Last week I attended my first dissertation defense! It was during my residency in my doctoral program in Education. My program is a low residency program of study, meaning that the learners come together four times a year for face-to-face seminars and lectures while the rest of the year they work on their own. So when the cohorts come together it is a non-stop intensive time where everyone is pretty much involved in everyone else’s work, as well as their own. The seminars, discussion groups, and lectures are attended by almost all of the learners as well as faculty and staff. And when one of us is defending it is a must see, one of us actually made it! This particular dissertation defense had six faculty, the dean, several administrators and about 15 doctoral students.
It was truly a public event; I was excited and nervous to see what a particularly brilliant colleague would present, sure that I would feel intimidated on what his 300 page thesis would be like in comparison to my own work. The defense started with opening comments by the chair of the committee and then the doctoral candidate started into his PowerPoint presentation. Within seconds my heart stopped and my skin started to crawl, every slide was a full written page of documentation, paragraph long quotes, long lists of numbers and statistics. The slides were impossible to read and had no visual graphing to help comprehension. And worst of all the presenter read his slides!!!! How was it possible that at this level we were still seeing a nervous and unskilled oral presentation? I pondered this through out the defense. Is the higher education system, from undergraduate to the doctoral level, still producing academics that have immense difficulty in communicating their own work?
I think in general we educators tend to still consider oral competency as a skill rather than a form of reasoning. Oral presentations do have platform skills and techniques but in academia orality is much more about relying on the spoken word rather than the written word to communicate meaning. It does not replace writing but it is much more than simply stating one’s written work. I think speaking publicly does ask an individual a form of logic and knowledge that is different from writing and in some ways more complex.Oral reasoning must give meaning to data within a certain amount of time and space and this is no easy task.
I keep wondering about how the logic and sense-making aspect of speaking can be better integrated into the higher education curriculum rather than the 10-20 minute group presentations that seem to abound throughout American colleges. And whether this would make an impact on academics presenting their work in public. More than a personal quest, I do believe that public speaking and oral communication as art and logic should be a part of higher education all the way up to the dissertation defense and beyond.
Suzanne,
I know exactly what you mean here. I was actually thinking of writing a post about the disconnect between what I teach my BPL students at the Schwartz Institute and what is expected of me and other academics when we give conference papers. The standard conference paper format is just to read from a prepared statement almost word for word, which goes against everything I tell my students to do. I have personally tried hard to integrate moments of informal speaking into my conference presentations, but given the short time span of most of those presentations it’s really scary to go off script. Watching these conference presentations, however, is often very boring for precisely these reasons. It’s sad that many of us in academia, simply do not practice what we preach when it comes to public speaking.
As for integrating other, perhaps less formal, forms of public speaking into the curriculum, that is a great idea. I think this begins with just forcing students to speak on their feet in the classroom and to be required to verbally defend their positions in class discussions. I also sometimes hold informal in-class debates where I force students to take one of two sides, meet as a group and then have several students present a verbal argument for their position. The question of the validity/necessity of regicide in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar provided, I remember, one particularly successful example of this.
Great Post.
James.
Not to mention that some of the doctoral faculty we encounter during our graduate education are known to read verbatim lecture notes, or read from long and cluttered PP slides. I have learned more about oral communication while teaching it to others here at BLSCI, then I have during my doctoral education.
Interesting post, Suzanne! I’ve only been to one dissertation defense, but actually found it to be an excellent example of oral communication in academia, since outside of the prepared remarks that opened it (which were read), the defense allowed the three faculty members to model their remarkably high level of oral competency. At some moments, it was thrilling to see my friend “match” his faculty members, as if it was a ritual designed to allow him to really engage on their level orally as a test for what he had been able to put into words on the page.
As Aga and James already mentioned, I too have been at conferences where I’ve been dismayed by how frequently we deliver exactly what we wouldn’t accept from our students. Whether the blame for that should be placed individually or in the structure of what we’re working with isn’t clear, but it’s so true that we have a ways to go…