This volume focuses on the single most important aspect of the communication discipline: our first-year courses. Nothing else we do as a discipline matters as much or has as broad an impact as our first-year communication courses. The discipline was founded on the importance of the first-year course, and most especially the course in public speaking. The original name of the National Communication Association was the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking, and The Quarterly Journal of Speech was originally The Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking. When Jim O’Neill advocated that teachers of speech break away from the National Council of Teachers of English in 1913, he grounded the argument in large part on the importance of the public speaking course and the need for specialist teachers in speech. The civic mission of communication education was grounded in the powerful role speech plays in communal and political life. The professional mission of communication education was grounded in the centrality of effective expression and coordination in economic affairs. We came into being as the teachers of good and effective speech.
While the discipline has changed much in the intervening century, and the first-year communication course today is not always the public speaking course, it does remain the overwhelming model throughout the United States. Even in cases where first-year course options include professional communication, debate, oral interpretation, or small group communication, they all reflect our most unique contribution as a discipline: the education of all students in effective oral communication. Teaching students to speak, to present themselves in physical presence or in electronic media, is still the most unique and important dimension of our discipline. Across the university and across the country, no other discipline remotely approaches our experience or offerings in the training of voice and body to convince, to move, to persuade, and to inspire.
Without our first-year courses, we have little chance of surviving as a discipline or of meeting our important functions in our society. Whatever we may do in our research or teach in our upper-division and graduate courses, none of it would be sufficient to sustain the discipline of communication studies without our first-year courses. Of course, there are places where there is no first-year communication course or no general education requirement for communication. That condition is sad for the students who do not learn the power and beauty of trained speech, but if it became the norm across the country, the discipline of communication studies would quickly go extinct. Yes, a few departments do not rely upon a general education course or other first-year offerings to sustain themselves, and they may hold out awhile longer than most, but the discipline they depend upon would collapse. The vast majority of places that have a department of communication find their livelihood dependent on the first-year course. At undergraduate institutions the first-year course offers a broad diversity of students an introduction to a major that almost no one declares on their college application. At most graduate institutions, whether they be masters or doctorate, the first-year course is the primary funding mechanism for the assistantships that make graduate education possible. It is also the bread-and-butter that provides a job market for graduates of those programs. In all cases, the course offers a strong position in discussions with administration and a clear and unique identity across campus (even if some would disavow this public face in the name of research). The first-year course is the life-blood of the discipline.
Yet, for all its importance and near omnipresence in our discipline, the first-year communication course receives almost no attention in our journals or our book publications. Unlike many of our sibling disciplines, such as English and Theater, we lack a robust scholarship of teaching and learning. What pedagogy literature we do have rarely focuses specifically on the first-year course. We have very little research to guide us on the important questions of how to teach the course, what kinds of practices are working, what evidence we have that they work, and how we can meet the challenges ahead. One volume cannot remedy this deficit, yet my hope is that the contributions here stoke the fire in others to join the conversation, that you, reader, will take up the work being done by these scholars as well as the few others in our discipline who have been tending our most precious courses.
How we teach our first-year courses is especially deserving of scholarly attention given the complexity of what we teach. That such courses include or sometimes focus on “skills” is not only the reason they matter so much to students and our society, but also exactly why they are so difficult to teach well and require robust research. If all we needed was to provide students a set of theories and concepts, which they would deploy in essays or exams, we would not require a specific pedagogy for speech. If all we did was mimic the courses in introduction to psychology or in appreciating literature, our jobs would be infinitely easier. Instead, our first-year courses are charged with teaching theories and principles put into action, praxis. Making things even more difficult is that the praxis we teach is embodied, requiring the training of not only the mind but the voice and body with a degree of coordination perhaps only found in music or theater. Compounding this complexity and these difficulties is the fact that, unlike writing or even music and theater, most of our first-year students have no prior education in effective speech. If they were taught public speaking, the odds are very good they were taught by someone with no training in how to teach the subject and were given poor advice. The student who arrives to us with as much speech training and experience as she has in writing is exceedingly rare. What we offer is difficult to teach, and we need more scholarship to provide guidance in best practices.
