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This document details the implementation of service-learning as critical pedagogy in an honors section of public speaking (spcm 1011h) at xavier university during the spring semester of 2003. The project required students to participate in a service-learning project within the new orleans community, focusing on the integration of new orleans public schools and the significance of brown vs. Board of education. Strategies used to activate student voices, such as ethnographic case studies, roundtable discussions, and student ownership of the project. The project's impact on students' public speaking skills and their collaboration with marshall middle school students is also highlighted.
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Dr. Ross Louis Department of Communications Xavier University of Louisiana Fall 2003 — Spring 2004
(Submitted May 19, 2004)
public speaking assignments. The Course Implementation section documents and analyzes in-class meetings, service-learning visits, and student speeches. The Conclusions section discusses the degree to which the course achieved its intended outcomes and offers suggestions for future SPCM 1011H sections.
Teaching Philosophy My first serious consideration of the politics implied by the phrase “to teach” came in response to Paulo Freire.
A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness. (72)
I read Freire while working on a research project in which I was using performance methods within an English as a Second Language classroom for adult immigrants and political refugees. I was both puzzled and inspired by the challenge I encountered in the pages of his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. On one hand, I could not escape my basic need for narration—the traditional unidirectional lecture—in teaching undergraduate courses. No matter how reductive Freire finds narration, I desperately needed the lecture to convey information in an efficient manner to a room of undergraduate communication students. Still, I could not ignore the obvious and acute link between Freire’s call for teaching as the practice of freedom and my experience within community-based ESL classrooms. I found it impossible to separate my English language instruction from the lives of the students who actively used that instruction as they adapted to a new American culture.
Freire’s bold pedagogical claims nagged me: “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people” (81). Applying the social agenda that I found within Freire and other critical theories of education made good sense in a community ESL class. But, how would that agenda play out in a traditional undergraduate classroom? What connection, if any, might be made between the tangible, historical bodies that occupied my communication classes and the tangible, historical world in which those bodies lived? What exactly is embedded within the phrase “to teach,” in addition to its denotative meaning of imparting knowledge and giving instruction?
In recent years, I have attempted to situate my philosophy of teaching within the particular contexts in which I teach. Teaching at Xavier University implies a response to the University’s identity as a historically Black school with Catholic foundations. I approach this history as an opportunity to situate my teaching in relation to the social and cultural identities that make up every Xavier public speaking classroom. Xavier’s
institutional identity also invites teaching that commits to a project of social justice. Ultimately, my philosophy of teaching is directed towards reconciling my view of education as the practice of freedom with the particular context of public speaking classrooms at Xavier University. To this end, I view teaching as a vocation that implies collaboration, attention to identity, a process of critique, and tangible, social consequences.
As a collaborative act, teaching occurs during moments of classroom dialogue, during moments of honest exchange between classroom participants. My teaching philosophy rests on the belief that students and instructors ought to participate together within the classroom. The role of teacher demands careful attention to creating a classroom space in which students and teachers react to course material by personalizing it, challenging it, extending it, and ultimately, redefining it. In this view, teaching becomes an ongoing process of facilitating and directing. Within a public speaking class, collaboration occurs when students take ownership of the course by investigating and critiquing the relevance of public discourse within their lived experiences. Collaboration does not merely happen as a result of required public speaking assignments. Collaboration happens when students receive and take responsibility for shaping the organization of a given class session, topic, or exercise.
Second, I view teaching as a commitment to the particular bodies and voices that occupy the classroom. Teaching both recognizes the authority embedded within the role of instructor and commits to the contingent, historical context that any given group of classroom participants comprises. Student and instructor identities emerge in relation to each other and to the constraints introduced by particular courses. Within a public speaking class, identity is privileged when public speaking is presented as a special case of identity management. That is, public discourse offers unique opportunities for speakers to investigate topics relative to their social and cultural identities.
Third, teaching is always connected to critique: critique of the classroom behaviors of teachers and students, critique of the social and cultural context within which the class resides, and critique of the course’s relevance within that context. I envision the classroom project of critique as processual, dialogic, and grounded within concrete social practices. Teaching as a process of critique recognizes that pedagogy engages in becoming rather than being. Teaching responds to the feedback of its constituents; it is malleable rather than fixed. Teaching responds to the material environment in which its participants live by fixating on specific social practices that interact with a given course’s curriculum. Within a public speaking class, speaking assignments provide opportunities for students to critique their social environments. For this critique to be viewed as more than an innocuous classroom assignment, however, students must first commit to a participatory and demanding classroom environment that hinges on their viewpoints.
