One reason for this, Leff suggests, is exemplified in a CCCs article, "Identifying and Teaching Rhetorical Plans for Arrangement" by Podis and Podis. "From my perspective, the most striking feature of the article is the implicit but clear sense of the subject being studied. The article is about composition, specifically about the teaching of composition in a basic course. The rhetoric of the essay itself hinges on the assumption that the audience has a common fund of experience based in the teaching of composition, and the authors also assume that this experience is more fundamental, more basic to the constitution of the audience, than theories that can be applied to or abstracted from practice. Thus, as they blend theory into practice, the authors can pursue a line of theoretical inquiry without losing sight of the primary subject, and they can sustain an appropriate balance in assessing he practical advantages and limitations of their own perspective." (118)

-From this, Leff notes a lack in rhetoricians who teach public speaking, in being able to make this kind of connection between theory and practice. In spite of public speaking being such a practical (and practice/product-based course?), public speech rhetoricians tend to go more towards the abstract models and theories and use those as a "top down" approach to informing course objectives, assessment, etc. "In other words, our scholarship informs our teaching, insofar as it does, from the outside in, and the teaching experience itself seems theoretically uninteresting. The result is that the fit between theory and practice in teaching becomes rather awkward and artificial." (118) But these theories that inform public speech pedagogy "seems so far removed from our rhetorical scholarship." (119)

A difference between English and Speech Communication departments - in Speech Communication, senior instructors and faculty teach upper-level courses which are more in-line with the current state of the field, fleeing from the introductory course which remains stagnant as a result. In contrast, English department faculty who genuinely specialize in composition stay in touch with the foundational course; they're not "literary scholars going through a probationary ritual" (119) (though we should note how often this does happen at some institutions! To say nothing of the graduate students who, like in Speech Communication, are assigned to the first-year course and may or may not have actual interest in or passion for teaching composition to freshmen).

While the state of affairs in English might seem to keep the English rhetorician chained to the first-year course's basic curriculum, it also ends up fostering more community around teaching of this course - which is true in reverse for Speech Communication rhetoricians, who are more loosely-connected, making rhetoric in Speech Communication more amorphous and less able to speak across gaps.

One place where this becomes a clear risk in scholarship is in rhetorical criticism, since theories and ideologies abound there is nothing specifically joining together their application; "in the absence of a reasonably well defined domain for practice, critics tend to speculate about practice in theoretical terms rather than to focus upon specific instances. [...] Theory, thus, becomes detached from grounded arguments about the interpretation of practice. [...] This situation raises a substantial problem in respect to the fit between theory and practice, but perhaps more important, it also encourages a dispersion of effort. Since the study of practice does not build on itself, the range of the scholarship remains unlimited, and individual studies become additive rather than cumulative. Unfortunately, we seem to lack the common experience working on the same subjects that seems required for a disciplinary consciousness." (120)

"My point, then, is that by concentrating on public speaking as composition, we might serve two purposes at once. Implications - rather than separating "skill courses" from more "serious" courses:
 * "We might be able to generate better, more innovative, and more theoretically interesting approaches to teaching the basic course.
 * "At the same time, if we viewed the public speaking class as an important arena of rhetorical practice, and not just as a burden imposed upon us, we might discover a shared referent that could help focus and invigorate rhetorical scholarship as a communal enterprise." (121)
 * "We would have to stop thinking of the public speaking course as nothing more than a 'service' enterprise;
 * "we would have to conceive it as something integral to our mission as teachers and scholars;
 * "we would have to engage senior faculty in the course and challenge them to connect what they know about rhetoric to the fundamentals of practice;
 * "and we would have to be willing to open the course to new ideas and to experiments that might alter its familiar and comfortable structure."