I'll be out of class this week, but I wanted to share a piece of pedagogy from my public speaking class last week.

When thinking about how to incorporate critical pedagogy into my Introduction to Public Speaking class, one of the first issues that comes up is performance. Public Speaking is heavily reliant on performance, and in the model of the class I teach--we can call it the "Practice Model," performance is given an even larger role than usual. Students in my class are required to give six speeches in front of their classmates throughout the semester. One of the ways I try to change the power dynamic of the classroom and give the students more agency is by introducing Service Learning, and asking them to speak about something they perhaps are an expert on and the rest of the class (and me) is not. This could be a narrative speech, an informative speech, or a protest or advocacy speech. Still, though, any speech they give is largely a solo performance and doesn't extend equal power to the entire class, just transfers power away from me for 4-5 minutes.

In an effort to expand the critical nature of the class, this semester I've decided to introduce film into the classroom. Last week we watched Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, an exploration of black masculinity and gender violence in the music industry. After we watched the video (about 1 hour out of a 3-hour seminar), we had a conversation about some of the issues that came up (I sat with them at a desk in a circle). I don't know if it was because I was sitting with them, or the effectiveness of the documentary, but we ended up talking about issues of violence and culture for almost an hour. At the beginning I prompted with a few questions, but soon students were responding to each other, arguing questions of ethics, and perhaps most telling, disagreeing with me publicly (which is something I've had real trouble fostering in the past--usually no student ever disagrees with me, even when I tell them it's okay). The discussion ended up going so well, we ran out of time to do the speech assignment I had planned for them, and had to push that back to next class.

This brings up another topic I've been thinking about recently. It seems to me that, from a teacher's perspective, flexibility is an important part of critical pedagogy. For a teacher like me, who is obsessively structured, this is something I have to be constantly aware of. The willingness on my part to push assignments back, or rearrange the schedule as the conversation goes in a different direction than I might expect, or just go with the flow of discussion, and realize that it's okay that the conversation didn't go quite as I mapped it out, feels like an important step in creating a safe critical classroom.

All the best,

David Tucker