Hurricanes & Persuasion

How does this happen? I spent two years living in New Orleans, and teaching ten miles up the road from where this happened during Hurricane Katrina:

And yet somehow, I encountered my first hurricane in Maryland. 

Anyway: with the hurricane passed, and the persuasive unit on the near horizon, I am returning with a vengeance to the blogosphere/tumblverse to provide some lesson ideas and approaches for the persuasive unit. What follows is the first of four lessons conceptualized as water heavily beat against the glass and the temperature abruptly shifted us from Fall to Winter. Behold, Hurricane Persuasive Unit! 

Note: For this unit, I am going to be posting entirely ideas and suggestions that do not come from the Instructor's Manual so that you all have maximum variety of options to choose from!

Day 1: Introducing the Persuasive Unit

I begin by ruminating on hurricanes because that is what the persuasive unit is all about to me. I lived and worked in a place where students' lives and parents' livelihoods were wiped away by a tremendous storm, flooded by government malfeasance and apathy, and tarred by an oil spill that crippled the local seafood industry. Time and again, these students, with jobs that would at first glance seem as far away from civic engagement as you could get (manning a shrimp boat; operating an oil rig), were thrown into an interaction with the political. They needed the potential to advocate for themselves, to research and read the messages thrown at them by the media and politicians, to stick up for their chosen lines of work, band together, and fight. This is true for everyone: we live in a society, and critical thought and persuasive skill are not optional. The need for these skills will find us, no matter what we do.

The goals of instilling critical thinking skills and speaking ability in students are not mutually exclusive. They play into each other and rely on one another. As students develop the critical consciousness to knock down arguments that are fallacious and badly reasoned, they become more cognizant of how to better prepare their own arguments to avoid these problems.

The first day is about orienting students to this idea, and beginning to develop their awareness of each. The next two days will develop each respective skill in immense detail. But for now, we just need an introduction to the major concepts and ideas. A brief outline looks like this:

1. Introduction: Persuade for a Dollar
2. Reading "A Campaign Speech"
3. Viewing a Real-World Speech
4. Viewing a Sample Speech
5. Introducing Persuasive Speech Expectations

1) Persuade for a Dollar

Materials required: A Dollar

I originally got this idea from my peer at Northern Illinois University, Marj Askins. She got it from her high school teacher. Who knows where he got it from. This is one of those activities that's so passed around in speech teacher lore that who knows where it came from. But it's fun and a good way to kick off persuasion.

I begin by stressing that this dollar is no longer my dollar. It now belongs to the class. And as the classroom is a democracy, the decision about how to use the dollar is now up to the class. First, I will ask students to jot down a brief argument for why they should receive the dollar. They will then come to the front of the room and persuade their classmates why they are the most worthy, or how they would use the dollar the best. Afterward, the class votes on who did the best job of persuading them about the dollar.

This is easy, it is fun, and it leads to a great discussion afterward of ethos, pathos, logos. Students will rely heavily on appeals to credibility, pathos, and to a lesser extent, logic to make these arguments. The discussion is best facilitated based on the votes: Why did ___ receive so many votes? Why did ____ receive no votes? Why was ___ more persuasive to you than ___? If you were one of the two people to vote for ___, why did you vote for him and not the guy who won? Etc.

2) Reading "A Campaign Speech"

On the heels of an election, it is always important to have students read a campaign speech. I will begin by passing out copies of the speech below. I will project the questions bulleted beneath the speech on the PowerPoint and have students discuss. Then, we'll turn to a full class conversation.

(Credit for this example speech and lesson idea goes to Roderick Hart and Suzanne Daughton from their textbook Modern Rhetorical Critcism, 3rd. ed.)

A Campaign Speech:

When I speak to you today and thus to millions of other Americans, I have more right to do this than anyone else. I have grown out of you yourselves. Once I myself stood among you, I was among you in the war for four and one-half years and now I speak to you whom I feel myself to be bound still today, and for whom in the final analysis I carry on the struggle. As far as I was concerned the struggle was not necessary. Nor would I wage it for a class or any certain stratum of society. I lead the struggle for the masses of millions of our honest, industriously working, and creative people. 

In my youth I was a worker like you, and then I worked my way up by industry, by study, and I can say, by starving. In my innermost being, I have always remained what I was before. When, after the war, I entered political life, I did so with the conviction that our people was poorly advised by its political leadership, that a horrible future awaited the American people as a result of this bad leadership. I acted then with the most sincere self-justification because I did not belong to those who were in any way responsible for the war. I was just as little responsible for the war as anyone among you, for at that time I was, just like you, an unknown person, whom fate passed over in the order of the day. 

I began with six or seven men. Today, it is the greatest American movement. This is not so by chance and not because the way was made easy for me, but because the ideas upon which I built are right. It was only for this reason that they could be carried through. For you can imagine, my friends, that when a man in my station in life begins a movement, success does not just fly to him. That is self-understood. One needs great tenacity and tremendous will to begin such an enterprise at all. If I had this faith, I had it only because I knew the people and because I had no doubts as to the quality of the American people. I took courage because I knew the American worker and the American farmer.

In America, I guarantee that this community will not work out to the advantage of any element of the American people. You can look upon me as the man who belongs to no class, who belongs to no group, who is above all such considerations. I have nothing but my connections with the American people. To me everyone is entirely equal. What interest do the intellectuals have for me, the middle class, or the working class? I am interested only in the American people. I belong exclusively to the American people and I struggle for the American people.

