New Speaking Center Teaches Skills for Public Presentations
Graham Honeycutt '06, a Speaking Center tutor, described its services to students in a history class.
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11/1/2005
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
“Yes, what you've always heard is true,” Kathie Turner asserted. “Surveys consistently show that people really do fear public speaking more than death.”
Turner, a professor of communication studies and director of Davidson College's new Speaking Center, continued with a chuckle. “The only way I can figure it is that if you die, you don't have to face those people any more. But if you do a lousy job giving a talk, the people who heard you are still around!”
Davidson opened its Speaking Center in late September to help students overcome their deathly fear by offering guidance through the conception, preparation, and delivery of oral presentations. Turner recruited and trained five students from her “Principles of Oral Communication” class last year as tutors to staff the center five nights per week. They are Oliver Foley ' 06, Graham Honeycutt ' 06, David Kerns ' 08, Garrett Monda ' 06, and Tia Washington ' 07.
The Speaking Center is co-located with the college's long-standing Writing Center in the basement of Chambers Building, and operates with a similar pedagogy. Those seeking help are received by tutors on a first-come, first-served basis. Tutors will assist clients at any point of the process of an oral presentation, from selecting a topic to delivering the speech, but will not do the work for them. Instead, tutors review general principles of effective speaking, and pose questions that guide students to find their own answers.
Tutor Graham Honeycutt explained that students can become better speakers by adhering to the “five rhetorical canons.” They are: 1) Invention: How can you develop and support your talk? 2) Disposition: How is the talk arranged? It can be chronologically, or in sequence of importance, but there should be a clear arrangement of the material. 3) Style: Is the talk intended to be informative, or persuasive, or another genre? 4) Memory: Don't read the speech. Be familiar enough with the material to conduct the talk in conversational manner with nothing more than note card tips for prompts. 5) Delivery: For example, use gestures and retain eye contact to connect with listeners.
Indeed, the Speaking Center summarizes its services succinctly in one of its posters on campus, which states simply, “We have ways to make you talk!”
Speaking Center tutors created several clever posters advertising its services.
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Once students have prepared a draft of a presentation, the Speaking Center offers them an opportunity to practice it. The center has two private rooms in which tutors can videotape presentations for critique. Students who bring along a DVD can take home a copy for further review. “I think our work is most helpful in the delivery phase,” said Oliver Foley, another tutor. “On tape, people can generally see their strengths and weaknesses pretty quickly.”
Tutors also have access to a regular classroom where clients can practice talks that include projection of PowerPoint shows or other material drawn from campus servers or the Internet.
Foley said students receive assignments for oral presentations in many different classes. “I had to make a presentation in a statistics class about a regression analysis I did on the Yankees' winning percentage,” he said. “I'm a history major, and this semester I have to give a major twenty-minute presentation of the media's role in the Vietnam War.”
Turner and the tutors discuss their work primarily via the interactive discussion feature of the college's Blackboard program, as well as periodic meetings over pizza. Clients also guide the work by completing evaluation sheets after their sessions.
Turner came to Davidson last academic year, charged with developing a communication studies program. She is developing a specific communication studies curriculum of courses, and seeking to raise the quality of oral communication skill across campus in general. The curriculum now includes the introductory principles of oral communication course, and a second course in “Introduction to Communication Studies.”
She envisioned a Speaking Center early on in her work, prompted by two primary concerns -- a growing recognition that students have very little practice with public speaking and rhetoric before college, and the importance of oral communication in creating and transmitting knowledge.
Turner said, “It used to be that great orators were the heroes of the day. But our culture has shifted from a conversational emphasis to an electronic one. Students still receive a lot of training on how to write, but elocution is no longer part of the public school curriculum.”
The Speaking Center offers its services not only to students with specific academic assignments, but also those who want to speak effectively in extracurricular situations. From that point of view, the center's goals dovetail closely with the college's mission, Turner explained. “Davidson strives to develop in students humane instincts and disciplined minds for lives of leadership and service,” she said. “Well, you can't lead or be a good servant if you can't speak.”
Another Speaking Center poster.
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Honeycutt agreed, explaining that he took Turner's introductory class to further his anticipated career in international sales. Foley added simply, “I've always thought the ability to speak well in public is one of the most useful skills a person can have.”
To help develop campus interest in the center, Turner has polled faculty members about oral presentation assignments in their classes, and is meeting with many to suggest ways they might integrate oral presentations into their curricula. The tutors are also giving short presentations about the Speaking Center in many classes, and Turner has been invited to critique oral presentations in some others. Last spring she helped students in a physics class develop presentations about measuring the speed of light. This semester she critiqued student presentations in a seminar about forensic serology.
She hopes faculty and students will come to view public speaking as a skill as valuable as good writing, and one that needs to be as carefully and regularly nurtured. “We aren't just polishing talks at the end, we want to help people learn the whole process,” she said. “While many people will never give a formal presentation in their adult lives, we can teach them concepts they will frequently use in meetings and social gatherings.”
With training and experience, she noted, people can replace public speaking at the top of their “fear” list with something more truly threatening. But there's no guarantee, even for an experienced speaker like Turner, that making a speech won't also arouse a tiny bit of anxiety.
“Yes, even I get nervous before going on stage,” she said. “An important part of our role is assuring people that nerves are normal. But I love telling people what Edward R. Murrow said about that. He said, 'It's natural to have butterflies, but what you want is to get them to fly in formation!'”
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,700 students. Since its founding by Presbyterians in 1837, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine. Davidson has recently completed “Let Learning Be Cherished,” a $250 million campaign in support of student financial assistance, academic resources, and community life.
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