We have intermittent moments in which it looks like our collective attention might finally acknowledge the first-year course, only to see us look away again. Now is not a time when we can afford to turn a blind eye. Changes across the country, inside and outside of higher education, offer us outstanding opportunities to return to our deepest calling as a discipline. If ignored, they also threaten not only the survival of the discipline but also the essential and powerful education we offer to over a million students every year. Our survival as a discipline is important because our students’ education in communication is important and no one else can offer them what we do. Even so, we ought to be doing it better.
The past decade has brought significant changes that require we reinvigorate our first-year course pedagogy. At multiple institutions we see a move to integrate, hybridize, or coordinate the first-year speech course with the course in composition. Some of these experiments are bolder than others, some better thought out than others, and some provide better education in speech than others. I will withhold my opinion on this trend until the epilogue that closes this volume, but one thing is clear: we cannot ignore the increasing tendency of scholars in composition to engage the public speaking class. Part of that new engagement comes from shifts in general education across the country. Pressure within certain professional fields, such as engineering, has both highlighted the need for students to be taught effective speech and severely restricted the number of credit hours available for course outside the major. In addition, general education programs are moving toward a model of competencies or outcomes, which might be taught by a variety of departments and are assessed by the institution at regular intervals.
My own experience as chair of the spoken communication specialty committee at the University of South Carolina and running the system-wide assessment of undergraduate speech competency has convinced me that we face a possible future in which teachers with little to no preparation or aptitude for teaching speech, from disciplines such as History, Philosophy, and Writing Studies, are increasingly given the privilege and responsibility of teaching students their most important oral communication skills. This would be a pitiable scenario for the students and grave for the discipline. Finally, the rise of cheap and widely available video streaming and conferencing technology has offered new venues for teaching speech and a new phase of orality, in which more people are engaging in digital oratory than ever before. Far more YouTube channels boast over a five-hundred thousand subscribers than there were frequent speakers in the assembly of ancient Athens. In many ways, the current trends in media production and consumption make public speaking all the more important, while challenging us to adapt to the norms of new rhetorical situations.
In response to these conditions, this volume offers the work of 10 teacher-scholars of communication, each of whom was asked to write on trends in teaching first-year undergraduate general-education communication courses. I asked authors to consider, in particular, the needs for innovation and scholarship in our first-year general education courses. As a prompt, I referred them to Omar Swartz’s 1995 argument that, as a discipline, communication studies has significantly undertheorized its pedagogy, especially in relation to the “basic” course.Footnote1 Part of the problem, Swartz argued, was a disconnect between work in “theory” and work in “pedagogy”—especially in rhetoric, but also more broadly across the discipline. How much of Swartz’s complaint still rings true today? Where are we seeing innovation, experimentation, or advancement in our first-year course? What are the conditions that facilitate or forestall such innovation and advancement? The resulting proposals were peer-reviewed, and we selected the projects presented here. After authors submitted their initial drafts, each was again subject to peer review and revision. As a result of the work of these committed authors and the diligent peer reviewers, these essays present a uniquely powerful and complex picture of our first-year pedagogy. I was so taken with their work that I was driven to write a manifesto for teaching public speaking, which became the epilogue to this collection.
The first five essays offer paradigmatic analyses of the first-year course. We begin with William Keith’s essay on the ecology of the first-year course. Being a long-time teacher of the course, a past department chair, and coauthor of a successful textbook, he provides a synoptic view of the ecology the course inhabits. He identifies the systems that impact the shape and outcomes of the course, the causes of its stagnation in some areas, its transformation in others, and the broad range of interests that make progress difficult.
Deanna Fassett eschews the term “basic” (a move I think we should all embrace) and argues for a meaningful integration of our first-year courses and our research agendas. Working from the now-familiar literature in critical communication pedagogy and constitutive communication, she critiques the outdated theories and approaches that dominate the textbooks and the narratives that structure our relationship to first-year courses. She makes a compelling case for the power of providing more positive narratives for first-year communication courses and better training for new and future teachers.
