Keynote Address to the 42nd Annual Basic Course Directors’ Conference

Jo Sprague

In the film Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman disguised as a woman, is asked by a female character, why “she” wears such heavy make-up. Tootsie answers,” Well, I have a little bit of a mustache problem.” “But, you know,” says the Jessica Lange character, “some men like that.” “I know,” says Tootsie, “but I don’t like the kind of man who likes that.” Well, today I find myself in exactly the opposite situation. I like the kind of people who like to come to Basic Course Conferences. As a subset of wonderful colleagues in our field, those who have made a professional commitment to quality basic course instruction always turn out to be a special, almost heroic, breed. I’m sure this is said at every meeting, but let me say it anyway, our basic courses in communication are among the most stimulating, challenging, and consequential courses offered at any college or university. Like you, I take great pride in this work. In this semi-retired phase of my career, looking back at what may be my contributions, I think that my teaching of the basic course, my work with scores of TAs and my co-authorship of a successful basic text rank at the top.

One way I like to think about the significance of our basic communication course is that it makes gross (not in the sense of disgusting, you understand, but in the sense of writ large) the problems we face throughout the entire curriculum. As others have observed, the basic course is basic not only in that it is introductory, but also in that it is seminal. Here we explore those core tenets of our field from which all the more advanced classes spring. Those of us who devote all or much of our professional energy to it know that it is unmatched in both the richness of its rewards, for teacher and student, and in the complexity of the pedagogical and philosophical problems it raises.

One balancing act, present in every class, but especially dramatic to those of us who direct multisection classes is the need to play off institutional agreements and issues of quality control against the values of creativity and innovation. This is true both in setting objectives for student achievement and in instructional arrangements. It’s what could be called the ceiling/floor issue. In standardizing some assignments, criteria for evaluation, some core objectives, we protect the department and the students by guaranteeing that every section at least meets some minimal standards of rigor and coverage. But, in guaranteeing that floor below which we probably won’t fall, do we inadvertently lower the ceiling of our courses and discourage innovation among the best faculty and students? I will admit, both from my few years as a university level administrator and from my years as basic course coordinator, that the broadened perspectives of such roles begin to bring about a certain cautiousness of spirit. Any time you hear of a creative idea, you picture the worst-case scenario when it goes awry and is featured in the local paper. Every time a TA comes up with a great new idea at midnight and tosses together a clever handout, that has not been vetted for inclusion in a standardized course resource book, you picture some elitist parent marking the misspellings and infelicitous language and mailing it to the University President asking: who are you hiring to teach my son or daughter? For the most part our fears are like those reported by media researchers that frequent TV watchers greatly overestimate their chances of being murdered or robbed. We need to sustain our stewardship for the constituencies our classes serve, and keep our political antennae in tune with the possible areas of political vulnerability on campus, but without letting our imaginations run wild. What we teach and how we teach it is largely defensible without overly intrusive surveillance. The greater risk is probably in the opposite direction, that we will worry too much about insuring minimal competence and not enough about the theoretical and practical vitality of our course.

In the early 1990’s Michael Leff reported returning to direct a basic communication course after two decades of being away from it, assuming that he would have months and months of catching up to do, and found the course essentially unchanged from when he had taught as a TA. About that same time, I wrote of my concerns about how we have marginalized the issues about our teaching so that our pedagogical work has not kept pace with the theoretical work in the field. Briefly, I reminded us that if we really believe that communication is a complex ever changing process, we can’t spell out static principles. If we acknowledge that much of communication behavior is unconscious or habitual, we can’t teach it exclusively in terms of making decisions. Since we understand that communication is performed, embodied, and usually oral process, we need to realize that some of our work has more in common with teaching music or p.e. than with teaching humanities or social sciences. Because we know that speech is so tied to social and personal identity, we have to be especially sensitive to the fact that whenever we to try to change how a person talks we are in effect trying to change who a person is. And finally, recognizing that communication is always politically laden, we know that it defines the power arrangements of society, both preserving privilege and setting boundaries. And so we know that we cannot teach about it as an innocent tool of individual empowerment, equally accessible to all.

Based on the quality of our textbooks and resources, the articles in Communication Education and the Basic Course Annual, the programs at our national and regional conventions, the movement toward the scholarship of teaching and learning, and superb programs such as the ones that will be offered here today and tomorrow, I believe that we have come a long way in the last decade toward infusing theory into our basic courses and revitalizing those classes.

