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| Doree
Allen and Jennifer Hennings, from Oral Comm, run a lecturer
through a practice presentation during the PWR 2 Summer Institute
while lecturer Bump Halbritter prepares to go next. See more
photos of Oral Comm at the Summer Institute here. |
Are your students
silenced by speech fright? Puzzled by Powerpoint? Overwhelmed
by oral presentations? Thanks to the collaborative efforts
of PWR and the Oral Communication Program, help is on the way.
After a successful pairing of PWR 2 instructors with Oral Communication
Tutors (OCTs) in a series of pilot classes in Spring 2003, the
Oral Communication Program now matches PWR 2 students and instructors
with teams of OCTs for an entire quarter.
Whether they are coaching
John Tinker’s students on their high-stakes presentations
to museum curators or offering performance tips to student actors
in Kevin DiPirro’s class, OCTs provide support in all aspects
of oral communication. Class-specific pairings allow OCTs to develop
a keen understanding of an instructor’s goals and expectations,
and to tailor their consultations and advice accordingly.
Ratul Narain, an OCT
and former student from Carolyn Ross’ “Community Rhetorics”
pilot class, says, “It’s cool because you don’t
just tutor them for their presentations. Since you’ve been
there, you’re a little bit older, and you know the workload,
you can tutor them on how to manage the writing as well as the
speaking parts of PWR 2. You can tell them to try writing the
outline for a presentation right after writing the paper, and
help them with the broader aspects of [the class].”
PWR students also
benefit from workshops given by Oral Communication Program Director
Doree Allen and Program Lecturers John Bilderbeck, Jennifer Hennings,
and Thomas Freeland. These workshops not only address the tenets
of effective oral presentation, but also answer such burning questions
as: “How do I distill weeks of research into a five-minute
presentation?”, “How can I engage and sustain an audience’s
attention?”, and of course, “How do I, like, get rid
of all my, you know, filler words?”
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