Why You Should Read the Whole Magazine

September 30, 2010 By 3 Comments

One of the few print publications I still read regularly is the New Yorker. The last issue (Oct 4th 2010) carries two, unintentionally related, items: In the ‘Talk of the Town’ section there is a ‘Note to our Readers’ from the Editors celebrating the inauguration of the Apple iPad edition of the magazine. Not the availability of the magazine on the iPad – most of the New Yorker has been available online for nine years, according to the note – but a special edition designed specifically for iPad readers, with ‘extra cartoons, extra photographs, videos, audio of writers and poets reading their work’. The other item is ‘Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted’, a longer article by Malcom Gladwell, in which he argues for the failure of digital social media to replace traditional forms of political and social activism.

Gladwell isn’t a typical Luddite, and his article is not a categorical rejection of the utility of social media. In fact, what Gladwell is trying to determine, is precisely what functions digital social media are best suited for. His conclusion is that ‘Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances’, as opposed to your friends. It is acquaintances, however, not friends, that are ‘our greatest source of new ideas and information’. Digital social media are ideal for developing broad networks of weak ties, but ‘weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism’.

What Gladwell does best in this article is dispel the notion that Facebook and Twitter have radically changed the way social and political activists operate. The student protests in Iran are touted as the most famous example of social-media-based activism, and Gladwell adds a less-publicized example, the so-called ‘Twitter Revolution’ in Moldova, in the spring of 2009. US media, and even political leaders, complimented Twitter and Facebook for their facilitation of these movements: one former national-security adviser cited went as far as suggesting that Twitter should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. This excitement masks the fact that the impact that Twitter had on each of these cases was primarily on the way the events were represented outside Iran and Moldova: ‘Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist”, while in the Iranian case ‘the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West’, with nobody wondering why none of these ‘Iranian’ activists were writing in Farsi. (Ironically, Gladwell’s deconstruction of the ‘Twitter revolution’ myth does not prevent David Denby, in his review of a film about the founder of Facebook in the same issue, from referring to social media as ‘capable of rattling authoritatrian governments).

What both the editors in their note, and Gladwell in his article seem to be failing to realize, is that technology has always been an aspect of communication – the editors even begin with the puzzling assertion  that during ‘the first years of this magazine, technology was only a modest factor in its production’. Surely the magazine (any magazine) is the product of centuries of technological innovation, not limited to the obvious: the printing press, mobile type, photography, writing itself. The editors romanticize a time when their predecessor ‘roamed the Algonquin and pressed his friends, the hotel’s literary habitués, to, well, write something’, just as Gladwell romanticizes the 1960s as a time of ‘high-risk’ activism based on immediate relationships, not remote acquaintances.

Gladwell in particular seems to fear that technology doesn’t only mediate communication, but actually determines its content, its direction, and its efficacy. There doesn’t seem to be much choice, in Gladwell, as to how technology is used: technology is designed for a specific purpose (remote, impersonal, apolitical networking, in this case), and it does only that. Gladwell isn’t necessarily wrong: design matters. The stories with which he documents his argument, however, do not so much show evidence of successful design, as of successful social reproduction: those with greater access to social and symbolic capital are better able to take advantage of the resources of social media. (Gladwell retells a story published in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody about how a ‘Wall Streeter’ was able to recover his stolen friend’s cell-phone from ‘the hands of a teen-ager from Queens’ by essentially mobilizing his social network to collectively stalk the girl with the stolen phone). There’s nothing new, however, in a social institution being used to reproduce social privilege.

Filed Under: Technology

“Why should I take this stupid test anyway?”

September 28, 2010 By 5 Comments

01-29-08
Creative Commons License photo credit: Fort Worth Squatch

As October nears, it is time to start explicitly preparing CUNY students for the dreaded CUNY Proficiency Exam (CPE), offered twice a year and a required, if standardized, rite of passage for all students with 45 or more credits.  At the BLSCI, we present a series of CPE Workshops that aim to walk students through the sometimes-tricky but never-impossible set of instructions mailed to them at the beginning of the semester.