The difficulty, of course, is that these notions, these emergent elaborations on our theoretical base, are terribly complex and messy. We know that very essence of teaching is to simplify. But, when we do so, we run the risk of simplifying to the extent that we end up teaching what we no longer believe is so. Have you ever had the experience in your classroom where you are working so desperately to help your students get something that you choose the most outrageously dramatic or silly explanation and even as you see the lights go on, you think, “thank God my colleagues aren’t hearing this”? Of course, those of us who are textbook authors, walk a much more public tightrope as we struggle to be true to the richness of our content and yet also accessible and clear to novice learners. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. reminds me again and again of the statement: I give not a fig for the simplicity that lies on this side of complexity, but I would lay down my life for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity. Today, I’d like to move away from the easy kind of simplicity and wade into the complexity of three particularly thorny problems that continue to challenge us in all our teaching and especially in our basic courses.

First, we have not really found ways to get our students to grasp the complexity of communication as a social phenomenon. Oh, we can get them to say those words, and to pepper their papers and exams with phrases like “social construction of reality,” “coordinated management of meaning,” and “the ontological force of talk”. Yet at every opportunity they still slip back into more simple, linear, individualized model of communication. These approaches are ubiquitous in popular treatments of communication, but they also pop up in our own basic textbooks and some of our research.

Every strand of our academic history has left a residue of simplistic beliefs about communication. Our rhetorical heritage, since the time of the sophists, has been reduced to the idea that one can learn a few tips to ensure persuasive success. The information age brought in a transmission metaphor of senders, receivers, channels, and noise, and with those the false belief that if we can just make our messages CLEAR enough, communication will work. Both Dale Carnegie’s emphasis on personality and the human relations movement’s concern with authentic expression have psychologized the study of interpersonal communication almost beyond redemption.

We labor to eradicate or complicate these images. We try to find ways to drag students out of inner cognitive space of either the sender or the receiver and up from the intricacies of the text into the realm that writers like Buber and Gadamer call “the between” where meaning is made. In our efforts to do so we often cast around for more powerful substitute metaphors.

  • Communication is not a tool you can pick up and put down at will, we tell them, but an ocean of meaning you swim in.
  • It’s not someone starting with a fully formed idea, wrapping it up in words, sending it along for someone else to unwrap and put away. It’s more like a group of people seated around a spinning potters wheel pushing and pulling on a messy blob of clay that rotates between them.
  • We don’t get words from our private internal safes we say, but in Bakhtin’s unsavory image, we get them from other people’s mouths. We can only draw on the communicative resources we find in our culture.
  • And interactions can’t be broken into clear cut beginnings and ends, we insist, citing Bakhtin again, that no one has the last word, only the next to the last word. It’s like arriving at a party, joining in a conversation that was already going on and then leaving knowing that it will continue when you’re gone.

Here’s my latest somewhat far-fetched effort to illustrate this distinction. When I grew up a person who was reporting a conversation did it like this: So then she says, where were you? And he says, I had to work late, and she says….. Later, I noticed students reported it like this: So she goes, where were you? And he goes, I had to work late. And now, have you noticed our students say: she’s all where were you and he’s all I had to work late) and I’m all… This strikes me as very strange. But I tell students that it signals a movement from speech as message transmission (she says) to speech as action (she goes) to speech as existence (she’s all). Pretty lame, I’ll admit, but it shows how desperate we are to try to get our students to turn that corner and foreground the social locus of communication.

So that’s our first big problem. Solving this problem, and its not an easy one, is prerequisite to an even more challenging task we face: How can we help our students use communication to revitalize the public sphere? Even if we succeed in getting them to look at communication in richer and more complex ways, there is still an emphasis on using speech for individual empowerment. They believe that they are gaining the skills they need in their careers and personal relationships. True enough. But how do we foster the understanding because of the deeply constitutive nature of communication, it not only shapes our lives but it literally makes the social world we inhabit?

