why an ‘r’ requirement?
“I didn’t say to myself, “Now I will never see him,” or “Now I will never shake him by the hand,” but, “Now I will never hear him.” The man presented himself as a voice. [. . .] The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words--the fit of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.” --Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
In 1998, the Boyer Commission Report “Reinventing Undergraduate Education” proposed that “an integrated education” should “produce a particular kind of individual, . . . one equipped with a spirit of inquiry and a zest for problem solving; one possessed of the skill in communication that is the hallmark of clear thinking as well as mastery of language; one informed by a rich and diverse experience. It is that kind of individual that will provide the scientific, technological, academic, political, and creative leadership for the next century.” <full text> Three years later, the Boyer Commission did a follow-up study (published in 2003) to see what recommendations had been implemented. The study concluded that institutional initiatives to improve oral skills lagged behind analogous efforts in writing.
In 2003, the Denison general faculty reaffirmed the oral communication requirement in the general education program, and voted to institute an across-the-divisions model for teaching the “R” in more discipline-specific contexts. In doing this, the college affirmed the importance of communication competence for a student’s general education, but also emphasized the value of learning field-dependent communication practices and conventions, idioms of discourse, etc. Both goals are consonant with the sentiments expressed by the Boyer Commission for an integrated education.
In the intervening years, general faculty from a number of departments have stepped forward enthusiastically to teach “R” courses, and a rich diversity of disciplines now regularly offer these courses. The college has shown a real willingness to cultivate this momentum, provide resources for ongoing development, and support the blossoming program. Much work remains to be done before the across-the-disciplines program is self-sustaining, but we have made a good start. An ad hoc study group initiated by Academic Affairs meets yearly (in the spring) to review progress and make recommendations for continued growth and health of the program. <Read latest report>
Informally, conversations have shown us that misunderstandings about oral communication competence are still perpetuated that may hamper its growth through the general education program. Some believe that because class participation is generally a hallmark of Denison pedagogy, the “R” is redundant. There is also still a tendency to associate oral competence with low-level career-training skills such as giving canned speeches and Power Point presentations. Although programs elsewhere may foster this belief by teaching oral competence at this reductive level, Denison has to be committed to recognizing speech as one of the fundamental attributes of the educated person, and one of the most difficult to achieve.
What, then, is oral competence?
Think of what happens when a person presents her or himself to another person and speaks in their own voice, and what the other person understands from this encounter.** There could hardly be a more telling event. What happens in these moments as a result of this exchange bears a great deal of the weight of our judgments, our expectations, our interests, and our achievements. We spend a good deal of our lives preparing for these encounters, reflecting back on them, and always trying to improve ourselves in them. And when we try to improve, what we’re trying to improve is ourselves, probably in the most important and immediate and intimate way anyone can, that is, how we relate to others as a human being. We all know how difficult this is, and how critical. Human community is built around these interactions, even if in a complex mass society a greater portion of our lives are taken over by indirect, anonymous and mechanized procedures. It always returns to this, to the encounter, and our performances in them.
Liberal education originally formed around the effort to help the children of well-off people learn how to perform well in the regular engagements of human beings with one another, since this was the crucial skill in societies where the face-to-face encounters of citizens drove law, government, and culture. Ancient paideia came to understand this training in the broadest sense, as the fundamental education in how to be a good human being. Quintilian’s curriculum, which he called rhetoric, had as its goal the formation of good citizens.* The reason we often return to the ancients on this point is because they seem to have understood better than we that in the very deepest sense “the ‘word’ has a communal meaning and implies a social relation.”*** To focus on speech is not to focus on message delivery, but to focus on what it means to be fully human.
This is the connection a liberal arts teaching institution has to maintain in building a speech program. Its curriculum is not trivial or redundant, since it is the closest we come in explicit curricular intention to focus on the actual conduct of each student as a social being. If we take the enormity of its subject matter seriously, it may be the most challenging and important thing we teach. The ability to be reflective about how our words effect others, how to shape our speech and actions and comportment in view of these effects, and to be committed to the life-long task of improving this most central human competence, is a great gift to our students. Because this performative skill encompasses not only language skill and organization of thought, but deliberative practice, group dynamics, interpersonal relations, and even our identity as discursive beings, the four years here at Denison is a laboratory of experiment, development and progress in shaping this paideia. That we focus one course on a conscious examination of this process is one of the defining functions of our liberal program.
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Notes
*Quintilian believed that a training in speech developed moral consciousness. The word is not only the manifestation of the person to a public world, but the means by which humans develop empathy towards others in running up against the relationship of speech and thought. The speech curriculum also implied an epistemology that has become once again important. The tradition of dissoi logoi, or controversia, promoted the free exchange of ideas on all sides to come to a better understanding of the matter at hand. This fostered both a respect for different points of view and placed a value on dialogue in its own right. As a paideia it was a precursor to the notions of discursive democracy and dialogic practice, the very means by which strains of intellectual culture have challenged the dominance of essentialism and instrumental knowledge. The flip side of the ephemerality of oral communication is its uniqueness, its particularity, its localization, key elements in the challenge to foundationalist epistemologies.
**“My voice is attached to the mass of my own life.” --Maurice Merleau-Ponty
***Hans-Georg Gadamer, “On the Truth of the Word,” in The Specter of Relativism, ed. Lawrence K. Schmidt, Northwestern UP, 1995.