For most people, both professors and students alike, even the thought of a “standardized test” brings up horrible associations: class and cultural bias, indecipherable rubrics, and the Kafka-esque nightmare of filling in tiny bubbles with No. 2 pencils in hopes of pleasing a robot. In leading some of these CPE workshops, I thus often feel the need to overcome this negative energy, or at least to address it in some meaningful way.  The approach I’ve fallen into lately, which is quite uncharacteristic for me, is to become a kind of evangelist for the CPE’s overall value.  I spend some time explaining the very basic skills that the test asks students to demonstrate, and I attempt to convince them that these skills, while perhaps never to be applied in such a “standardized” way again , will nonetheless prove extremely useful to them for the rest of their lives, and are in fact necessary for them to succeed in the types of careers that they are ostensibly seeking.

It is unlikely that our students will be writing five paragraph essays after they get out of college.  However, the basic framework of those essays, in which claims are made and backed with specific evidence, is a technique that extends far beyond college essays, applicable as much in an argument with a friend as in a loan application.  As much as students desperately want the CPE to go away, the fact is they MUST pass the exam to continue at CUNY, and I have found that framing the test as an opportunity to hone an elementary but imperative set of skills helps some students see through the No.2 pencil haze to find some personal value in what can be an admittedly stomach-churning experience.

Filed Under: CUNY

Cheating for Adults

September 24, 2010 By 1 Comment

Earlier this week, at the first Great Works faculty roundtable of the semester, faculty and fellows discussed the overlapping worlds of plagiarism and assignment design.  Toward the end of the session, talk turned to the role classroom conversations about plagiarism play in the larger context of teacher-student power dynamics.  So often plagiarism reduces the complicated acts of composition and grading into a parent-child chase marked by sneakiness, discovery, and punishment.


Sherrie Levine shoots Walker Evans

Do we do our students a disservice by failing to place plagiarism in the larger spectrum of discourses about linguistic re-use? It seems that to really usher them into “adult conversation” would be to move beyond invokation of rule-based compliance and to acknowledge and explore the larger arena of poetic re-use.  The point is not at all to re-brand academic plagiarism as acceptable or as poetry, but rather to open up the dialogue so that students themselves are responsible for naming and analyzing varieties of borrowing and stealing, and become full-fledged participants in the larger contemporary cultural dialogue involving writers and artists such as Kenneth Goldsmith, David Shields, and Sherrie Levine.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Pedagogy, Plagiarism

On Paglia on Gaga

September 23, 2010 By 3 Comments

I’ve been following with some curiosity the groundswell of blogosphere rage  following Camille Paglia’s attempted takedown of Lady Gaga in the Sunday Times. (A few of the many examples here, here, and here.) Each day for the past week or so, every glance at Twitter or my RSS feed yields up another vehement rebuttal, attacking Paglia’s thesis (an admittedly shaky one, centering on the disembodied asexuality of Gaga and her generation) and Paglia herself (comments range from critiques of her archaic interpretations of feminism to pretty vulgar bursts of outright misogyny). Given Gaga’s immense popular appeal, as well as the fact that she’s become a novel cultural “text” to be continually unraveled by and for the academic community (she’s even the subject of a self-described, hagiographically-titled academic journal, Gaga Stigmata), this is unsurprising.

