Hearing the Sound of Your Own Voice

May 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Christian Slater, Pump Up the Volume

Although I have been assisting students with their oral communication skills for the past several years in my capacity as a Writing and (then, later) Communication Fellow at the Schwartz Institute, it is only recently that I have begun more directly engaging in the development of my own oral communication skills. Since February, I’ve been hosting a podcast called Topical Fever (the latest episode of which features our own Hillary Miller talking about her part in producing the web series AmericanMD), and the experience has already taught me many lessons about the relationship between thinking, speaking, and notions of “performance.”

Sitting in front of a microphone, alone in the small office of my apartment that I call “the studio,” with headphones blaring the sound of my own voice right back into my ears, in real time, produces a bizarre kind of self-consciousness. In the same way that students preparing to give oral presentations have the opportunity to view themselves rehearsing these presentations on digital video at the Schwartz Institute, the instant digital mirror that podcasting forces into view was, initially, a shocking experience. And this shock has been shared by many of my guests thus far, who have repeated the commonly expressed idea of “hating the sound of their own voice,” and, I’ll admit, I’ve felt that aural self-hatred my entire life. But producing and editing Topical Fever has forced me to listen to myself, talking, for hours on end. And after the initial horror, the more I’ve listened, the more I’ve noticed all sorts of things about the way I express myself, and have grown more and more comfortable with my voice and how I use it.

How can we help our students develop comfort and confidence with their own voices? One idea might be to create a framework through which students have frequent opportunities to speak in “low stakes” situations during class time. In recent semesters I’ve begun engaging this idea by doing much more group work, which allows me to walk around the class and talk to students in smaller groups (and, often, one-on-one). I find I’ve been able to have direct discussions about class material with far more students than I’ve reached in the past, and that these interactions allow the students a chance to practice talking without the formal pressure of speaking in front of the entire class. This informality also allows each student’s personality to emerge more comfortably, which is, for me, a critical component of the larger process of locating and developing a sense of confidence and authenticity. As I continue to work on my own “authentic” voice, I’m learning that, like a musical instrument, the voice is something that grows more powerful and resonant with constant practice. It makes sense, then, that as educators we should provide as many sites as possible for those student voices to be heard.

Filed Under: cac, Pedagogy, Podcasts and Podcasting, Process

Scaffolding and Revision in Business Policy

May 14, 2013 By 1 Comment

Granted, this is not the most beguiling blog post title. However, I was inspired by Priya’s recap of her work  and decided to share my own musings about my first year as a Communication Fellow. My reflections quickly landed on scaffolding and revision, two foundational principles of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). As a New Yorker I am not a fan of scaffolding. As an educator, I am a big proponent.

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Unwelcome scaffolding in Soho.

I have worked with three different professors who each teach Business Policy (BPL 5100) in very different ways. BPL 5100 classes require a final group presentation on a particular company, but this assignment is presented and evaluated differently professor to professor. While one professor might require a 40-minute presentation that includes an extensive explanation of financial indicators in an effort to determine if purchasing the company’s stock is a good recommendation, another professor might assign students a specific “critical issue” for a company and ask students to talk for twenty minutes about how the company could most effectively address the issue.

This semester I worked with Professor Cornelius Marx and I have been struck by how much assignment design has influenced student work. Professor Marx uses the “critical issue” premise, which helps focus students’ research efforts towards developing a strong argument. The key for me, though, is that Professor Marx assigns a paper in which the students, as a group, write up their research (an industry analysis, a list of possible alternatives for the company, recommendations for which alternatives to pursue, and implementation plans for those recommendations). Students submit revisions to help clarify their argument, add or remove feasible alternatives, and improve language skills. The paper is due long before the oral presentation and receives its own grade.

I asked Professor Marx about his approach and he explained that he’d made this pedagogical decision two years ago to help students avoid procrastination and to improve the overall quality of their work. He shared his perspective with how these WAC principles have worked in his classroom:

This increases the workload for me but the quality definitely improves. If the paper is put to rest before the oral is begun, the oral inevitably improves because they know their material much better… Of course there are still teams that do it at the last moment but the average quality of both paper and presentation has improved.

