THE PUBLIC SPEAKING PUBLIC: AN ANALYSIS OF A RHETORIC OF PUBLIC SPEAKING PEDAGOGY Matt McGarrity Submitted for the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Communication and Culture Indiana University June 2005 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ______________________________ Patricia Hayes Andrews, Ph.D. Chairperson ______________________________ Rosa A. Eberly, Ph.D. Doctoral Committee ______________________________ Jeffrey C. Isaac, Ph.D. ______________________________ Robert L. Ivie, Ph.D. ______________________________ Robert E. Terrill, Ph.D. September 8, 2004 ii © 2005 Matt McGarrity ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe thanks to the members of my committee who helped me develop and complete this dissertation. In particular, I would like to thank Jeff Isaac who has long modeled for me the best traits of an engaged scholar. I am grateful to Rosa Eberly who encouraged me with her scholarship and her words. Finally, I would have never written nor completed this dissertation without the help of Pat Andrews. Her constant guidance and support were vital to my work. I consider it a distinct privilege to have been her final advisee at Indiana University. I would also like to thank the other Communication and Culture faculty members at Indiana University, particularly Jim Andrews. Though Jim was not a member of my committee he has always proven to be a wonderful role model for good scholarship. Thanks are also due to my friends and colleagues in the Department of Communication and Culture. I would especially like to thank George LaMaster, who sat through many discussions about this dissertation at Kilroy’s. He helped me sort through a number of issue. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support during this long process. My parents and my brother were always willing to listen to me talk about this project or simply vent my frustrations. I would especially like to thank my wife Laura. Were it not for her constant love and support I would never have been able to earn my degree. This work is dedicated to her. iv Matt McGarrity THE PUBLIC SPEAKING PUBLIC: AN ANALYSIS OF A RHETORIC OF PUBLIC SPEAKING PEDAGOGY This dissertation examines how the Communication discipline rhetorically constructs the public speaking course. Following the work of Stephen North, who studied the oral and textual means by which the field of Composition created a shared frame for teaching and discussing the composition class, this dissertation studies how teachers and scholars of Communication create a shared frame for teaching the public speaking course. North calls this shared frame a discipline’s “teaching lore.” In this dissertation, I examine how aspects of public speaking lore operate in textbooks and teaching materials, how lore is critiqued in journals, and how the field might best challenge this public speaking lore. This dissertation examines those aspects of lore appearing in textbooks, teaching materials, syllabi, and interviews with public speaking teachers and textbook writers. This dissertation argues that the lore that appears in such materials minimizes the role that invention plays in a study of rhetoric. This dissertation examines how teachers and scholars of Communication critique public speaking lore in academic journals. It argues that such critiques avoid close analysis of public speaking texts. Instead, these critiques attack lore with straw arguments. v Finally, this dissertation provides some strategies for challenging public speaking lore. It outlines a model for the public speaking class that challenges lore’s weak form of rhetorical invention. This dissertation also calls for changes to disciplinary discourse in order to improve the quality of public speaking lore criticism. Patricia Hayes Andrews, Ph.D. Chairperson ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ vi Table of Contents Chapter 1: Lore and the Public Speaking Public 1 Lore 4 The Public Speaking Public 8 The Circulation of Lore in the Public Speaking Public 16 Lore in Textbooks, Journals, and Talk 23 Studying Lore in the Public Speaking Public 28 Textbooks and IRMs 29 Journal Articles 32 Informal Vernacular Discourse 33 Textbook Authors 35 Teachers of Public Speaking 36 University of Othello 39 Macbeth University 43 Lear University 46 Conclusion 49 Chapter 2: Textbooks and Lore 53 Lore and Invention 54 Experience and Topic Selection 58 The Development of Thesis Statements 65 Lore and the Construction of Audiences 72 The Need for Ethical Constraints 84 Conclusion 87 vii Chapter 3: Critiques of Lore 91 Practitioner Criticism 94 Researcher Criticism 101 Scholarly Criticism 108 Conclusion 119 Chapter 4: Challenging Lore 124 Protopublic Classrooms 125 Agonistic Pluralism 133 The Role of the Teacher 143 Instrumentalism 149 Conclusion: Implementing Agonistic Topical Protopublics 152 Chapter 5: Conclusion--Challenging the Content and Circulation of Critiques of Lore 156 More and Better Critiques of Lore 156 More Critical Venues 160 Conclusion: The Case for Composition 163 Appendix A: Texts in the Public Speaking Public 166 Appendix B: Interview Questions for Public Speaking Textbook Authors 182 Appendix C: Interview Questions for Public Speaking Teachers 186 Appendix D: Human Subjects Committee Approval 190 Appendix E: Explanation of the Sample Public Speaking Syllabus 192 Appendix F: Sample Public Speaking Syllabus 197 Works Cited 205 viii Chapter 1: Lore and the Public Speaking Public Unlike other forms of disciplinary knowledge, the public speaking course receives little critical analysis. Common opinion seems to deny the public speaking course any theoretical or disciplinary validity. When the public speaking course is discussed in disciplinary spaces, it is framed as lacking theory (Leff, “Teaching Public Speaking;” Frobish; Pearson and Nelson), lacking ethics (Hess, “Rethinking Our Approach to the Basic Course;” Hess, “Teaching Ethics;” Schwartzman), and generally lacking quality. However, such criticism does not examine how the presumed model for teaching the public speaking course gained and maintains dominance. Although public speaking classes make up a significant portion of the Communication discipline’s course offerings, this aspect of the discipline receives virtually no significant critical attention Journals and fields of study that proclaim a dedication to communication education often avoid close analysis of public speaking texts and practices. While the sub-field of instructional communication has provided some insights into various aspects of student-teacher communication, instructional communication does not critique or develop pedagogical models for the public speaking course. Jo Sprague argues that instructional communication “has asked a narrow set of questions derived more from the demands of a preferred research methodology than from a mission to generate helpful findings for practitioners and policy makers” (“The Spiral Continues” 341). Public speaking receives some attention in Communication Education, but often the course simply serves as a site for studying communication apprehension or verbal aggressiveness. Apart from the 2002 Ronald Walter Greene article discussed later, over 1 fifteen years have passed since Quarterly Journal of Speech published an article relating to classroom teaching and that article dealt with the need to increase the study of media (Haynes, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Media”). The Basic Communication Course Annual (BCCA) addresses the basic course exclusively (though not necessarily the basic public speaking course) and includes an eclectic mix of teaching ideas, pedagogy, and instructional communication studies. Unfortunately, the BCCA exists more as a specialty publication that is read and cited infrequently by the majority of the discipline. This studied avoidance of the public speaking course was not always the norm. The public speaking course was a motivating factor for a group of public speaking teachers to break away from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in 1914 and establish the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking (NAATPS). Andrew Weaver later named this founding group the “Seventeen Who Made History,” though perhaps the founding itself arrived with a bit less fanfare. In fact, the emerging discipline’s future was notably hazy. As the NAATPS sought to distinguish itself from the NCTE, members argued vigorously in the first editions of Quarterly Journal of Speech (then named The Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking) about what it meant to study and teach public speaking. Pedagogical discussions during this early period enjoyed widespread participation from a variety of scholars. Public speaking was not simply a service course that had little impact on scholarship and research; the course was a key factor in the foundation of the discipline and not something to be ignored. The public willing to participate in discussions of public speaking pedagogy was thus quite active during this foundational period. Unfortunately, 2 the public that discusses and debates the public speaking course today is not nearly as robust. This dissertation seeks to explore some of the strategies by which disciplinary discourse establishes certain social truths