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What
do you see as the role of humor in teaching oral presentation
skills?
I try to use
humor to engage students and myself. Humor in student presentations
can be a way for them to acknowledge the face-to-face nature of
the interaction. Humor can be a way to show your awareness of
audience and occasion.
But perhaps
even more than humor I talk about surprise and delight. These
qualities need to be present in spoken as well as written work.
It’s the milieu that’s created—and it’s
really dynamic and infectious when live and among lots of people--when
the writer/speaker reaches into a tone or rhetorical mode which
audiences quickly identify and see the point of—and appreciate
the originality of the intent. It’s beyond, oh, here’s
some information this person’s saying and it’s kind
of interesting but mostly I’m listening to be polite.
I also tell
my students to smile as they talk. It will help them and their
audience. I urge them to remember that the presentation can be
an enjoyable moment if they don’t focus just on getting
through without making an ass of themselves. That’s usually
what occludes our brains. It does mine, anyway.
So,
what do you see as the big, outstanding challenges in teaching
PWR2?
Do you have
a couple of hours? No, I think one very important challenge—particularly
for first-time teachers is finding adequate time for the research.
I’ve placed a series of relatively strict parameters or
limits on student research projects. I think of these as “narrowing
gates” that can focus student work. The feedback has been
very good from the students on them; they often say they worry
at first they’ll get bored by sticking to one project but
end up seeing how immense and overwhelming that project can be
and are very glad they started off narrow.
The sort of teaching that works for PWR 2 (and is importantly
different from teaching PWR 1) is still very much a work in progress.
Additionally, I’m still finding more and more ways to bring
my training in theatre and drama into it. One thing I’d
like to continue to try is more improvisation on my part. I’ve
always done this assess-as-you-go kind of thing during each class
and almost always assign writing prompts based specifically what
we got into that class, but even more to it—and I got this
from doing a six person playwriting seminar last year—I’m
willing to stop an activity on a dime and have them do something
right then and there I’ve just come up with that suddenly
struck me as getting right to the point of the exercise. The big
issue of course is trust—trusting myself to go in blind
and see what happens. It doesn’t always work, but more often
than not it does. And I guess the students get to see you living
by your “test” credo—and not just telling them
to do it.
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