Because students came to their oral presentation rehearsal knowing more about their topic and their vision for the company, we were able to spend the rehearsal discussing the fundamentals of good public speaking: converting the written paper into listener-friendly speaking notes, connecting with the audience through eye contact and vocal clarity; proper introductions and conclusions; using transitions, internal previews, and summaries to create group cohesion; and the importance of consistent PowerPoint design.

As a former Teaching Fellow and current adjunct instructor at Baruch, I’ve often wondered if my students were really “getting it” and if scaffolding and revising were worth my additional efforts. It has been a heartening revelation to watch a more experienced professor’s pedagogical process and see its clear benefits.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Business, Pedagogy, Uncategorized, Writing Across the Curriculum

Posthumous Tweets, Postmortal Updates: Voicing the Dead in Writing Assignments

May 13, 2013 By 1 Comment

A recent blog post in The Guardian, “Why Death is Not the End of Your Social Media Life,” describes how “social media is…bridging the gap between the living and the dead” through digital services such as LivesOn and DeadSoci.al. The former—with its mildly witty tagline “when your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting”—builds a profile of you based on your tweets, who you’re following, who’s following you, and so forth. After you have exhaled for the last time, the Twitter app LivesOn takes over where you left off and keeps “you” tweeting from across mortality’s threshold. DeadSoci.al, a “free social media tool,” takes a slightly different approach by allowing the user to craft her or his own “digital legacy,” which links to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and would be deployed upon notification (and presumably verification) that one has died.

As someone whose research centers on matters of death and the dead in early modern English drama and whose pedagogy is aimed at strengthening and expanding written and oral communication skills across a range of media—not to mention, someone who’s more than a bit fidgety over the inevitability of her own expiration—I am intrigued by this technology and its applications. While I don’t see myself creating a posthumous social media “me,” my immersion in my subject matter has my mind abuzz with all sorts of imaginings. Will my FB newsfeed someday include others’ posthumous updates? And just what might such updates say: “It’s your birthday, live it up” “I know who’s going to win the election,” “Dante was right?” Will my own updates be “liked” by assorted dead people in the future? Part of the fascination with these new tools, of course, comes from the creepiness that surrounds them—one reader comments that this turn in social media is “pretty creepy,” while another ventures, “this definitely has a certain weird appeal.” Of course it does because the dead don’t remain entirely dead. We don’t let them. They’re part of our individual and collective psyches.

At the same time that we try to shield ourselves from the dead by limiting our contact with corpses (we have created hospitals, hospice centers, and funeral homes to take care of what our forebears routinely did), and by dieting and exercising our way towards death-at-least-a-little-deferred, we remain pretty drawn to them. The popularity of forensic television dramas such as CSI, films such as the Twilight Saga, and exhibitions like Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds series underscore our simultaneous revulsion and fascination with death and the dead. LivesOn and DeadSoci.al extend this connection—that is, the connection between the living and the dead, which cultures have sought via the creation of Purgatory, the belief in the visions of sages and clairvoyants, the establishment of philanthropic endowments, et al. In our seemingly endless quest to maintain communication between the living and the dead, the world of social media—which draws together at least half the world’s population—is a logical addition to this constellation. These latest forays in social media also speak directly to our fear of annihilation and our indignation over the cessation of personal identity.