But the more I read, the less interested I became in analyzing Paglia’s argument and its various deconstructions, and the more I began to speculate whether more effective writing on Paglia’s part might have won a few more readers over to her side. Respondents parsed her arguments (fairly accurately, it seems) without critiquing her actual writing. But the writing itself fails to function as the academic work of cultural criticism it’s framed as, structurally and syntactically. It’s rife with generalizations—and dated ones, at that (ie., Gaga is often seen “tottering down the street in some outlandish get-up,” with a “bizarre hairdo assembled by an invisible company of elves,” and a face that’s “creepy” as it mouths “insipid” lyrics). Tucked amid dangling modifiers and abrupt transitions, her generalizations shift in the direction of Gaga’s demographic, a generation of “atrophied” voices forced to “communicate mutely through a stream of atomized, telegraphic text messages.” Of course, this generation comprises Paglia’s students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she teaches media studies—ostensibly without attempting to understand new conventions in communication. I have to wonder, though—does she understand the old ones, either?

Filed Under: Art, Media, Music, Politics

Reggie Watts for Poet Laureate

September 22, 2010 By 2 Comments

So last night, my colleague and friend Amy buzzed me about a free comedy show at Upright Citizens Brigade. She is doing her dissertation research on stand-up comics in New York, so such locales constitute fieldsites for her. There would be other comedians, including Jeffery Joseph relating his experience teaching ‘at-risk youth’ from Riker’s Island, Ron Lynch playing an animatronic comedian of the future, Daniel Kitson on existential loneliness, and surprise heavyweights Louis CK and Jim Gaffigan.

The draw for me, however, was Reggie Watts. The man came out for the final set, when my lungs had already been effectively inverted from hard laughter by the preceding parade of absurdity. Watts burst through the flimsy curtain, his face hidden somewhere between the ‘fro clearly outta contro’ and complementary beard and pot-belly. He looks a bit like Lenny Kravitz if he let himself go, a lot. Only with much more of what the experts call ‘talent,’ no offense to LK or his devoted dozens of followers.

On stage he’s armed with two mics, one of which is plugged into a doo-dad on a stool with little knobs and switches. Mostly his weapon of choice is his voice, which he wields with unpredictable grace. The gizmo is to loop beats and modulate sounds beyond the limits of his larynx, which is expansive as it is. His show is part beat-box concert, with organic renditions of hip-hop- and soul-inspired music, part pastiche theater of impersonations. But not impressions of celebrities or political figures or cultural stereotypes. In rapid-fire, Watts channels the everyday speech patterns and lingo you can put a place but not quite a face to. Then suddenly he’s breaking into song again. It’s a linguistic and musical kaleidoscope that reaches trascendental ground: Watts in some moments seems to turn himself into a pure instrument of sound and vernaculars. I’d say he takes joy in reproducing, like scrambled ethnographic recorder stuck on play, words and beats, if it weren’t for the deadpan delivery that leaves the audience in wonder. I ought to report: while half of the audience giggled in delight at Watt’s virtuosity, the other half stared in bewilderment. I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter were the more intended reaction.

I try to describe this performance, but I honestly don’t know what to make of Reggie Watts. I only sense that an obligation to tell others about him, maybe to warn them maybe to claim that I saw him long before he got famous and sold out or jumped the shark. My first encounter with Watts was this meta-hiphop music video, F*ck Sh*t Stack, where he skewers, in successive verses, rap’s most cherished stereotypes: curse words, the objectification of women, and conspicuous consumption. But satire is not Watts’s modus operandi. It’s too sincere, in a way. (Although musically, he does have his intimate serious side.)

Rather, I direct you towards some of the philosophical and linguistic buffonery, like this clip where Watts opens with an Esperanto-esque gibberish monologue:

or this gig at Google headquarters that seems to go right over the poor egg-head employees:

Or this Max Headroom-esque mix:

In effect, he’s all very -esque. Watts has even faked his own death (and life) as an Exxon ‘maintenance man’ who donates his body to his employer to be turned into fuel (“I, I think I’d like to be a, uh, candle…”)

I suppose I present Watts to the emerging discussion on this site over the relationship between thought and language, content and style. How can language refer to absolutely nothing, yet carry so much meaning? To watch him shape-shift in front of your eyes so jarringly from Queen’s-English professorial cadence into Bed Stuy street slang makes one suddenly aware of the intimate relationship between language as a performed, public activity and cultural identity. It also makes one wonder at how Watts can so effortlessly assume these voices. And finally, there’s the phenomenon of humor at work here: it’s hilarious to speak through the idioms of others, while it’s not funny at all to speak about them, as I have done here.