The withering of the “public sphere” has been the subject of commentary from de Toqueville’s Democracy in America to Bellah and his colleagues’, Habits of the Heart, to Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Like you, no doubt, I always feel this concern about public life most deeply in election years. Since 9/11, since the war in Iraq, since my own state has witnessed the extension of its over-reliance on government by initiative to a bizarre gubernatorial recall election, these concerns are more salient than every. Intellectually, I know that scholars throughout the academy are involved in trying to gauge the impact of mass media, globalization, the Internet and other forces on the quality of public life. We are still too close to these changes to have definitive answers, but we certainly know that our students need to be prepared for very different forms of civic life and very different political institutions than the ones we studied in graduate school. And we are pretty sure that they will not be readied by hearing abstractions of political theory or learning traditional formats of debate. Without knowing what the next bizarre political twist will be or what further assaults on civil discourse are ahead, what sort of educational experiences can we possibly devise?

A great spokesperson on the relationship of democracy and education, John Dewey, said in 1916 that “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint experience.” Only by extending the number of individuals who participate directly can each come to refer his or her action to that of others and to consider the interests of others in shaping those action. Only this direct participation makes it possible to begin to break down barriers of class, race and national territory that block us from perceiving our interdependence.

The difficulty of achieving this kind of perception is illustrated in the well-known fableof the Tragedy of the Commons. Literally the commons refers to the shared grazing lands traditionally found in the center of pre-industrial towns. Symbolically, the commons refers to any shared resource that is finite and that requires time to replenish itself—water, clean air, lumber, fertile soil, edible fish and game, and of course, fossil fuels. The Tragedy of the Commons lies in the tendency of consumers to harvest the scarce resources at such a rapid rate that the commons is eventually destroyed. In the fable, first one and then another farmer added just one more cow until the land was grazed over the commons was barren. The tragedy, the social trap in the words of social psychologists, is that each individual decision to increase one’s own herd was perfectly logical in the short term. Yet the very decisions that make sense based on a short-term individual calculus are disastrous when applied to a group and over the long term. How can we get people to shift their perspective from me to us, from now to later? We hear people say things like “Is my one tank of gas, my few sheets of unrecycled paper really going to harm the environment?” But the question of expanding perspectives outward in scope and forward in time is not limited to environmental issues. It is at the heart of political deliberation.

Over the last four decades social scientists have simulated the commons situation in research studies. I’ve used it as a class exercise as you may have. In the simplest form, participants were allowed to take tokens from a dish. I used nickels, but now would probably need quarters. They were motivated to accumulate a large number and were told that every ten seconds the experimenter would replenish the supply of tokens by matching the number left in the dish. Initially I didn’t allow them to communicate during the activity. Obviously the best strategy would be to “harvest” tokens slowly, leaving several in the central pool so that it would continue to grow. Instead, about 75% of the laboratory games collapsed almost immediately. Subjects often struggled physically for the tokens and frequently exhausted the pool before the first ten-second period had passed. A far cry from the Iroquois principle of thinking about the impact of a decision on the next seven generations, when these folks can’t realize how they are affecting the next ten second segment. Amazingly, the high rate of collapse of the entire system held fairly constant even when the researchers carefully explained the long-range benefits of harvesting slowly. In my classes, I even gave students the chance to caucus and make agreements before resuming the next round. Things would start out a little better, but then one person would start to grab, and it still falls apart.

Results improved only in one research condition: when subjects were allowed continuous communication, before, during and after each round. This led Julian Edney to conclude “information may only be effective if it is fully processed within the consuming group itself.” For me this is just one compelling illustration that learning to live associated lives, whether in relationships, the workplace, or civic arena, is not a matter of having access to data, or of having individual communication skills. People learn to communicate by engaging in communication, reminding each other in the moment, in that context, of how their interests are interdependent and of why they need to forego self serving short term strategies and craft a more enduring consensus. Eternal, exhausting, enervating negotiation, reopening questions again and again, recasting data, rearticulating interests, exhorting, promising, stroking, warning. Sound like some of the faculty meetings you attend?

Contrast that to the kind of interactions that are all too common in our basic public speaking courses. When time allows for a brief question and answer period, of perhaps one or two questions, what do we see? With models like Jerry Springer or Simon Cowell we may get the brief “that sucks” comment, but more typically, students are quick to abandon any controversy and fall back on individualistic responses like “well, you’ve got a right to your opinion.” These students simply don’t have the skills to sustain a deeper exploration of differences and they lack models and motivation to develop those skills.