Finally, I view teaching as an efficacious project that can and should address issues of social justice. When directed towards the social practices that immediately and directly impact its participants, teaching becomes a means of social action. Teaching as
students to create a speech about the significance of a person, place, or event connected to the 1960 integration of New Orleans Public Schools.
While viewing SPCM 1011H from the perspective of service-learning, I recognized the project as a potential means of carrying out the theoretical goals of critical pedagogy. As I discuss in the subsequent section, critical pedagogy argues that education operates from a subjective, ideological position. Elyse Pineau condenses critical pedagogy to three fundamental assumptions: “[C]ritical educators believe that intervention is needed (the language of critique), that renewal is possible (the language of possibility), and that our privileged position as educators makes us personally responsible for enacting both at every level of our professional lives (the commitment to action)” (43). While planning for SPCM 1011H, I looked at critical pedagogy as a body of theory that presents a sizable challenge: How can designing a course around a service-learning project fulfill the goals of social critique, potential for social reform, and commitment to social action?
Critical pedagogy imposes specific course objectives on any course. First, the goal of social critique implies that students perceive the course as an opportunity to exercise their voices and experiences. Therefore, the syllabus must offer concrete opportunities for students to influence the direction of the course (e.g. collaborative creation of class policies, options for speaking assignments, and responsibility for locating and presenting material related to a particular course topic). The most significant way this happened in SPCM 1011H was through the service-learning project. Through their involvement with the service-learning project, SPCM 1011H students interrogated historical and contemporary American educational practices.
Second, students’ collaborative design and implementation of the service-learning project became an exercise in envisioning social possibility, another objective for critical pedagogy. Throughout their interaction with Marshall Middle students and later during their reflection on the service-learning experience, SPCM 1011H students considered possibilities for change. Students proposed educational reform policies during their final speeches, and they reflected on the efficacy of public speaking as agency within a middle school social studies curriculum.
Finally, the service-learning project engaged students in community action. Critical pedagogy proposes concrete involvement within a specific community. SPCM 1011H students responded to this objective through their mentoring of Marshall Middle students. By encouraging their community partners to research school integration in New Orleans and motivating them to present speeches about its significance, SPCM 1011H students served as role models.
Critical Pedagogy Critical pedagogy scholars have argued that education involves more than teaching and learning. Henry Giroux and Roger Simon define pedagogy as “a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge and identities are produced within and
among particular sets of social relations” (12). They observe that pedagogical praxis brings together a wide range of tasks, all of which inherently implicate pedagogy as a political venture. Pedagogy always indicates “what knowledge is of most worth, in what direction we should desire, what it means to know something, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment” (Giroux and Simon 12). Freire positions classroom instructional methods as extending from political stances. Traditional instruction, which Freire calls banking pedagogy, constructs “a partial view of reality” that serves the status quo (Pedagogy 60). In stark contrast, Freire’s problem-posing pedagogy aims for the “practice of freedom” by encouraging students to gain a critical consciousness regarding their respective positions and related oppressions in the world (Pedagogy 66-67). Pedagogy thus works within distinct sociopolitical and cultural boundaries, hegemonic lines drawn between those holding/maintaining power and those seeking power. Peter McLaren explains, “[S]chooling always represents an introduction to, preparation for, and legitimation of particular forms of social life. It is always implicated in relations of power, social practices, and the favoring of forms of knowledge that support a specific vision of past, present, and future” (McLaren, Life 160-61). When viewed this way, pedagogy implicates educational institutions, administrators, instructors, and students as participants in a socially and politically charged battle for power, representation, and identity. Pedagogy is seen as always already enlisting participants in a sociopolitical and cultural struggle. Rather than viewed as “a unitary, monolithic, and ironclad system of rules and regulations,” schools take on the identity of a contested site of cultural politics, where the dominant ideologies of a society might be reproduced, resisted, or transformed by both students and teachers (McLaren, Life 186).