Filed Under: Fun, Language, Music, Non-Standard English, Style, To Ponder

“Hell’s bells, Trudy!” and other Mad Men lingo

September 21, 2010 By 1 Comment

As a fan of the TV show Mad Men, whose creator Matt Weiner attempts to inject historical authenticity into all aspects of the show (currently dramatizing New York life in 1965), I really enjoyed an online discussion about how much cursing and slang really went into casual speech in that era.  The video is on Bloggingheads.tv and also excerpted on the New York Times website here, and includes Benjamin Zimmer of the Times speaking with John McWhorter of the New Republic.

People like the main character’s ex-wife Betty, and his colleague Pete Campbell, have particularly stiff and proper speech styles that frankly sound somewhat phony today.  Does Pete Campbell’s proper speech style ring true for 1965, in terms of his character’s background and aspirations?  Like Data on Star Trek, Pete doesn’t even use contractions [I mean, he does not], and uses what Zimmer calls “minced oaths,” like hell’s bells and judas priest.

An interesting part of this conversation concerns what evidence the writers might properly use to reconstruct the reality of speech from the ’60s.  Would the letters people wrote in that era be a good measure?  How about popular film?  After deciding that letters would be too different from spoken language, they consider that movie dialogue is an unreliable indicator, too. Social pressures may have pushed screenwriters and actors to make it all sound more proper than everyday speech actually did in those days.

So what spoken language examples could you find then for casual speech from that era, as a point of comparison?  John McWhorter suggests a radio show that recorded people when they did not realize they were being overheard, Candid Microphone, a precursor to Candid Camera.    Having listened to these old recordings, he thinks that, except for some now outdated expressions, ordinary people in those days — “in terms of sloppiness,” and slang, and cursing — sounded just like us.

I was trying to remember how my own parents spoke in those days. My parents were from the deep south and spoke with heavy southern accents, so I’m pretty sure they didn’t sound like the New Yorkers on Mad Men. In fact, cursing was considered so unladylike in the south that I never heard my mother swear at all. It was also bad form for a family man, so my father cleaned up his epithets to things like “Flitter!” Sounds as quaint as hell’s bells in retrospect.

Filed Under: Interpersonal Communication, Language, Media, New York

Afghanistan in American Ads: The Treasures I Found while Moving

September 20, 2010 By 3 Comments

Last month, I moved out of my childhood home of Sheepshead Bay to another section of lovely Brooklyn. In the process of moving, I found these beautiful vintage ads. I am not sure how I got these — some were eBay discoveries and others were things my father had collected. Framed and set in my living room, they had become so ordinary that I had forgotten my ambitious goals to write about these and weave them into my dissertation. Sharing them here is a great opportunity to chat about my favorite pieces.


The Great Game is not everyone’s cup of tea, but Arbuckles Coffee Co. in NYC printed these limited edition cards in 1889 that came with their teas. Afghanistan made up card No. 100 and depicted The Great Game. The round image, although seems like an Arab outfit, may be Shah Shujah, the king that wanted to reclaim his throne in Afghanistan (the one the British were sponsoring). It seems to be the entrance of the British into Afghanistan via The Khyber Pass.

I can’t imagine cigarettes coming with anything other than skull&bone images or warnings of cancer — but back in the early 20th c. they came with fun cards.

This one, part of a series of Great Battles by Wills Cigarette Company, depicts the Retreat of Cabul. The sole survivor of the British attack into Afghanistan returns to the British India.

In 1958, Ford went around the world to prove itself to American drivers. Here a Ford car drives through the unpaved streets of Herat (it began somewhere in Greece and traveled through Turkey, to Iran, to Afghanistan). The contrast is clear. If any car can make it in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan, well it’s a car you can trust.