I’ve been giving thought, as well, to the classroom and how the idea of tweeting or updating posthumously might be used in writing assignments. Admittedly, nothing has really crystallized yet, but I find myself returning to an example set by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Twitter-driven 2010 production of Romeo and Juliet, titled Such Tweet Sorrow. Taking place in real-time over the space of five weeks, six principal characters (Romeo, Juliet, the Nurse, Friar Lawrence, Mercutio, and Tybalt) tweeted improvised lines, which were supplemented by characters’ tweets on current social and political events, and tweets from the actors reflecting on their roles and responding to audience tweets. What if Hamlet took to Twitter or Facebook? How might his meditations on death read in 140 characters? What could we learn from rephrasing or supplementing these vast thoughts within such tight parameters? What sorts of photos would he post on FB and who would some of his FB friends be? Imagine Hamlet Sr. tweeting from Purgatory or Gertrude’s closet, Polonius continuing to insist himself from behind the arras and from his plight as “supper,” Ophelia updating her status as she floats away or as Hamlet and Laertes come to blows in her grave? How might the study of early modern beliefs about death and the dead be enhanced by role-playing through social media and what would these classroom tweets and updates reveal about our own thoughts on the subject? By directly weaving their voices into the play, exchanging tweets, and sharing insights and questions coming out of these tweets on a course blog, students could produce a rich conversation from which to draw their own questions towards a thesis statement for their papers. As I continue to play with the shape and learning outcomes of this assignment, I’ll let myself be guided by the idea that it should stir the students’ sense of investment in their writing. This, plus the belief that their voices can productively comingle with language that is often thought of as arcane and closed off to postmodern ears, eyes, and mouths.

Filed Under: Culture, Media, To Ponder, Uncategorized

Does Our Education System Overemphasize Literature at the Expense of Writing?

May 7, 2013 By 3 Comments

Let me start by saying that I’m posing this as a question based on my own experience. If there’s research that flies in the face of what I’m going to suggest, please post it in the comments.

Frequently I hear professors lament that students come to Baruch College with inadequate writing skills. This sentiment is not bound by discipline, as I’ve heard it from faculty members in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences as well as the Zicklin School of Business. The latter even felt compelled to create a pair of zero credit Business Communication courses that all MBA students are required to take. This is a Communication Across the Curriculum blog, so it seems as good a venue as any to consider what causes this issue.

The natural inclination is to blame it on Baruch’s high percentage of non-native English speakers. However, I’ve found that the bulk of students who were born and raised in the U.S. come into my classes without knowing the most basic rules of writing, like those found in Strunk & White’s Elements of Style.

Elements of Style

Was I supposed to read this?

The first time I taught Journalistic Writing, I was shocked to receive the first set of papers and find that I had to go over some of the most commonsense stylistic rules with junior and senior journalism majors. These are students who, presumably, decided they liked writing enough to pursue it as a career — or at least enough to occupy 24 credits of their undergraduate education. But as I prepared my lesson on what I thought were the most basic concepts, I realized something embarrassing: I had never formally learned the lessons taught in Elements of Style.

Oh, I owned a copy. I had to buy it along with an AP Stylebook for one of the first journalism classes I took as an undergrad. But we never actually did anything with it because it was assigned as a tool to brush up on concepts we should have learned long before. So as I thumbed through the book and scribbled down Strunk & White’s rules to then teach hours later as though I were an expert, I felt like a hypocrite. I was about to go preach the importance of writing rules when I had earned my own journalism degree simply by using one I made up for myself: If it sounds right, it probably is right. That’s not very scientific.

So why didn’t I ever get these lessons? Probably because my English classes in grades 7 through 12 were taught as literature classes with writing as a secondary focus, if that.

I understand the idea behind forming writing assignments around classic works of literature to kill two birds with one stone, but I always felt like I was graded much more on what themes and allusions I could pluck from a work and not on how well I could actually explain my reasoning. This totally ignores writing for daily life — the kind of writing that you’ll actually be judged upon outside of an academic sitting. Explain what your problem is. Explain why I need to know what you’re telling me. Convince me of something.

Clearly educators agree that this type of writing needs to be taught beyond elementary school, because we require college students to take composition classes. So why do students go from age 12 to 18 without having to do any of it? Instead, classes reward the use of big words and convoluted sentences, and reaching page minimums instead of working within page maximums.

It’s widely and rightly accepted now that you don’t teach writing by drilling students with grammar rules, and I’m not saying we should. I’m also not suggesting we scrap literature from the K-12 curriculum in favor of more practical forms of writing. But can’t we have both? Shouldn’t we have both?