Ira Shor argues that pedagogy follows one of two motivations: accepting the traditional curriculum or rejecting it. In either case, the teaching that results contributes to a particular vision of society, and that vision either restricts or enables students (347). McLaren describes the project of critical pedagogy as one that both recognizes the cultural politics at work within sites of schooling and articulates means of agency and empowerment for the students and teachers affected by that politics (Life 160). Critical pedagogy has been suggested as an answer to inegalitarian conditions, inasmuch as it critiques the power structures present in an educational system and offers resistant practices to democratize those structures. This project requires a revised vision of schools “as sites of both domination and contestation.” As Giroux explains, this position resists the hopeless view of a totalizing dominant culture that merely imposes itself on students. Instead, critical pedagogy recognizes that resistance to the dominant culture and its attempts to reproduce occurs naturally within normal social relations (Theory 62- 63). Operating from the possibility that resistance enables transformation, scholars in critical pedagogy have asserted the goals of “hope and emancipation” as central to the new version of social life advocated in curriculum (Aronowitz and Giroux 141).
Within the classroom, critical pedagogy has at least two comprehensive goals: the construction of a “democratic public sphere” and the recognition of lived experience within the classroom. Giroux and McLaren use the label “democratic public sphere” to describe schools charged with a revolutionary task: “awakening the moral, political, and
affirmed, or marginalized within the texts, institutional practices, and social structures that both shape and give meaning to their lives” (“Schooling” 148). Moreover, the curriculum in this site features “student experience as both a narrative for agency and a referent for critique” (“Schooling” 149). Giroux explains the privileging of lived experience in the classroom as an exercise in critical reflection on how student identities have been constructed:
Although this approach valorizes the language forms, modes of reasoning, dispositions, and histories that students use in defining themselves and their relation to the larger society, it also subjects such experiences and ideologies to the discourse of suspicion and skepticism, to forms of analysis that attempt to understand how they are structured by cultural and symbolic codes inscribed within particular configurations of history and power. (“Schooling” 149)
Portfolio Purpose Statement and Research Goals Because of its service-learning requirement, SPCM 1011H provides an opportunity to connect a public speaking curriculum with concrete social practices. Service-learning rests on the belief that students can practice classroom concepts and theories within real-world contexts at the same time they practice civic engagement. SPCM 1011H students identified the public discourse needs of Marshall Middle students who were preparing speeches on the 1960 integration of New Orleans Public Schools. SPCM 1011H students adapted their public speaking curricula and instruction to address those needs.
Since service-learning propels students into social communities, a service- learning project becomes fertile testing ground for making concrete the theories of critical pedagogy. The primary purpose of this portfolio is to assess the efficacy of using service-learning to do the work of critical pedagogy in the SPCM 1011H course. Two interrelated research questions emerge from fusing critical pedagogy with service- learning in this context:
These questions arise from critical pedagogy’s fundamental assertions that education is inherently infused with ideology, that educators must be committed to exposing the dominant ideologies at work within education, and that educators must be committed to concrete action that equalizes the power relations between privileged and marginalized social positions.
Based on the research questions listed above, I use this portfolio to assess the degree to which SPCM 1011H students engaged in critique of social, cultural, and
political practices related to the course theme of educational opportunity. I also assess any measurable social change affected by the public speaking curriculum delivered during SPCM 1011H service-learning project.
Assessment Plan Assessment of critical pedagogy—a project marked by participation, dialogue, critique, and social action—necessarily involves its participants. In the case of this course portfolio project, service-learning served as a testing ground for critical pedagogy’s assumptions of critique and social action. Therefore, the main assessment strategy was to treat the service-learning project as an ethnographic case study in which I collected data via participant-observation, fieldwork reports, group debriefings, and documents collected from SPCM 1011H and Marshall Middle students.
Adopting qualitative methods from the practice of ethnography, I compiled field notes from SPCM 1011H class meetings and service-learning visits to Marshall Middle. I collected numerous reflection documents from SPCM 1011H students throughout the semester, including summaries of their service-learning visits and journal entries. In response to SPCM 1011H students’ suggestions, I considered changes to the course syllabus and the service-learning project. I collected documents submitted by SPCM 1011H students that led to the creation of the public speaking curriculum for Marshall Middle. I analyzed the relationship between in-class SPCM 1011H speeches and educational opportunity issues relevant to the service-learning project. A colleague from the Communications Department, Dr. Rockell Brown, attended a SPCM 1011H class meeting and offered evaluative remarks related to critical pedagogy themes. I also administered surveys to SPCM 1011H students, Marshall Middle students, and the Marshall Middle instructor. The SPCM 1011H student survey was not submitted in time for me to use in this portfolio. All participants in the project signed research consent forms, granting me permission to use course assignments and documents within this portfolio (see Appendix A).