The Girls Scout is not just an American thing, you know. Afghanistan had their own girls scout. Perhaps it was influenced by the presence of the American Peace Corps but these Afghan stamps are my favorite. They are dedicated to Afghan girls scouts called: Sarandoy (applies to either gender)

There is a lot more… but I’ll save that for my ahem… brilliant… to be written… soon to maybe appear… writer’s block resistant essay on all of my American-Afghanistan postcards/stamps/money/ads… (fingers crossed, two ear tugs and open-palm prayer hands… inshallah)

Filed Under: Art, Asides, Language

The Risks & Rewards of Whorf-Mongering

September 16, 2010 By 1 Comment

The recent August 26th issue of the New York Times Magazine has an article entitled “We Are What We Speak,” by Guy Deutscher.  The article is excerpted and adapted from Deutscher’s forthcoming book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.  Curiously, the online version of the article bears a different title: “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?”

This trio of titles triangulates some ideas that are of obvious interest to those of us who work with “multilingual learners” (the somewhat ambiguous but preferred term, I believe, for students who don’t only speak English).  The CUNY adjunct/Writing Fellow and also the dilettante linguist/philosopher in me were intrigued.

Deutscher revisits the idea that any given language constitutes its own “structure of reality,” a notion that may ring a little stodgy or problematic to our ears.  On the other hand, I imagine the question asked in that revised title might strike us—especially those who, unlike me, know two or more languages—as so obvious as to not pose much of a real question: Well, yeah, of course my language(s) bear(s) on my thinking.

Deutscher’s article is persuasive, entertaining, and authoritative enough—like a good docent in a gallery—though it also distorts and overlooks a few things.  The book, I’m sure, is more thorough; I may or may not buy it.

Here, to follow, is 1) a summary and gentle critique of the piece, and 2) a few thoughts the article stirred up regarding teaching communication arts to “MLLs” and also to “IMESs” (my own group, “Impoverished Monolingual English Speakers”).

1.

My rather unfair, super-compressed summary of what Deutscher says runs like this: Pseudo-linguist Benjamin Whorf captured everyone’s attention in 1940 and beyond with his zany, dogmatic thesis that a given language traps you, terribly, within a delimited group of concepts and restricts you from knowing any “outside” concepts.  This happened primarily because Whorf sensationalized the case of the rather exceptional language of the Hopi people, with whom he actually had no first-hand experience.  At first, everyone bought Whorf’s rubbish; later, everyone came to their senses and said, “This stuff is unfounded rubbish!” Later still, some more reputable researchers and linguists—like Roman Jakobson—argued and proved that, well, yes, a given language does “shape” the way its speakers think about the world because it “obliges” them to use certain conventions.  Now, witness several examples of how this works, the first group showing comparatively how the assignment of gender to nouns create varied associations and social obligations in different languages, the second group exhibiting a small showcase of sensational, Whorf-like (!) accounts of far-flung tribes with entertainingly unfamiliar language habits.  So in conclusion, we now know—but no thanks to that restriction-monger Whorf—that different languages do influence experience and perception in different ways.

As I hope my tone indicates, Deutscher’s straw-man thing with Whorf seemed a bit overdone to me, maybe even specious.  Here’s a ransom-note-style collage of Deutscher’s characterization of Whorf and his ideas:

His stirring prose seduced a whole generation…our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think…languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality…Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike…he assumed that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts…a language forbids its speakers to think certain things… (All italics mine, of course.)

