Contemporary Public Address

Contemporary Public Address is an undergraduate honors course that I taught at LSU. As an honors course, it is fairly work-intensive and the enrollment is usually small. I structured the course assignments based on individual grading contracts and so blank contracts and descriptions of the assignments are given on the course page. Additionally, most of the course reading material is on line, so the course page includes links to contemporary speeches that I used and several readings about public address, rhetoric, and critical analysis. Most of the readings come from an old textbook by Donald K. Smith entitled “Man Speaking: A Rhetoric of Public Speech.” I believe this textbook is how out of print. Of course, I don’t like its title — man speaking — though to expect otherwise would be to take it out of its historical context. In addition, the title provides a teachable moment regarding the history of women in public address. Overall, I think this textbook does an excellent job of teaching students how to analyze elements of a speech. The other readings come from a variety of older rhetoric textbooks. Although newer textbooks do a better job of getting some of the more complex issues of rhetoric today, I’ve found the excerpts I’ve selected are quite teachable, particularly for students who are not communication majors. In addition, I have not taught this course since I left LSU, which was prior to Obama’s election.

Cyberculture

This is an undergraduate course that I first taught at Arizona State University Department of Communication (under the guise of a popular culture class) and Louisiana State University Department of Communication Studies. The impetus for the course was “The Matrix.” The class is really misnamed since its focus was more on technoculture, which I think is broader than cyberculture. I structured the assignments around experiential labs. The course readings all came from the internet.  My favorite reading, “Cyborgs on Campus,” is no longer available. It was a delightful hypertext article that equated Jesus to a faxed cat. Initially the course website’s look was based on graphics from “The Matrix,” and I was proud of its design. It was sharp a few years ago, but now it looks dated and clunky by today’s standards, so I’ve taken it down. Since I last taught the course, the internet has changed dramatically into the web 2.0 (whatever that is..), and cybercultural studies has exploded. Although many of the course readings are now dated (and some are no longer available), I’ve kept the basic information about the class on this page because I love the assignments, and because I think the issues are still relevant, though our understanding of them has become more sophisticated.

Introduction to Graduate Studies in Communication

I taught this graduate class taught at LSU. The course covers the basic skills and resources needed for a student to be successful in graduate school. The course website has great resources for beginning graduate students — how to read for classes, how to present papers and handle questions — as well as assignments details for all of the class assignments and readings. My approach was to develop the idea of learning how to read paradigms and disciplines, to teach students how to look for and tease out disciplinary arguments. After learning about paradigms and disciplines in the abstract, we then moved on to communication studies, followed by a closer look at the various sub-disciplines in the field. In addition, we covered some basic professionalization issues. The course page also has links to useful resources.