If I were to assess SPCM 1011H as a course, I would create instruments to evaluate the outcomes of every learning objective listed in the syllabus. However, my primary intent in this portfolio is to examine the efficacy of service-learning as critical pedagogy. Only one objective relates to service-learning: understanding the relationship between agency and public discourse. In conducting a qualitative assessment of this objective and the critical pedagogy research questions stated in the previous section, I rely on interpretive analysis of the documents mentioned above. In the following sections, I describe and interpret data collected throughout the course design and course implementation processes. Based on these interpretations, I also assess the degree to which SPCM 1011H students participated in critical pedagogy’s goals of social critique and community action.
Syllabus and Service-Learning Project Design SPCM 1011H was a course in progress, from my initial design of the syllabus (see Appendix C) to the completion of the service-learning project. Rather than isolate the service-learning project (see Appendix D) as one of the required assignments for the course, I designed the entire course around the project. I suspected that teaching a public speaking curriculum to middle school students would require a tremendous time commitment, and I considered numerous ways of compensating SPCM 1011H students for their additional effort. I could not seriously reduce the number of required in-class speeches because the course was, in fact, a public speaking class that satisfied the University’s Core Curriculum communication requirement and prepared students for a sophomore Speech Competency exam. I could not seriously reduce the amount of reading required because the course textbook also served as a manual for preparing the speeches they would give in class and teach in the service-learning project.
My response to this dilemma was to position the course as “up for grabs” during the first week of class. By this, I mean that I introduced the course as property jointly owned by students and myself. The vehicle that most clearly propelled this message was the service-learning project. All the course assignments, including the in-class public speeches, related to a common theme: educational opportunity. In particular, I positioned the curriculum as an action to be taken by its participants (students and myself). My initial attempt to situate the course in critical pedagogy involved positioning students as active agents responding to a particular problem: identifying historical injustices related to educational opportunity and responding via the service-learning project. I framed the course as a case of “citizenship education,” which Giroux describes as a deliberately political project that seeks a “genuine democratic society, one that is response to the needs of all and not just of a privileged few” (Theory 201).
The “Class Format” section of the course syllabus illustrates my early efforts to activate students as co-owners of the course curriculum. The section described how the course would be conducted, and I explicitly linked student participation to the potential success of the course:
The Honors Public Speaking course relies on a heavy amount of student participation and ownership of course material. The course uses service learning to explore the usefulness of public speaking principles and to make connections between community agency and public speaking. The eventual outcome of this course, as well as what is produced within it, relies on an active collaboration between students and myself....
My approach to this course is based on the expectation that I will learn from and about you as you contribute to each class meeting. I also expect that you will learn from and about your peers during each meeting. All public speaking depends upon a speaker/audience relationship, and we
will work specifically to build that relationship within our course. (SPCM 1011H Syllabus)
On the first day of class, I used an exercise that was intended to motivate students to critique the classroom context in which American education typically occurs. At precisely 1:15 p.m., the designated start time for SPCM 1011H, I passed out copies of the syllabus, proceeded to the front of the classroom, and stood behind the podium. At a brisk rate and with a monotone voice, I began to read the syllabus verbatim. After about two minutes, I stopped reading. I asked students to consider the following two quotes that commented on education:
A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness. (Friere 72)
Education is not only a function of books, but a function of experience and connecting what one reads with ongoing observations and experiences. (Coles, 1990, 164).
I then asked students to work in groups of three to create short dramatic scenes that demonstrated what the first day of a college class would look like if “narration sickness” was cured, if education was also a “function of experience,” and if education was connected to “ongoing observations and experiences.” In every performed scene, the relationship between instructor and student was relaxed and friendly. The instructor consistently asked students about their personal lives and their previous college experiences. In one scene, the instructor asked students to explain their preferences for lectures or discussion circles.
Following the scenes, we sat in a circle and discussed the syllabus. I encouraged students to comment on the course requirements and policies. We made decisions about the physical arrangement of the classroom (sitting in a discussion circle) and rules for interacting with each other. Students described the instructor/student relationship as a tense balance between being friendly and “losing control.” Their suggestion was for instructors to maintain friendliness without students being disrespectful.
