Today's Chronicle has a first-person piece on the voice and teaching. It's a little too late for me to try any of its tips, since all I have is exam day and pancake day (that's right, pancake day), but--but!--I do like how this piece calls attention to teaching as delivery. It's something we all kind of know, right?
Maybe it's because I've been wading through a lot of eighteenth-century material on elocution, or maybe it's because I've been listening to Josh Gunn's repeated calls for reclaiming speech in communication studies, but vocality doesn't seem to get the kind of attention it might well deserve.
It strikes me too that I am not the main audience for this Chronicle piece--or rather I'm more like a member of the choir who doesn't necessarily need this preaching. Two statements help me see that I'm not really part of the audience Lang is all that concerned with. The first is the way he assumes his readers oppose performance and learning:
As much as we might want to resist the notion of teaching as a performance -- thinking that our focus should be on student learning -- it can't be denied that our voices, gestures, and movement in the classroom can help or harm student attentiveness.
Resist!? I have banked the better part of my scholarly career on the relationship between learning and performing and am quite amenable to teaching as performance, as I think are a lot of teachers I know.
And then the partner-opposition that left me scratching my head is this:
It might help to think about this issue as one of communication rather than performance.
Sigh. Rhetoric, to me, is largely a matter of communication-as-performance. Up with performance! Up with speech!*
*And lest you Derrideans--yeah, you!--think I'm privileging speech over writing, I think there's plenty of room for writing-as-performance as well. I'm just diddling with some other, slightly more surprising, binaries this piece introduces, like speech/communication; speech/performance.
Me? I try and contribute to the situation by being "a listless or unskilled speaker whose ideas you admired but found hard to follow," so as to more easily convince everyone else to do better. Of course, I'm still working on the ideas worthy of admiration part, too.
But I have lists! ;-)
cgb
Posted by: collin | 30 April 2007 at 06:29 PM
And lest those Derridians think they have Derrida "correct," I say we should privilege speech over writing, dammit! The key is polyphony and babble, the performances of speaking in tongues!
I'm down with the performance choir: Rhetoricians really should be reading more TPQ!
Posted by: Joshie Juice | 30 April 2007 at 06:30 PM
I try to avoid becoming bored with the hum of my own voice. Speaking of uncanny, Joshie, how about the self-alienation from tne non-recorded sound? Many a day as teacher, I just don't want to hear my own voice anymore. I doubt I am alone in that.
Posted by: Some Guy | 30 April 2007 at 07:08 PM
cgb! funny.
and totally agreed, J.J. In fact, I am going to go read TPQ right now. I'm not even kidding.
Posted by: dhawhee | 30 April 2007 at 09:03 PM
perhaps ironically, the indisseverability of those binaries is especially apparent when they are severed, as they are frequently on my campus with its huge Deaf population. interpreters, when they go from english to ASL must use their whole body and face to communicate all elements of what is being said, and when going ASL to english, they must modulate their voice in order to produce/convey tone. it ain't just content! it's kind of funny to see a really flat speaker get interpreted, b/c one always thinks the interpreter is doing them HUGE favors by performing their words.
Posted by: E! | 01 May 2007 at 02:23 PM
p.s. i'm sure i'll feel stupid when i find out the answer, but what is TPQ?
Posted by: E! | 01 May 2007 at 02:24 PM
no, you shouldn't feel stupid, it's on the newish side: Text and Performance Quarterly, the latest issue of which, incidentally (a propos to your previous comment, which is on the money) features a nice selection of articles working at the nexus of disability/performance studies.
Posted by: dhawhee | 01 May 2007 at 02:46 PM
...I've always found it strange that we live in such a scripto-centric world, and yet some still insist on the "priority" of speech over writing. I realize the argument here is centered around the always thorny issues of presence and originality, but all the same, in so many of our institutions, doesn't writing tend to trump speech for good or ill?
Great post, btw, from someone who teaches course that enrolls 250......
Posted by: Ted Striphas | 02 May 2007 at 10:14 AM