Filed Under: Education, Journalism, literature, Pedagogy, Writing Instruction

Do Communication-Intensive Methods Improve Science Learning?

May 6, 2013 By 4 Comments

In January, I blogged about the collaboration between the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute and Professor David Gruber, who is teaching Environmental Science 1020.  Both last semester and this semester, students in Professor Gruber’s class were assigned to lab groups and each group produced a Digital Lab Report for one lab.  The assignments we created were specific to the different learning goals of the labs; however, all required students to use at least one (often more) form of media and incorporate writing and critical reflection into the process.  Each group goes through a series of collaborative and creative steps.  These include: free-writing soon after the lab is complete; brainstorming; research to pull in other relevant material; posting raw footage, audio, and pictures on the class blog; and creating a rough draft of a Digital Lab Report (which might be a video, a podcast of a radio show, a timeline, or a Prezi depending on the assignment).  Then, groups present their rough drafts to the class and receive feedback on the communication, critical thinking, and content components of their DLRs.  Students have the opportunity to revise their Digital Lab Reports over the next couple of weeks before presenting their final versions.  For a timeline of this process for last semester’s Mutualism lab, click here.

There are many obvious benefits to having students create Digital Lab Reports.   They compel students to collaborate and converse more about their lab work.  They encourage critical thinking, as students are expected to articulate reflections on their work through the various stages.  They are fun – students often use humor.  They improve students’ media and communication skills because students get feedback on these aspects of their creations as well.  But the one main question at the back of my mind when we embarked on this project was whether communication intensive pedagogy actually helps students to learn science.

After almost a year of observation, I feel confident answering yes. In class last Wednesday students presented their drafts.  Their introductions to their Digital Lab Reports and the DLRs themselves gave us a great deal of insight into how they were understanding (or not understanding) scientific concepts in ways traditional lab reports might never reveal.  This is partially because the DLRs require students to consider their audience and speak to their audience.  This means re-phrasing scientific language to make it accessible.  To do this, students must take in information, analyze it, and reformulate it in their own way.  Furthermore, the accuracy or inaccuracy of the external information and images they brought in as examples gave Professor Gruber insight into how they had remembered and interpreted the concepts he had explicated, as well as what they were considering “real world” connections.  The collaborative aspects of the DLRs means that students have to hash out these ideas and arrive at a shared understanding.  After each draft presentation, groups were asked questions and received feedback from their peers, Professor Gruber, and me.   Through the process of revising their labs, they will have to address the inaccuracies or gaps in their understanding of scientific concepts.  Their next round of presentation drafts will let us know if and how their scientific thinking has changed.

For me, this reveals that communication and technology-intensive methods are particularly beneficial for science courses and have great potential to enhance student learning.

Filed Under: BLSCI, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), CUNY, EdTech, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Science, Teaching, Technology

Publicly Sponsored Hate Speech

May 1, 2013 By 3 Comments

I hadn’t intended to write another post about the virulent hatred of fat, fatness, and fat people that is currently shaping our culture. My previous post on the topic led to some interesting and intense conversation, but there are many other topics to discuss and many other dangerous political trends to analyze. Besides, this is a communications blog.

But when I came across this astonishing campaign image on the subway recently, I realized that it deserves its own post.

"Cut the Junk" NYC Campaign

“Cut the Junk” NYC Campaign

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Art, Culture, Health, Marketing, Media, New York, Politics, Science

Teaching in the “Post-Plagiarism” Era

April 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment

“How do we instill the ethics of citation and attribution, when the real world doesn’t seem to care about such paltry details?”

Christopher’s excellent post on “post-plagiarism” articulated the anxiety produced by the the mixed signals we all receive about originality and appropriation. I recall a class discussion regarding Shakespeare’s frequent borrowing from previously existing sources. This class happened to come shortly after a thorough review of the college’s academic integrity policies. “So, Shakespeare was a plagiarizer?” a student asked. Translation: “Shakespeare has been regarded as a genius of the English language for doing something you just told us was unethical and a punishable offense. What gives?”