After discussing the syllabus, students reported that the severe penalty for missing any service-learning visit (5% deducted from the final course grade) was too extreme and signaled my distrust of them. In response, I emphasized the importance of the service- learning project and the mentoring work they would undertake with seventh-grade students. I then asked the students to address the service-learning attendance policy. They decided to eliminate the penalty from the syllabus and to pledge their attendance at every service-learning visit.
The second speaking assignment, an informative speech (see Appendix F), was scheduled during the midpoint of the semester while students were discussing the integration of New Orleans Public Schools with their Marshall Middle groups. I intended the speech to encourage students to think about the task that their Marshall Middle groups faced. Since Marshall Middle students were creating speeches about significant people, events, or places related to the integration of New Orleans schools, I wanted SPCM 1011H students to focus on related civil rights issues. As described in the assignment, the speech allowed students to research the broad social context in which New Orleans school integration occurred:
The focus of the informative speech is the stories told by the places related to the civil rights movement in New Orleans. Specifically, you will select a place (or series of places) that has/have some significance to civil rights decisions in New Orleans. After viewing the “A House Divided” documentary, think about specific events you learned about. Then, consider selecting a place that will allow you to tell a portion of the New Orleans’ civil rights story.
Your goals should be to inform the audience of the story that relates to a civil rights place in New Orleans and to connect the story to our current state of affairs with race in New Orleans and/or the U.S.
Ideas include: districts/areas; schools; sites of integration struggles; sites that commemorate civil rights leaders; churches; gravesites; lunch counters; universities; public transportation sites; etc. (Informative Speaking Assignment)
The third speaking assignment, a persuasive speech (see Appendix G), concluded the semester during the final exam period. I created the assignment near the end of the service-learning project to serve as a course capstone. The assignment required students to propose a policy in response to an instance of educational inequality. My intent was to allow students to reflect on the educational issues that arose during the service-learning project and consider their work as part of an ongoing struggle to eliminate educational inequality.
By viewing the SPCM 1011H syllabus as malleable and reframing course design as an ongoing process rather than a fixed task, I was able to supplant my traditional, authoritative instructor role in favor of shared ownership with students. The primary benefit of this transition was seen in the active role that students assumed during the service-learning project. As I discuss in the “Course Implementation” section, the service-learning project was ultimately designed and implemented by the students. They recognized, sometimes painfully, that their success in SPCM 1011H transcended a course grade and depended in large part on the success of Marshall Middle students in completing a public speaking assignment.
Class Meetings The implementation of SPCM 1011H occurred during three interrelated stages: class meetings, service-learning visits, and in-class speech assignments. All these stages, though, were focused on service-learning and the theme of educational opportunity. In particular, class meetings operated as the staging ground for service-learning work and students’ in-class speeches. The class met twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays for 75-minute sessions. I created detailed weekly plans that divided most meetings between discussions of public speaking concepts, planning for service-learning visits, and planning for speaking assignments (see Appendix H). My foremost concern during class meetings was to replace the traditional “sage on the stage” approach to instruction, where I became the ultimate authority in constructing and transmitting knowledge. Critical pedagogy is inherently pedagogy of action, both inside and outside the classroom. My initial task was to replace the “transmission mode of pedagogy” with a class session that encouraged students to “challenge, engage, and question the form and substance of the learning process” (Giroux, Theory 202).
I established this pattern on the first day of class, as students participated in the “course design” exercise that I described earlier in this portfolio. On subsequent meetings, I used two strategies to activate student voices. The first strategy was the staging of in-class writing sessions where students responded to questions that were related to educational opportunity issues and then discussed their opinions with each other. The first of these happened on the second day of class. Students responded to the following prompt:
Write a brief story about a time that your cultural identity affected (in some way) the educational opportunities you received. Be specific about what happened, how you reacted, and how it affected your perspective on cultural identity and education.
Working in pairs, students told their narratives to each other. Next, we formed a circle, and I requested that a few students share their experiences. Because I had planned to introduce the course syllabus and the service-learning project, I told the class that we would have time for only a few responses.
