A part of 4.1 Lightning Talk session

Daveeda Goldberg, Sessional (CUPE 3902, Unit 3)/CLTA, ELL, FAS

Back in the 1970s, Marshall McLuhan argued that TV, film and radio represented a new “electronic culture,” and that this constituted a return to “the Oral,” that is, a return to synchroneity, to village mentality, and, following from those, a return to egalitarian, intimate, and immediate communication.

However, from a more contemporary p.o.v, it might seem that McLuhan was just wrong, and that, instead of turning up the volume on the Oral, digital communication has re-enlivened a Print-like, asynchronous culture of communication that, in fact, constitutes a return to formality, formalism and dis-engagement. Indeed, when the English Language Learners program decided to launch an online mini-course in the spring of 2021, it occurred to us that a course on “Oral Presentations” might be a strange fit for digital learning.

When I planned the course initially, I thought I would try to cover the basic skills and structures of a typical presentation-assignment rubric, week by week. But in January 2021, students had already been learning fully online for almost a year, and I soon understood how little they had been able to connect to their learning as embodied, equal, and individual persons. In fact, my students told me that they had barely moved the muscles of their jaws all year. In response, the course plan went through a quick re-focus.

And that’s how this course on oral presentations ended up using “Oral” methods of teaching, involving social, emotional, and embodied ways of learning — like read out-louds, imagination exercises, and iterative storytelling — to teach both content-based principles about rhetoric, composition and voice, and, at the same time, to help students discover how and why rhetoric and communication are most successful when approached as practices of equality, compassion, and inclusion.