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>> Good afternoon.
I'm Christiane Donohue.
I'm the Director of the Institute for Writing
and Rhetoric here at Dartmouth and first of all thank you
for being here and for being able to listen to what we have
to say about writing and speech.
>> And I'm Josh Compton; I'm Senior Lecturer
and Speech for the Institute.
We believe that the best teaching begins with the end
and by that I mean that we ask what are the intended outcomes
that we have in mind for our students.
What do we want them to know?
How do we want them to be able to do what they know
at the ends of our courses?
And for answers we draw on a range of resources.
We look at the college's learning objectives,
we depend on our knowledge of the disciplines,
we ask alumni and others.
>> Christiane Donohue: And then we plan after that what we need
to do as teachers in order to get our students where it is
that we've determined they should be.
That process is fundamental to teaching success
and it's a priority for the institute.
Every student at Dartmouth comes through at least one
of our writing courses in the first year
and there's a huge demand for speech
so these are actually amazing opportunities for foundational
and transformative work.
>> Josh Compton: We think that one of the best
and often the most interesting ways to study writing
and speaking is to actually write and speak.
So that's what we'd like to do today with your help.
In just a moment we're going to pose three questions and we ask
that you first write down your initial responses
to these questions.
We're going to give you about a minute to do that.
Then we're going to ask that you turn to someone near you
and continue your responses in conversation with each other
for about another minute, and then we're going to resume
as a group to share some of these ideas.
>> Christiane: So here are our questions and we're going
to have them for you on the screen at the same time.
The first question is how has writing or speaking helped you
to be so successful in your career first?
How do you recognize at some point a need to change anything
in your writing or speaking in order to succeed
at something new that you hadn't done before, and what had
to change and how did you go about it?
So these questions are up here on the screen.
You can tackle all three questions if you want,
you can tackle just one that's fine, you can do anything
that you'd like with these questions;
but if you would just take actually a little bit less
than a minute to jot down anything that immediately comes
to mind as an answer to any and all of these questions.
Go for it.
[ Pause ]
>> Josh: On that we'd like for you to shift from writing
to speaking so please turn to someone near you
and continue this conversation in conversation.
[ Pause ]
>> Christiane: OK.
Let's come back front and center and let's here some
of the things that you had to say.
What are some of the themes that came out in the process
of talking about this?
What kinds of themes emerged about writing and speaking
in your work on writing and speaking?
>> Student: Christiane I'll take a crack at this on the second
and third in that I think the improvement requires the ability
to be detached and objective about your own writing
and I guess some speaking as well,
up to and including having the willingness
to throw it away and start over again.
>> Christiane: So detached and objective,
willingness to throw away.
OK what else?
What other themes came out of your discussion?
>> Student: I addressed the first one about being helpful
in my career and I don't do it any longer but in years past I'm
in the oil and gas business, [inaudible] wells
and that required a lot of money which I didn't have
so I raised money from investors.
If you're trying to raise money
from investors you're generally dealing with people
who are fairly well educated because they have money
to begin with, and be able to write, of course I had to visit
with them personally and articulate
and persuade verbally, but the starting point was a precisely
written letter that was very articulate and persuasive.
>> Christiane: OK so this is just a few minute's worth
of thinking about this and we've got this collection
of very complex things that people need to know how to do
in order to successfully write and speak
out in the world, very, very complex.
Even just here we're reflecting on that complexity.
Imagine if you had to design a course where you even tried
to teach students to be able to do just this little bit of work
that we've put up here just as a starting point.
And since it's pretty impossible to teach students
in one 10-week period, everything that they need
to know for every situation they're going to enter in to.
The situation of having to write that first letter, the situation
of discovering something new and you don't know how to do it,
whatever those might be.
We tend to focus instead on teaching them processes,
on teaching them core principles and a foundation
that enables them then to make the adaptations that they need
to make when they get into the new contexts,
so that they have somewhere to begin
and then they see the challenges coning,
and rather than just walking away from them
because they don't have the ability, they understand how
to adapt, they understand how to flex what they have
in ways that get them there.
>> Josh: So as Christiane was saying
without this academic approach, without treating the writing
and speaking as intellectual activities,
we would instead be reducing writing and speaking instruction
to skills training, something like top 10 tips on how to sound
like a good public speaker or top 10 tips on how to write.
But that approach would fail our students
because it wouldn't prepare them for the complexities
that we just demonstrated in that short activity with you.
So instead at Dartmouth we invite them
into a whole new conversation.
>> Christiane: So this idea of conversation is one
that actually comes up a lot in speaking and writing
and the world of speaking and writing,
the sort of using conversation as a frame for what we do.