Instead, after a few students shared their narratives, students began taking turns. It became apparent that the group felt obligated (perhaps to each other) to share their educational experiences. One student disclosed that she felt belittled when her high school yearbook editor assigned her to write a story on the minority club because she was the token minority on the staff. Another student explained that she felt as if she needed to prove her worth during a summer institute for high academic achievers because she was one of the few African-American females in attendance. In contrast, another student reported that she believed her African-American identity was a key reason that she received certain academic scholarships. She explained, “I’m okay with that.” At the
learning project, and in-class speaking assignments. According to the course prerequisites, students enrolled in SPCM 1011H were supposed to have previous public speaking experience. (I actually allowed several students into the class who did not have extensive public speaking backgrounds because I was concerned about course enrollment numbers during the first semester it was offered.) With the expectation that SPCM 1011H students were comfortable and experienced with public speaking, I revised the reading load. Rather than require students to read every chapter in the textbook, I focused on particular pages that were relevant to a given speech assignment or their service-learning work at Marshall Middle. To guide their reading, I distributed journal/discussion questions (see Appendix I) for students to answer during in-class discussions and within their course reflection journal.
During the third week of the course, we discussed the definition of culture offered in the course textbook. The discussion questions for the assigned reading included the following:
Can you identify cultural differences you expect to encounter with your audience at Marshall? Can you identify specific behaviors that will respect and adapt to those differences during your SL visits?
What are possible positive effects of ethnocentrism? What are possible negative effects of ethnocentrism? Discuss possible cases of ethnocentrism that may arise as you work with Marshall students? That is, which parts of your cultural identity/experience might you privilege over the students’ cultural identity/experience? (e.g. social class; private vs. public school; suburb vs. inner city; occupation and career ambitions)
During this discussion, we constructed a list of cultural differences that students may experience when visiting Marshall Middle. A student offered her perception of the poor quality of New Orleans education. She suggested that Xavier students may perceive the educational quality differently than do Marshall Middle students. Another student described the language barriers she encounters in New Orleans. We talked generally— and then very specifically—about the dialects and language structures used in New Orleans. Students discussed the relationship between spoken language and perceptions of a person’s educational level. We eventually considered specific behaviors that students could use during their service-learning visits that adapted to the cultural differences they described.
By allowing students to explain their understanding of the assigned reading, the course assumed a seminar-like identity. During our meetings, I assumed that students already understood the concepts they were assigned to read. Rather than spend time discussing the definitions and explicit examples of each concept, we moved more quickly to application of these concepts. This was seen in the example described above where students created their own examples for the significance of cultural differences during public speaking events. By connecting the concepts of cultural identity and ethnocentrism to the service-learning project, students both contextualized course material and prepared themselves for their work at Marshall Middle.
Another goal of the discussion strategy was to create a collaborative context for working on students’ speaking assignments. Rather than lecture on all the necessary ingredients of each speech, I assumed that students would engage in a discussion about applying the concepts from assigned readings to the particular assignment. During the twelfth week of the semester, for example, we discussed persuasive speaking in relation to students’ final speaking assignment. Dr. Brown attended this class session to provide feedback in relation to the critical pedagogy themes I targeted throughout the course. The session began with a free-write exercise during which students responded to the following question: “Is education in the United States an equal opportunity enterprise? Offer examples/opinions for your opinion.” The goal of the free-write was to encourage students to consider possible topics for their final speech assignment, a policy speech in which students argued for a solution to a particular education-related problem. After a brief discussion of students’ responses, I asked students to free-write on policies based on the following prompt: “Imagine there are no financial, social, or legal restraints on you. Create a magic list of solutions that specifically fix the problems you mentioned in your earlier response.” Next, we discussed how the problems that students identified might serve as topics for their policy speeches. Students collaborated on a sample speech outline that demonstrated the types of persuasive speech claims, organization patterns for persuasive speeches, and types of persuasive appeals.
During the discussion portion of this session, it became clear that most of the twelve students did not understand clearly the distinction between claims of fact, value, and policy. They also expressed confusion regarding the organization patterns for persuasive speeches. I interrupted our roundtable discussion to lecture on the definitions of each of these, while students provided examples. This session revealed a limitation of my commitment to student ownership and voice within SPCM 1011H. If students were to guide the classroom discussion and participate in a seminar-type session, they first needed clarity on course concepts. However, the SPCM 1011H students with limited public speaking experience often needed more clarification on the definitions of concepts prior to applying them to their speaking assignments. Dr. Brown noted that she too was unclear whether students connected course concepts to their public speaking assignments. She explained:
The only area where I have some concern regards the students’ individual public speaking assignments. I did not get a good sense of their “broader” understanding of course material as it pertained to their persuasive