Christopher’s increasing disinclination to report student plagiarism reminded me of Rebecca Moore Howard’s November 26, 2001 article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, ”Forget About Policing Plagiarism. Just Teach.”  Howard, a professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University, warns that by obsessing about students who plagiarize “we are replacing the student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police relationship.” This increases anxiety for both professor and students alike and hinders learning.

Howard points out the various types and levels of severity of plagiarism, including whole cloth plagiarism, patchwriting, failure to attribute, and omitting quotation marks. But she emphasizes pedagogical reform including scaffolding assignments, not backloading the course with a single looming paper due at the end of the semester, the problem of grades without comments, and/or comments that focus on the mechanics of grammar rather than student learning goals. Howard ends noting that educational institutions need to be structured to support this level of pedagogical engagement.

Over ten years later, with even larger classrooms, more contingent faculty, and more digitally accessible information, the dilemmas Howard articulates have proliferated.

I have chosen a number of strategies to curb plagiarism, some more effective than others. When I first began teaching dramatic literature, I became a structural zealot and eschewed discussion of broad themes because I was convinced students were just parroting what they had read on Wikipedia or SparkNotes. I gave a lot of quizzes with questions designed to be unanswerable by a cursory review of a plot summary. Those were the most reactionary approaches, coming from what Mark Mullen calls a “pedagogy of suspicion.” 

The perfect desks for pedagogy of suspicion.

The perfect desks for pedagogy of suspicion.

Now that I have been a writing fellow and am teaching speech communication, my (hopefully) more fruitful approaches are to:

1. Scaffold assignments so that the chosen topic for the assignment, article research, outline draft, and final assignment are each due on a different day.

2.Facilitate problem solving workshops in which each student shares a roadblock s/he has encountered in the topic research or design and classmates offer suggestions.

3. Organize peer critique sessions in which students, aided with a template, read, evaluate, and discuss each others’ outlines before they are turned in.

4. Require revision.

5. Use plagiarism detection software as a teaching tool that shows students when they are over-relying on others’ words or when they have forgotten to add quotation marks or to attribute. (More on the ethics and effectiveness of that later.)

It is all a lot of work. Tonight I arrived home from an hour-long subway commute beleaguered by an eleven-pound backpack full of research methods worksheets, uncorrected final outlines stapled to their drafts, and speech rubrics held together in a rainbow of binder clips. Still, I prefer this situation to the anger and desperation of discovering a swath of cut-and-pasted copy.

Filed Under: Academic Integrity, Grading, Pedagogy, Plagiarism, Teaching, Writing Instruction

Grad School Year’s End Blues

April 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Like everyone, I am looking forward to the end of the semester. After the last two weeks packed with teaching, oral presentation rehearsals, meetings–let alone my own writing deadlines and classwork–I’m right there with everyone else hailing the approaching summer. As much as I love the work I do, I know that in a mere month I’ll get the rare privilege to sleep in on a Saturday without anxiety. For those of us who are lucky enough to get to slack a bit in the summer, it’s sometimes all we can use to keep us going. Administrators right on down to students–we’re all singing the same poppy song. It’s about sunshine and sleep and freedom.

Photo ©Bahman Farzad / lotusflowerimages.com

Photo ©Bahman Farzad / lotusflowerimages.com

However, I’ve also been feeling something unique this year as the last weeks of the term arrive: I’m calling it the Grad School Year’s End Blues. You may be familiar with it. The Grad School Year’s End Blues comes sliding in with the deadlines pulsing just in the distance. It floats around as that residual senior-itis brushes off the folks who are actually leaving. It comes (to me at least) along with the swelling acknowledgement that “my summer off” will be a write-a-thon punctuated by expensive conferences and exams.

But it’s not all about disappointment or anxiety, these blues. That’s the chorus, to be sure–the hook. I want to sing one particular verse, one that I’m just learning for the first time this year: the verse about the end of a one-of-a-kind teaching experience.