It's essentially a way especially when we talk
about the academic conversation to get at how college writing
and college speaking are about big ideas.
They're about working with other people's ideas not only your own
ideas; they're about analyzing, synthesizing, exchanging,
being able to sort of grapple back and forth.
And out of all that creating new ideas, new knowledge,
new understanding and then being able to manage
that new knowledge and understanding and communicate it
in ways that make sense.
>> Josh: And we do this
by designing our pedagogue G-force specific outcomes.
Now each of our courses in the institute has between 15
to 20 intended outcomes.
And the IWR worked for two years with faculty
to hammer out these outcomes.
But today we selected just one to share with you, one example,
and we think this is an outcome that is applicable to writing,
to first year seminar, and to speech.
So this is the outcome that we've selected.
Students completing our courses should be able
to enter the ongoing academic conversation about key issues,
aware of multiple points of view and able to collaborate
with others on the reading, writing, speaking
and inquiry demanded by serious intellectual prospects.
And with such goals our courses then create the ground students
stand on for their college career and beyond.
Our classes transform students' thinking, their inquiry,
their creativity, their communication skills,
their writing, their speaking using media,
quite simply this is an approach that makes thoughtful
and informed communication possible.
>> Christiane: And it's certainly not learned
by writing AP exams and personal essays or reciting reports;
it's learned by moving beyond that.
Let's consider how this outcome might actually look to students.
This idea of sort of entering in academic conversation
which we consider foundational to students' learning.
Because the first year writing course does actually work
with every single student
and therefore gives students a common intellectual experience,
and because the speech courses actually cut
across all disciplines, in both cases we see ourselves
as making students ready for other courses
that they're going to take after hours.
But the outcome is also transformative.
Students make the shift from sort of I thought I knew how
to do this to now I see what I really need to do in college,
how I really need to think about it.
The work that they do looks a lot like what we did
with you just in those first few minutes, at least at the start
of a course that they might be taking.
So taking that same outcome that we showed you a few minutes ago
as one sample outcome for the courses.
If we think about what we did together
as a model let's just tie it to this kind of an outcome.
In just five minutes we had you do four different things
that actually all exemplify this particular outcome.
First was to draw on your own knowledge and experience,
the second was to work collaboratively in order
to create new insights, third was to use both writing
and speaking in order to make sense out of your thinking.
And fourth was to work collectively
to move beyond individual knowledge while critically
engaging with the ideas.
Research shows that all of these approaches are very,
very powerful ways to learn.
Active learning actually stretches learners beyond
to sort of the existing ability they brought
in to the new ability in their thinking and their reading
and their analyzing and their writing and in their speaking.
One of the things that we work with our students
on we don't only have them do written essays,
we also have them do essays using various forms
of new media.
And this particular film, we're just going
to show you 30 seconds of it,
let me emphasize before showing it to you that this kind
of work does not replace traditional composing
in our classes, it builds on and it enhances the development
that students are going through.
So the students working in these modes other
than print actually learn about the same key issues.
They learn about evidence, they learn about structure,
they learn about clarity, transitions, everything.
They often comment on how that helps them when they work
in a different mode to go back to their written work,
their traditional writing, and to learn about the kinds
of choices they've had to make and how those can come
out in this different work and then how they can do it better
in their written work as a result.
So we see working in those other modes is actually a way
to get them better at both, at doing the new mode
and at doing the traditional print mode.
So we'll show you just this 30-second clip
from the student's first year seminar film.
>> China is one of the world's fast developing countries.
Its booming economy with a 9% annual growth rate has wowed
the world.
And to sustain its development,
huge amounts of energy is needed.
Currently China uses 10% of the world's total energy
to support 20% of the global population.
When compared to industrialization
such as the U.S., energy consumption is expected
to double as GDP increases.
>> Christiane: One of the things that we liked in particular
about it, as an example is that it uses some data
which our first year students hardly ever do.
And that's something that we're working towards increasing your
use of and the working in the mode of video seems
to encourage students to think about that kind of evidence
in ways that they don't seem to think about it in writing.
So again we can then get them to go back to the writing
and say why aren't you using it here?
What's going on?
So we're just going to give you a concluding sentence
and turn it over to you.
>> Josh: What we hope that we've emphasized
in the last 20 minutes is that writing
and speaking they have dramatically changed over time,
but they've also kept some core values.
Critical engagement with the world's problems,
with existing material that students are reading
and evaluating, with clarity, with structure, with good style,
then, now and always writing and speech are essential
to a liberal arts education.
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