Craig Rood follows Fassett in noting the gap between scholarship and education, in his case specifically within rhetoric. While rhetorical education aims to improve civic discourse, Rood writes, a wide gap exists between the two. The remedy, he argues, is for rhetoric scholars to pay more scholarly attention to rhetorical education.
Isa Engleberg then turns our attention to the outcomes we expect our first-year courses to meet. Working from the research of the National Communication Association Core Competencies Task Force, she proposes seven core competencies that can serve as the unifying objectives for all the various first-year communication courses. In doing so, she provides a paradigm for curriculum and assessment while accepting the diversity of courses that emerge at each institution.
Rounding out the section on paradigms for the first-year communication course, Nicholas Zoffel renders a kind of auto-ethnographic argument for critical communication paradigms that gives readers a glimpse into his classroom practices. His own experience and insights provide critical questions for both the disciplinary conversations about first-year pedagogy and the ways we approach our classroom practices. That intersection makes it a useful bridge into the second half of this collection.
The next five essays are organized under the theme of “Innovations in Classroom Practice” and provide specific approaches to teaching first-year communication courses. The first of these is Juliane Mora’s study of social justice pedagogy. Whereas others have done foundational work on critical communication pedagogy and the philosophy of social justice education, Mora offers us the concrete practices of how social justice pedagogy affects the communication classroom. She does so by analyzing the practices of eight tenured professors of communication who self-identify as social justice pedagogues.
Next, Luke LeFebvre explains how team-based learning works as a model for the public speaking course. He provides not only a compelling argument for this approach and a detailed explanation of its implementation but also a number of practical resources to facilitate adopting team-based pedagogy.
Jette Barnholdt Hansen chronicles the emergence of response and feedback techniques in teaching public speaking at the University of Copenhagen. She traces the influence of composition studies and classical rhetorical theory while also providing a usable guide for incorporating feedback and imitation into many of our classes. The approach and model will strike American teachers as unusual and offers much to enhance our teaching.
Teaching first-year communication courses online is one of the most controversial approaches to emerge in recent years, and Susan Ward deftly navigates the issue in her contribution. She advocates for teaching online speech as a new course specifically focused on the challenges and opportunities for digital oratory, that is, speaking in digital contexts. She not only gives us a useful pathway for doing so but also offers specific teaching practices and advice to guide such a course.
Tracy Stephenson Shaffer rounds out this section with her discussion of the oral interpretation and performance class as implemented at Louisiana State University. She begins by tracing its history, influences, changes, and core philosophy, then details the teacher training used, the role of the course in the curriculum, course structure, and content. Her case is especially interesting given the historical role of oral interpretation courses in the discipline, their remaining presence in many departments, and potential to serve important functions in the first-year curriculum.
Finally, to conclude this volume, I offer an epilogue. Moved and inspired by these authors, I set out to sing their praises and take up their cause. What resulted is admittedly more of a monologue than an epilogue, a manifesto for teaching public speaking that argues for a revolution in our first-year courses. Intentionally polemical, it provokes response in the hope that such provocation can produce progress in our scholarship of teaching and learning.
Regardless of our opinions, our research, our teaching experiences, or our positions on different aspects of pedagogy, one thing is consistent across these essays: the need for more scholarly work on the pedagogy of the first-year communication course. Regardless of whether any of their calls for transformation or proposals for specific practices catch hold in future communication education, these authors are contributing to the single most important aspect of the communication discipline and the most important activity of the communication teacher. I applaud them, thank them, and urge you to join the conversation. Take up the cause of the first-year communication course, advance our knowledge and practices of good teaching, and serve the one group of people that every speech teacher impacts: our students.
Notes
1. Omar Swartz, “Interdisciplinarity and Pedagogical Implications of Rhetorical Theory,” Communication Studies 46 (1995): 130–39.