I tend to surround myself with teachers who love to teach, and I’ve heard them each hum a line of this one in their time: about the honors capstone course they got to teach that once, or the totally blog-based integrated learning environment they’d finally perfected after years of tweaking. The last lyrics always end, “but who knows when I’ll ever get to do that again!”

That’s my situation this year. I ended up getting a repeat gig as a first-year composition instructor for the honors engineering program at City College. Two falls in a row now, I’ve taught honors engineers with a curriculum I adapted from the department’s template. I’ve experimented wildly, and received decent support and encouragement from my supervisors. I gave it a few injections of comp/rhet methodology (process work, freewriting, revision, collaboration) and technology (wikis, blogs, multimodal assignments). The really special thing is that this year I got to teach only these students: the two sections of the honors English 110 course from the fall followed me almost wholesale to the 210 course I’m teaching this spring. For the first time in my teaching career, I got to see how a writer develops over more than 15 weeks. It’s been tremendously instructive.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I feel a hokey kind of pride for how far these particular students have developed. They’ve grown tremendously in their understanding of writing, both as a practice and as a discipline of study. But that’s not the feeling in this song. This is Nina Simone, not Sarah Vaughan. There’s a snarl behind those tears.

The reality is, as an adjunct teacher who studies composition pedagogy, I benefit professionally from the chance to experiment on a wide variety of writing curricula, student demographics, and physical spaces (this year in a computer lab for the first and probably last time). I know that this was probably my only chance to study this kind of pedagogical situation, at least until I’m in a full-time job. The truth is, I got lucky just to get this kind of experience the first time: most people get very little freedom in the courses they teach. And I might get lucky enough to get another go at it, to see if the successes I had here are actually repeatable. But I probably won’t.

Experience working in diverse teaching spaces matters.
Photo by Mike1024 via Wikimedia Commons.

For me, and a lot of pedagogy folks out there I know, access to a free range of courses to teach is like access to lab space. The reality for most of us who adjunct at CUNY is that it’s usually the luck of the draw whether we land in departments that give us access to a variety of teaching opportunities, or those that reserve the more challenging courses for full-time faculty. If we want to push our scholarship as compositionists, to produce innovative work that will lead to publication, or to ensure a wide and impressive teaching portfolio for when we enter the job market, we need access to new and challenging teaching experiences. From my experience in English departments, at least, the keys to that lab space are guarded pretty tightly (tell me in the comments if it’s different elsewhere).

So, I’m sure I’ll enjoy my summer when it gets here. I bet I’ll have a great time at that conference, and I’ll learn Spanish, and I’ll write a ton and still somehow have fun in the sun. But for now, I’m still here reading student papers, trying to enjoy the last good bits of the term, and singing these Grad School Year’s End Blues.

Filed Under: Higher Education, Pedagogy, Scholarship, Teaching, To Ponder, Writing Instruction

Shopping at Whole Foods: Class, Business and Yuppiedom at Baruch College

April 23, 2013 By 2 Comments
IMG_1142

Whole Foods: enter at your own risk.

At the beginning of every semester, students in my speech class interview each other about their life ambitions to collect material for their first mini-speeches of the semester.  And every semester I hear more-or-less the same thing: they want to make a lot of money.  Of course there are anomalies, but money is the dominant goal, at least within what students are willing to share with a room full of strangers.

At the same time, though, I notice a trend of judgment toward certain consumer practices deemed to be evidence of bourgeois privilege.  While I was leading a workshop in a Business Policy course a few weeks ago, a discussion of the business strategies of Whole Foods triggered a set of interesting responses.

A group of students studying the company suggested that Whole Foods sold not only natural foods and nutritional products but also an image of health, purity and affluence. Students were quick to disassociate themselves from the consumer body of Whole Foods shoppers.  Claims of “I don’t shop there” rang out around the room.  A student shared an anecdote about a relative who shops at the dreaded natural food store only for her baby.  Exorbitantly expensive organic bananas received their due share of ridicule.  I kept my dirty little secret to myself: I have been known to walk well out of my way to have lunch at the Whole Foods salad bar.

