Oral Communication Institute
This project involves faculty members in workshops and seminars designed to develop teaching strategies that lead to productive and engaged classroom discussions. The development of a Rhetoric and Communication Institute extends the work of the OCI to include workshops on rhetoric, technology and media in the classroom.
Spring & Fall Semester 2003
The Teaching Fellows Institute will allow us to reflect on what our culture teaches students about oral communication, explore how discourse can help students to better understand their own perspectives and those of others, discuss and evaluate the oral communication assignments that we use currently, plan new strategies that will be implemented in a specific course, and devise methods for assessing the impact of these new strategies.
Specifically, we plan to offer the institute in January and throughout the spring semester during the 2002-2003 academic year. Participating faculty will choose at least one course to revise during the institute's working sessions with the intention of implementing the changes the next time the course is taught, ideally in the fall of 2003. The institute's faculty will meet as a group for three days in January (the dates for this year will be January 13-15) and four times during the spring semester. The January and spring meeting times will be used to read about oral communication (including the infamous Finkel book, Teaching with Your Mouth Shut), in particular reflective discourse, and to work with the others in the group to plan new strategies and assignments, as well as ways of evaluating them. One follow-up meeting will be scheduled in late August and two meetings will be arranged during the fall of 2003. These meetings will allow us to assess our work and continue planning teaching strategies.