Since I’m no linguist or Whorf expert, and since Deutscher never actually cites him, I reached for the nearest book on my shelf likely to reference Whorf and found a paragraph-sized excerpt.  In it, Whorf argues that the grammar of each language “is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity.”  Whorf then cites the necessity of mentally organizing the “kaleidoscopic flux of impressions,” which happens largely according to whatever linguistic system or systems have sway in our minds, and he also speaks of the tacit “agreement” of terms and codes inherent to any particular language.  Although such agreement is itself “implicit and unstated,” Whorf posits—exactly as Deutscher, via Jakobson, does!—that “its terms are absolutely obligatory: we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees” (qtd. in Max Black, The Labyrinth of Language 91-92).

In other words, Whorf himself articulates in advance the supposed Jakobsonian correction to his own ideas: that specific languages shape thought because they “oblige” the speaker/writer to abide by certain patterns and conventions.  At least in the passage I read, instead of sounding idiotic, Whorf just sounds a lot like Deutscher, whose allegedly “entirely different” argument is encapsulated in these two excerpts:

[W]hen we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience…(1)

When language routinely obliges your to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. (3)

“C’mon, Deutscher, for rhetoric’s sake,” I plead, “do a little more justice to what you’re beating up on and claiming to supersede.”  Clearly there are problems in how Whorf’s ideas were spelled out and interpreted, but the merest bit of research makes it just as clear that he’s not quite the “prison-house of language” fiend Deutscher casts him as.

2.

Moving out of the above ill-tempered griping (I repent of it) and into a more sanguine and WAC-related mode, here are my distilled thoughts on the instructional significance of mother-tongue and language-shaping matters.  Given that so many college students move between languages, it is certainly vital that those students and their professors grasp the idea that different languages have differing structures, modes, inflections, rhetorics, and even epistemological lenses.  Deutscher’s article (and book, I’m sure) is a salutary reminder of that very real heterogeneity.

Yet I’ve recently become wary of the potentially inuring effects of overemphasizing reductive notions of what a given language is and how languages differ from each other.  It seems more fruitful—or at least fruitful as a complementary measure—for us to consider and to convey cogently the sheer net power language has, at the level of every person, to build and shape one’s engagement with the world in continually developing ways.   According to this frame of the person, rather than that of the mother-tongue, that original question about how “your language” shapes the way you think takes on a new meaning.  Whether Student X is fluent in four languages or only in English, the more fully she attends to and cultivates (that is, practices) linguistic habits—through reading, listening, speaking, looking, and writing—the more she will amplify her own ability to negotiate the world through words.  “Her language(s),” which is to say her experience itself (a Wittgensteinian lebensform), will be augmented through accretion and ripened through nuance.

If English or Spanish or Chinese obliges me to think in certain ways—obligation being a form of constraint, after all—it also supplies me with an almost infinitely malleable body of instruments and materials for use.  Thus the only thing that truly threatens to constrain lively and effective communication, in one’s mother-tongue or in a second or third language, is an impoverished or habitually inept sense of this plastic, evolving superabundance intrinsic to language itself.

Filed Under: Language

A Lesson from the Stump: The Oversell

September 15, 2010 By 1 Comment

As the midterm election approaches, I’ve been wondering if campaign speeches can teach our students anything about effective oral communication. I’ve been searching for examples to show students of that elusive, indefinable quality: interestingness.

In ACC 4100, Baruch College’s communication-intensive capstone accounting course, students are sometimes faced with a great challenge: to deliver presentations about relatively dull topics in exciting, engaging ways. When students would rehearse their presentations for me last semester, I would often chide them, “You sound like you’re reading the phone book. I haven’t been this bored since the last time I accidentally watched a Kevin Costner movie.” Just kidding—most of my students are too young to know either Kevin Costner or phone books. I would, however, ask them, “What do you think you can do to catch and hold your audience’s attention?”

More often than not, they’d answer, “Nothing. The assignment was to describe the differences between two sets of accounting standards. It’s just inherently boring.”

Of course, I would beg to differ, and we’d discuss and practice techniques for engaging audiences: real-life examples, connections to current events, relevant hand gestures, sincere eye contact, modulating tone of voice. I’d conclude, “You have to sell the topic. If you sound bored, your audience will be bored. But if you speak with enthusiasm and conviction, you can make the audience enjoy any topic.”