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Organic bananas for the baby.

I wondered: what does “shopping at Whole Foods” connote in the context of Baruch College?  Is it a useful metaphor for understanding something about the interplay of class aspirations, education and business in this particular academic community?

As readers will know, the CUNY system at large has historically been held to the standard (and has sometimes been seen as falling short) of enabling class mobility for New York City’s working, middle class and immigrant populations.  Dusana’s post back in February asked us to consider why so many students’ Business Policy presentations seem to advocate business strategies “rooted in exploitation and inequalities” when Baruch’s student body represents so many class, ethnic and immigrant groups who have born the brunt of these same inequalities.  At the same time, though, I think my anecdote conveys a strain of Baruch undergraduate culture that pushes back against the idea that success in business fields must go hand in hand with the assumption of lifestyle and consumption habits associated with affluence.

Baruch is an environment in which outer trappings of professionalism are valued.  Students are often required, for example, to dress professionally for class presentations.  For many students this is not an exercise or performance; they are professionals, coming to class after a day at the office, or heading off to an internship for the afternoon.  Of course, these outward signifiers are not neutral in their cultural connotations any more so than is shopping at an expensive organic grocery chain.

If we choose to read “shopping at Whole Foods” as a metaphor for a set of eschewed behaviors within the milieu of Baruch undergraduates, what specifically does it signify?  Perhaps it is a sign of being duped by a marketing coup that self-respecting business students pride themselves in detecting?  In the student’s anecdote, it was, tellingly, the baby only who ate organic products.  Maybe “shopping at Whole Foods” can be read as a sign of being born into privilege, rather than wealth and comfort achieved through education, work, and entrepreneurship.

These anecdotes encouraged me to consider the difference between professionalism and economic success on the one hand, and performance of affluence in culturally specific ways on the other.  Or at least they attuned me to the inevitable particularity of whatever the approved ways of spending one’s wealth are in a given social context.

But I’ll end this here, because I can no longer ignore my craving for organic gluten cubes and $12 local cashew juice.

IMG_1149

Cashew juice: an investment to be taken seriously.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Business, Culture, CUNY, Health, Uncategorized

Just the Entrée, No Garnish Please

April 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

So far working as a Communication Fellow this semester has provided me with a lot of new insights.  As a cultural anthropologist working with accounting students who are about to graduate I think about the best way I can inform their experience as graduating seniors.  Some students are currently working in accounting departments at various financial firms in New York City, while others have jobs in other fields/sectors and will apply to enter their professional fields after graduation.

One day (early in the semester) as I videotaped groups rehearsing their oral presentations, I was left feeling hungry and not quite satisfied.  By hungry I mean that some presentations were lacking substance and I didn’t quite understand what the their focus was because the content outlined and the explanation of said content was insufficient.  Not only did I want more clarity on the subject matter, but I couldn’t comprehend the purpose of the presentation.  I reflected on my experience teaching Cultural Anthropology and Black Studies courses and wondered why do some students insist on serving garnish?  As a self-professed “foodie,” I came up with the analogy of a plate of food to describe some students’ work.  I find providing students with analogies that they can relate to is often the best way to express my feedback, because unless you’re a Breatharian, everybody has to eat.  I often begin with a story about going to a restaurant and depending on the caliber of the restaurant one may receive garnish on one’s plate.  The entrée may consist of a protein, a carbohydrate (in the form of some starch, usually rice or potatoes), and vegetables.  If the chef is feeling creative that day one might get some garnish that consists of ornately carved radish, tomato, carrot, or sprigs of parsley.  Now if one were to consume just the garnish and not eat the protein, starch, or vegetables, one would be very hungry.  I then tell students that usually they serve up a big pile of garnish but no meat, no potatoes.  Meaning, what is at the heart of what they are trying to convey and will their audience be satisfied?

