Why Focus on Community Needs?

One of the purposes of this speech assignment (and the next one) is to help prepare you to be kind of Malone graduate (and the kind of person) who is prepared to "serve the church, community & world."

Some classical education treated the study of rhetoric (or persuasion) as the final stage in preparing a student -- after they had grown in wisdom, it would be essential that they be schooled in entering the "public sphere" in a way that would be effective and helpful. Other classical educators included rhetorical (or persuasive) training right from the beginning and all the way through their education. They believed that if students understood how much they owed the audiences they spoke to, they would be motivated to learn well AND eventually affect the community in important ways. Regardless of whether they thought that public speaking was "frosting on the cake" or "the recipe itself" -- they agreed that a concern for the good of the community was essential to one's education and implicit within persuasive training.

We're up to the same thing in this class. I want you to start to take responsibility for the community that surrounds you. The ability to persuade people carries with it the great burden of being responsible for the welfare of those you persuade.

Through these two speeches, I want you to develop a deeper understanding of some of the problems in the community surrounding you. I also want you to start to think about the various solutions that might respond to those problems. One of the challenges in speaking about community problems is that there are so MANY things you could talk about that choosing just the right things is hard work. Another challenge? In a group the size of our class (or any other group) people disagree about causes and ideals. Talking about the problem in a way that is inclusive and invitational becomes a difficult logistical task.

No matter what kind of public communication you do later on though, through your neighborhood, your school district, your local government, in media, through your job, writing on the internet -- one of the important (yet often invisible) responsiblities that will weight that communication -- is your responsibility for your community. I hope these assignments start to help you think about that responsibility and that relationship in concrete and ultimately helpful ways.

Community Involvement

Many teachers assign a grade for student participation in class. While I agree that student participation is very important for a successful classroom experience, I am even more interested in developing a community of learning that includes student (and teacher) participation both within the classroom and outside of the classroom. A community of learning encompasses both formal communication patterns and informal communication patterns. It includes our explicit discussions about mass media in our lives and world, but could include conversations with one another as we consume media. It also includes relationships between students just as much as the relationship between the teacher and each individual student.

This grade will be calculated based on multiple assessments, all of which will be measured considering the ways that you contribute to the community of learning in this class. Therefore, some of the areas that will be evaluated in this category include:

1.) your constructive contributions in class (amount, depth of insight, and other-orientation are all important here),
2.) your verbal and non-verbal interaction with others in the class,
3.) your attendance,
4.) your interactions with your peers both inside and outside of class time,
5.) any way you facilitate the learning of other students (clarifying examples in class, phone calls in the evening, sharing notes together, after class discussions, and study groups, commenting on blogs) or
6.) any other contributions that you can make to improving the learning climate within the class.

You should focus on developing a culture of learning together; while the development of relationships with one another is important – it is essential that you orient these relationships toward developing one another’s ability to think about communication and to communicate well. I assume that in order to succeed in this portion of the class, you will need to have read well and been an active participant in class lecture and discussion.

This grade will be evaluated several ways. I will invite the entire class to advocate on behalf of other members of the class. I will journal after class, noting contributions made by individuals. On some days, I will take notes. Halfway through the semester, I will suggest the grade that I think most appropriate for your community involvement thus far (based on my assessments and the assessments of your peers). If you feel that this grade doesn't accurately reflect the way you contributed to the community of learning, I URGE you to talk to me. We can together reflect on our differing perspectives, and set goals for a better understanding in the second half of the semester. I expect you will have the most opportunities to contribute to Community Involvement within your Media Squad.

Clearly, this system doesn’t allow you to either be invisible or domineering in this class. Hopefully we can co-construct a positive learning environment together. At the end of the class, I will assign the final grade, but will consider the following factors: your personal assessment, your peers advocacy, and observations from my class journal throughout the semester.

Reading Notes

Each class period when reading is due, I will collect notecards from you. You may include any information that you would like to on the notecards; I recommend that you fill them with terms, definitions, concepts, models and ideas that seem like the main ideas from the chapter.

I will give you all of your notecards on the day of the exam.

Notecards are completely optional.