I imagine that Phil Davidson, GOP primary candidate for county treasurer of Stark County, Ohio and recent viral video superstar, heard a similar pep talk when he was studying for the “Masters degree in Communication” that he so ironically mentions in his over-the-top stump speech. Unfortunately, in his retreat from “monotone,” he sprinted straight past “engaging” and into “loony.” This video is a cautionary tale: if you oversell the enthusiasm and conviction, your speech could start to resemble a WWF pro wrestler routine.

Filed Under: Oral Communication

Deliberative democracy and communication studies

September 13, 2010 By 2 Comments

The Journal of Public Deliberation (which posts of all its articles online for free) recently posted a special issue on higher education. An article on communication as a discipline in U.S. colleges, “Communication studies and Deliberative Democracy: Current Contributions and Future Possibilities,” by Martín Carcasson, Laura W. Black, and Elizabeth S. Sink, makes an argument common to many other authors in this issue, and one that is probably an inherent belief with scholars of the concept of deliberative democracy:

“It is clear that one of the major barriers to a more deliberative democracy is the lack of quality interaction, and thus understanding and mutual respect across perspectives” (2010: 13).

These authors focus their analysis on communication studies, as well as on other classes such as rhetoric, group communication, and interpersonal communication.

“Perhaps most emblematic of the connection between communication education and democracy are the public speaking courses required for thousands of students each semester. This course has an inherent to skills relevant to democracy, as students are typically asked to research public issues and persuade their fellow student-citizens of particular points of view” (7).

However, the authors remark, “unfortunately” these classes often focus more on “individual achievement, needs of marketplace, and professional presentation skills.”

They see these skills as suitable to an “adversarial” kind of democracy, rather than a deliberative one. I think adversarial democracy more aptly describes what we’ve got, actually. But the question of which values, what system of beliefs, undergirds the way we teach communication is one I was really happy to see grappled with, out in the (relative) open of a free, scholarly journal.

If there are communicative values behind what we teach when we teach Com 1010, they don’t seem to be foregrounded, made available for critique. When I was assigned two sections of this class as a new grad student, I partly compensated for my lack of teaching experience by approaching the class as if it was a thesis project. I grabbed on to a few oblique references to democracy and public speaking in The Art of Public Speaking textbook—democratic values like respect and inclusion. This ended up taking over my own research interest, and really influencing the way I taught the class.

I saw these norms in the way not only public speaking but also composition is taught: including and respecting the other side, representing others’ arguments with compassion as well as accuracy, crediting others’ work. But I wonder if this method of communicating will be fairly unique to college. As my students leave college and advance through adulthood, I imagine them sifting themselves into communities of cultural and political taste, and looking over to the other side from across a wider divide, often apoplectic. That’s been my experience. Political conversations in my observation mostly seem about heightening our own beliefs, more thoroughly dismissing the opposition. Where outside of class do we practice this method of empathy, reciprocity, and inquiry with those whose beliefs most distinctly contrast with our own?

“Deliberative scholars and practitioners” according to the article, “strive to create spaces where multiple voices can not only be heard, but truly listened to, even in communities that have marked power imbalances.”

“Yet despite the numerous links between the fields and exemplary democratic practice, teaching and scholarship too often remains indirect, dispersed, secondary, rather than at the forefront of disciplinary concerns” (1).

The article is a call for what Charles Taylor described as “liberalism as a fighting creed,” rather than a procedural fallback, and rather than a negative freedom to be left alone, to do your own thing. I really like this article, it’s comprehensive and clear, with a nice overview of communication studies in its various versions in higher ed. But I think rather than put this belief system at the forefront of concerns, it should also be discussed, made available for critique, rather than tucked into a textbook like The Art of Public Speaking, an assumed, unexamined, scattered belief system.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
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