Town Meetings: A Strategy for including Speaking in a Writing Classroom

Abstract

One of the needs of college students, especially first-year ones, was put neatly by a visiting Chinese instructor who remarked that our students need to know what they think. They also need to know what others think. For some students, the difficulties in formulating their beliefs are complicated by habits of public silence or acquiescence acquired from the local cultures in which they have grown up. Such students need especially to learn to know their own minds and to say what they think, to take responsibility for their attitudes and positions. On the other hand, verbally more aggressive students need to learn to listen to others, to discover that not everyone thinks the same or can be cowed into doing so. These goals are served by many composition courses, but I would like to describe a method of including speaking in a writing course that provides unique help toward these and related ends. The strategy came about as one consequence of an effort to develop an experimental university-wide, first-year college composition course that was supposed to include some formal speaking. There were institutional and political reasons for the intrusion of speech into the already crowded, and hardly silent, world of writing. But we sought to respond to this impulse on our own terms, to include some formal occasions for speaking in a form compatible with our thinking about composition, based on recent scholarship-by such people as Atwell, Moffett, Berthoff, Bakhtin, Murray, and Rose-which is quite different in theory and pedagogy from public speaking. Left to invent some means of doing so in a pilot section of the new course, I faced quickly the fact that I am not trained as a speech teacher and did not want to devote much time to training myself or my students. My first inclination was to build a soapbox and have Hyde Park sessions, to let students speak out boldly on issues of concern to them. Experience suggested, however, that many of my students are not eager for confrontation in classrooms. I take this trait to be partly cultural, imagining that when I was a student in a different place and time we were all prepared to argue any issue before our peers at the drop of a hat. My students by contrast are from backgrounds where public disagreement is not valued. And I knew that if the experience of my daughters