photo by Finn

photo by Finn

Sometimes as an instructor I get a ton of garnish from students who haven’t done the work or more often than not, they have done the work but are lacking confidence.  This lack of confidence prevents them from writing assertively or expressing their ideas in a confident manner.  When I press students further about what is underlying their insecurities, I often get: “Well if I say what I want to say, it isn’t going to sound right.”  What exactly does “sounding right” mean?  Many students feel that if they can’t sound like their professors and write using the same language that is in their course readings, then their views are not valid, and they’re not going to be accepted by their classmates or their professors.  So a paper or assignment that had really “good bones” ends up being just that, “good bones” without the substance to build their work into a body that’s actually saying something.

This semester, the groups that performed well were groups that knew the material but needed minor adjustments in performance strategies.  In those instances, a sprig or two of parsley would give their presentations some personality and much needed lively energy.  In a case where they either don’t know the material (and it’s not for a lack of trying) what are they to do?  Since I’m just learning the basics on IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) and GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) as accounting principles I couldn’t offer them much on content so I told them to fake it, ’til they make it!  Faking it won’t work all the time but speaking with an air of confidence even though one has no clue what s/he is talking about, can work in a pinch, but as the adage goes “you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.”  One group I worked with had very little understanding of a particular accounting principle they were assigned to present.  To make up for this deficit one member said she searched YouTube for tutorials and they helped her.  Now I won’t be sending all of the groups to YouTube but her effort to understand the principle showed me that she wasn’t comfortable giving an oral presentation full of garnish, she wanted the audience to understand.  However in order for that to happen, this student realized that she had to understand and be satisfied with her knowledge too.  As graduating seniors I encouraged them to be proactive in their learning process and ask questions and seek guidance from their professors and other people that might be able to help them.

When speaking to my sister, a librarian,  about the accounting groups and some of the principles, she suggested that I tell the groups to look at some major accounting firms because some of these firms have online presentations and papers.  She also suggested that I encourage them to do research in online periodicals and professional organizations because it’s also a good way for them to begin getting acclimated to engaging the accounting profession as a professional.  I told the groups I work with that I don’t know anything about accounting but leading and consulting on these rehearsals and sitting in the classes, I’m learning a few things.

There are initiatives occurring throughout CUNY that are focused on ensuring students are as proficient as possible in communicating in their intended profession.  During rehearsals I provide students with support by letting them know that it’s okay to trust the body of knowledge they have accrued over the years.  Being able to explain challenging accounting principles to someone outside of the field using language that’s accessible to non-experts is a great start.  Then making the necessary adjustments to present material before an audience of experts demonstrates a command of the material.  It’s providing the audience with an entrée they will be satisfied with after the final product is delivered, and using the garnish to enhance the main elements of the dish/presentation.  While college isn’t an episode of Top Chef, where someone is getting eliminated, these students are graduating and moving onto the next phase of their careers.  Many of them have given dozens of presentations without thinking about the content and delivery of the material and if there are better ways to present the content.

I have found that supporting and encouraging the students while giving them honest and constructive feedback helps them to think about creating a presentation that they are proud of.  When we watch the video of their rehearsal together, I stress that students should think about producing a final product that they would not mind observing if they were audience members, and I ask them: were they successful in achieving the goal of the assignment?  Did they convey the content in a manner that was clear, concise, and understandable to their audience?  Often the responses are mixed, with students focusing on their appearance or the how their voices sound on tape.  I take a moment to emphasize the content-the meat and potatoes portion of the entrée-and ask groups if they were satisfied.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, they say “No.”  However, that “No” becomes a launchpad from which they can assess their content and performance and move forward to improving the final product.  So far, by the time I observe most of the final presentations, students who focused on the content and made minor adjustments in performance skills deliver pretty good presentations.  They deliver something that’s worth listening to and being engaged in as an audience member.  The final presentation is often one that I may not fully understand, but it is still a dish worth having.

Filed Under: Audience, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Oral Communication, Powerpoint and Presentations, Process, Uncategorized
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