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Do
you even have students resist these sorts of exercises?
If you own
the thing you’re asking them to do, they will usually just
do it, blindly. So far I haven’t had real resistance.
For
you, what does a successful student presentation look like?
The first level of accomplishment is to be able to deliver a clear,
relatively formal talk without being petrified; to not have huge
things go wrong without being able to deal with them. The next
level is to amp that up a little – the things that I’m
working on have a lot to do with performance in that respect.
Beyond not getting in your own way or in the way of your material,
how do you actively create spaces for yourself to be heard? How
do you generate enthusiasm and excitement for your talk? How do
you use your body, your voice, your apparatus to dramatize what
you’re talking about and connect with the audience in ways
that make people say, “That’s a really good public
speaker,” rather than “They did a fine job”?
How
do you talk to your students about this new sort of persona that
you’d like them to try out?
Early on I
have them assess the oral performance of a professor or a lecturer
and identify who they are as a speaker. I have them give me terms:
engaging, ironic, big cheese speaker, skeptical, funny. I try
to get them to characterize the speaker in several words.
Then I have
them describe who they themselves speak as, in three words. I
then ask them who they would like to speak as, if they could choose
another sort of persona. These final three terms help them set
some goals for the course. This gives them some new language to
think about what they mean by “themselves.”
Then there’s
a wholly different tack. I try to show students how they can use
their voice to express meaning and emotion. I’ll have them
read something they’ve written and then direct them. I’ll
stop them and ask them what emotions they’re trying to convey
there. How could you bring that to the reading? Usually these
are very slight adjustments, but they can have a big effect.
So, sometimes
I try to get them to think consciously about their persona and
other times I try to get them to forget it and think about their
material instead.
How
do you deal with student anxiety regarding performance? In particular,
how do you talk to the student who says to you that she’s
not a performer and is uncomfortable trying to become one?
I use the
instrument – the Aeolian lyre – metaphor. I talk about
how it’s simply about the material and content passing through
you. If you’re a good instrument you pass it through clearly
and cleanly. And if you’re a really good instrument, you
add interesting things to engage your audience. Emphasizing content
delivery in this way can really help minimize anxieties.
I also talk
about reconceiving of performance; so that it’s not this
stressful kind of “test” moment, but instead, it is
a flexible, ongoing series of moments in time to try things out.
I guess it’s a “test” in that way, — a
test case, not an exam — the way Tom Freeland talks about
with the German term for rehearsal, “die probe.”
(continued...)
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