both theory and practice
Oral communication education approaches ideals of a liberal arts learning when it achieves a seamless integration between theory and practice. Such a constituitive interdependence is not necessarily a characteristic of all or even most “R” courses, but is an example of how a reflexive attention to speaking and listening can become more than simply a tool competency.
One way to do this is to help students become aware of how knowledge is constituted by the engagement of conflicting perspectives in a living exchange, how a matter stands (“the truth of the matter”) does not necessarily precede the free exchange of ideas, but emerges out of the exchange.*
Another way to do this is to use free and open dialogue as a means to transform the learning situation, making discursive engagement the engine of curricular discovery and priority. Although not appropriate for many learning situations, it is an exciting avenue of pedagogy that makes the speech of students and teacher in the classroom central to the class mission.**
Another way to do this is to engage one’s own discursive culture itself as a subject for examination, one that includes the language and communication practices of academic, professional, and student life, The ways that discourse operates in various field-dependent relations is itself constituitive of values, norms, and power relations.
Such approaches suggest the extraordinary potential of oral performance, extemporaneous dialogue, and focus on speaking and listening to move beyond ancillary skills to the heart of the educational mission. There is no one-size-fits-all model that can be imposed on the move to a divisional “R” program. But on the other hand, the wholesale tendency to reduce oral competence to merely instrumental knowledge, as tends to happen in the larger state university systems of education, also has to be resisted.
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* This approach has ancient roots in the tradition of the Sophistic dissoi logoi and Roman controversia. In one contemporary intellectual tradition this theory-practice relation became the basis for an entire paradigm of knowledge, one that came to challenge the rationalist epistemologies of modernity. One recent example of this argument for a paradigm shift is the “rhetoric is epistemic” movement inaugurated by Robert Scott. Scott, Robert L. "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic." Central States Speech Journal 18 (1967): 9-16.
**See for instance Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & LIttlefield, 1998.
The Potential of SAC Education