With their surrounding peers, students will discuss the following questions from the PowerPoint:

• Who is the speaker’s audience? (Or audiences?) Who might be listening to the speech?
• What is the speaker’s purpose? (Or purposes?) What is the speech trying to accomplish?
• What is the speaker’s strategy? (Or strategies?) HOW is he trying to persuade his audience?
• Is the speech effective? Is this convincing? Would you vote for this person? Is he doing anything unethical?

As students evaluate the speech, they will probably come across another question lurking in the background: Who delivered this speech? Have the class speculate. Point out the war record, the humble origins. Have them consider which presidential candidate in the U.S. may have best fit this. Then, reveal to them your secret lie: This is a speech by Adolf Hitler, with "Germany" and "German" changed to say "America" and "American." (A particularly clever student may hit on this before you say anything about it.)

The implications of this are huge! Have students reflect on what it means that a speech by the worst fascist in history could have plausibly sounded like it came from one of our own politicians. The important point is this: 

3) Viewing a Speech

It is important to ground students in the social importance of what they're doing. Particularly: the importance of finding a passion and designing arguments that deeply matter to them. To do this, I am selecting this TED Talk which is a strong example of personal advocacy:

What J.D. Schramm does here reveals many valuable aspects of effective persuasive speaking. A few points that, in the ensuing discussion, I would want to hit:

• He delivers a narrative. He tells a story, revealing his own part in that story as a surprise. This plays off of all of the traditionally strong elements of a narrative compositionally, and is something we should urge our students to try in their own speeches.
• He cares about this, personally. While students may not all have this deep and powerful of a connection to what they're talking about, we can urge them to pick topics that reflect their genuine passions. Is it something they can rant about, or rage about? Then they should talk about it.
• Finally, the thing I like best about this video is that it emphasizes the power of talk to bring about a change on a topic. We shy away from talk on controversial or depressing subjects like this; but it is in the interaction surrounding the subject that we can bring healing, social reform, and ultimately, change.

The purpose of the video is to get students' imagination going about what, in their own lives and experiences, deeply matters to them to convince us about. We then transition to a more formally organized speech that better matches the structure that they will use here.

4) Introducing a Sample Speech: Video

Before viewing the speech, tell students to get out a pen and paper and outline it. Not only is this good practice for a "debate" students will have with one another in a few days; it also sets them up to start recognizing the structural elements they will be expected to have in their own speeches.

(I believe this speech comes from a DVD accompanying The Art of Public Speaking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but there is no credit listed on the video here on YouTube.) A few points that should be made as regards the video:

• Students will likely say her video is a bit robotic. That's true, you should counter, she could be more conversational and relaxed. But what's more important is that she is controlled and clear in her message. She has a clear idea of what she's going to say/do moving forward in the speech.
• There is some discussion to be had here about intensity and enthusiasm. She can't be enthusiastic about teenage driving deaths, but she can be intense about it.
• She is attentive to her audience. Speaking to a room of college freshmen who recently earned the right to drive, she asks them to listen to her with an open mind, anticipating their skepticism of her point.
• Her evidence is not stitched together like a bunch of paper dolls; it is seamlessly integrated into her speech and attributed properly, summarized and reframed in her own words.

5) Persuasive Speech Expectations

This then segues into the expectations for the persuasive speech itself. 

I will set this up by:

1. Eliciting student thoughts on what they needed to improve on in the wake of the informative speech.
2. Asking how the speeches we just viewed differed from some of the topics/structural patterns seen in the informative examples and students' own informative speeches.
3. Having students explain the components of the outline and justify why she might have organized it that way.

As always, I will not run this entire conversation as a full-class discussion right off the bat. Students will talk through these three points with one another in a turn-and-talk, then we'll come back full group. This way, I can more confidently cold call on people--"What did your group discuss?" rather than listening for crickets for several minutes.

The next area I will hit is topic selection, which is important for me to give some explicit guidance about. I will stress four major points:

1. Persuasive. The topic must be something that not everyone else in the room is inclined to agree about. That is, it needs to be something you have to actually persuade people about. Convincing a classroom of college students to lower the drinking age to 18 is probably not going to work.
2. Realistic. At the same time, it needs to be realistic. You're not going to get a pro-life person to turn pro-choice in ten minutes. I will use a "persuasive number line" to illustrate what I am talking about here. Imagine that 0 is a middle-of-the-road position on the topic; a -10 is completely opposed to your opinion; and a 10 is completely in your favor. Can you convince a -10 to move all the way to a 10? Probably not. But you can perhaps get them to shift their view toward a more moderate position, or get them to accept a certain policy as reasonable. Or, you can move a moderate person toward your more extreme position. 
3. Personal. The topic must be something they have a personal connection or or interest in.
4. Policy-based. We will consider the distinction between propositions of fact, value, and policy (page 396). It is crucial that students recognize the major differences between each, and have a clear sense of what they're trying to accomplish with their persuasion. I will stress that this speech is not so much about questions of fact ("9/11 was an inside job") or questions of value ("You should support gay marriage!"). Rather, it should be about questions of policy: Convincing people to support a certain plan, proposal, or law; getting them to accept or reject something on campus. Questions of fact and value obviously play into one's opinion on a policy. But the policy argument tends to lead to a richer and more complex speech that is easier to persuade others to buy into. It avoids the absolutes (the -10s and 10s on the number line).

I will conclude by hitting a few things that are due:

1. The due date for topic selection (next class period) 
2. A paragraph of important considerations about their topic, including key places where people might have differences in opinion, the types of proof/evidence that might be needed to persuade others, and their personal connection and passion for the topic.
3. The place to look in the book for an example outline (410-411)
4. The importance of reading Chapter 15 by next class if they have not yet done so.