Noting that speech instruction as a liberal study must include significant subject matter, rigorous intellectual application, high ethical standards, and responsibility, this paper describes the humanities core course at Allegheny College (Pennsylvania) as providing such a climate for speech instruction. The paper first describes the course goals…

The bargaining simulation unit is a useful educational tool in the introductory organizational communication course. It provides students with the opportunity to apply concepts such as communication, authority, and decision making already taught in the course, and teaches responsibility in analyzing, enacting, and discussing the bargaining case.…

The two articles in this publication focus on ways of teaching argumentation and debate in the college setting. The first article examines the place of the argumentation and debate course in the speech communication curriculum and suggests cognitive and behavioral objectives and assignments for use in such a course. The second article discusses…

The speech communication department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, provides a rigorous and legally oriented course in freedom of speech. The objectives of the course are to help students gain insight into the historical and philosophical foundations of the First Amendment, the legal/judicial processes concerning the First Amendment, and…

The University of Tennessee (Knoxville) offers as a special section of the public speaking curriculum, a "speech anxiety" program, taught by faculty and graduate students from the speech and theatre and educational psychology departments and staff from the counseling services center. The students spend the first few weeks of the special…

Three innovations combine to make it possible for Arizona State University to move 1,600 students a year through a performance based communication course with no expense but the salary of a single faculty member. Apart from the obvious economic benefits, the mass lecture/small group breakdown format assures that the student will receive an…

The place of argumentation within the speech communication curriculum is the focus of this article. The article provides a rationale for an upper-level college course in the deliberation and decision making process currently taught at the University of North Carolina, and relates that rationale to broader concerns of argumentation theory. Various…

Describes a course developed by a speech instructor and instructional librarian at Spoon River College, Illinois, to foster the students' ability to orally present information in a coherent and understandable fashion and their ability to access information effectively. (CBC)

The community services department of an eastern community college offers a noncredit course called Overcoming Speech Anxiety. The students range from those who avoid conversation with most people to those who speak publicly often but with a great deal of discomfort. Their reasons for taking such a class suggest that most people suffer situational…

Describes the use of andragogy (a process for helping students become self-directed learners) in an oral communications course. Reveals that the use of performance contracts increased students' involvement in planning, conducting, and evaluating their own learning. Reviews indicators of the strategy's success. (DMM)

This paper asserts that by removing speech and rhetoric from the "English" department and making composition a stepchild of literature, Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities ultimately made it much more difficult for writing instructors today to capitalize on the strong physical underpinnings that speech and rhetoric provide to writing.…

Describes a program that gives psychology students practice in written and oral communication. It involves students in writing an abstract of a journal article and in making an oral presentation. Writing and speaking skills, along with methodology, may be the most enduring legacy of introductory psychology courses. (CS)

Intended as a curriculum development aid for speech communication instructors, this paper provides an outline model for basic speech competencies. The first section of the outline offers approaches to the basic speech communication course, including traditional versus competency-based approaches to education, and presents the three dimensions of a…

This paper describes a short course for middle school students that was sponsored by the Higher Education Council of Columbus, Ohio, and undertaken to promote the development of self-expression capabilities by using public speaking as a communicative channel. The class was designed to be completed in three class meetings of three hours each,…

Within the structure of a senior and graduate level course, students in the Ohio University school of interpersonal communication collaborate with community groups in the creation of campaigns promoting issue-awareness, political candidates, fund raising events, and citizen action. The course objectives include teaching students to understand the…