David Powers Corwin
George Mason University
dcorwin@gmu.edu

Casey Klemmer
George Mason University
casey.klemmer@gmail.com

Julia Timpane
George Mason University
jtimpane@gmail.com

Communication in Context: Introduction

George Mason University’s School of Integrative Studies “engage[s] scholarship, tools, and real-world learning opportunities that will bring [students’] learning to life, and ultimately prepare[s] them to enter the workforce” Through learning communities and experiential learning, the school weaves together disciplinary knowledge, civic engagement, on the job training, and research to create a unique undergraduate experience for each student

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Integrative Studies 202 (INTS): Public Speaking and Critical Thinking Skills is a 4-credit course that was originally designed for integrative studies majors to satisfy Mason’s Oral Communication Requirement. In recent years, the course attracts students from all degree programs which calls for more nuanced pedagogies. All sections of the course take a discussion-based approach with multiple speech and writing projects while also putting emphasis on critical thinking through class discussions, small group exercises, and out of class assignments. The fourth credit is typically satisfied through a semester-long group project that culminates in a final group speech.

The course section we have developed (as instructors and teaching assistants) teaches critical thinking and public speaking skills through friendship rhetoric, which requires students to engage with rhetoricians ranging from Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, to current discussions of friendships such as Jeffrey St. Onge, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, and Mia Birdsong. Students’ informational speech topics are related to their own conceptualization of friendships and researching a friendship in a context in which they plan to conduct professional or activist work. Students also have the option to research historical or media representations of friendships for their informational speeches. Their group speeches ask them to persuasively answer “why do friendships matter in the pursuit of social change?” through a rhetorical situation of their choice. Students often choose a form of popular culture or a particular social movement to focus their topic on a specific object.

Friendships as Rhetoric

While the course does not seek to be one providing disciplinary training on friendship rhetoric, foundations in the area are certainly critical to the course’s framing. Students are exposed to Aristotle’s discussion of the necessity of friendships and how “friendships are another self” (Nehamas 11) and his three types of friendship 1) friendships of utility; 2) friendships based on pleasure of each other’s company; and 3) friendships based on love of the person (Vernon 3). Students continue to be challenged through Plato’s Lysis, which ultimately dubs friendships as rhetorical and dismantles Aristotle’s categorization of friendships due to Socrates and his colleagues inability to define what a “good friend” is (Garver). Cicero continues this conversation by saying that “ friendships are ahead of all other human concerns”(71) and that “we have no right to get tired of friendships as we do of other things.” (76). These theories of friendships rhetorically situate the course so that students can see the wide variety of ways rhetoricians conceptualize friendships and that these relationships are deeply rhetorical because they cannot be singularly defined. Even though Aristotle tried to categorize them, Plato and Cicero are deeply critical of his analysis because not only could a friendship occupy multiple types of friendship, but also rhetorical situations are not taken into consideration at all in this model. That said, they are all in agreement that these relationships are not just important but necessities in the human experience and along with as we argue oral communication and critical thinking skills.

In juxtaposition with these classical rhetorical theories, students also read Sow and Friedman’s memoir, Big Friendships: How We Keep Each Other Close, St. Onge’s “On Radical Friendliness: Productive Citizenship in an Age of Division”, selections from Birdsong’s How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community and Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place:

Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and other Hangouts at the Heart of the Community among other popular and scholarly sources on grieving friendships, digital friendships, and friendships across cultures. In unison, these texts ask students to rhetorically situate friendships in relation to race, gender, sexuality, political affiliation, culture, and location. These frameworks push against some of the classical rhetorical theories. Because with the exception of St. Onge, these theorists would not identify as rhetoricians, but they focus much more on how rhetorically specific friendships are than Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero. With this shared body of scholarship, students have a launching pad to conduct their own research, begin their own understanding of rhetorical situations as frameworks for speech giving, and that the study of friendships in and of itself is a form of critical thinking.

Friendships as Critical Thinking 

The interdisciplinary nature of this course requires us to find a common place to start with all our students. As demonstrated, friendship is important to every human existence, and a relationship in which every person is deeply familiar . In Teaching Critical Thinking, bell hooks defines critical thinking as, “discovering the who, what, when, where, and how of things…and then utilizing that knowledge in a manner that enables you to determine what matters most (9). Friendships provide a clear starting point for students to understand how to think critically and the importance of this skill in their own lives.

In order to practice critical thinking in connection with Sow and Friedman’s Big Friendships, we focus on a concept which they call stretching (90). Stretching refers to, “all the ways our friends expand our world, challenge us, and inspire us to change” (90). When the concept is first introduced, we provide students with challenging friendship scenarios and ask them to consider their own responses. We ask the question, “What are healthy ways one could stretch and also healthy ways that one could choose not to stretch?” which encourages students to think critically about what the best solution is in their given scenarios. Later in the semester, we repeat this activity; this time, we incorporate Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle by asking students to analyze each element of ethos, pathos, and logos to find the best solution. By repeating an activity with similar concepts, students are able to see their own growth throughout the semester, and are shown how critical thinking is important to the efficacy of their learning. Students also demonstrate their growth through the final group speech assignment. The assignment asks students to work together in groups to develop a speech that discusses all the main concepts in the course: communication theory, critical thinking, and friendship studies.

Cultivating Community Through Discussions of Friendship 

A public speaking class is stereotypically a place students dread going rather than a place where they make friends and build community. We have seen, however, a public speaking classroom transform into a place to make friends, openly discuss identity, and work through their communication anxiety. We normalize that speech anxiety exists for us all; Joseph Valenzano III, Melissa Broeckelman-Post, and Stephen Braden discuss “communication apprehension,” saying that most people “experience some communication apprehension in some communication contexts” (14) and this issue exists for everyone on a spectrum rather than in the binary that we often assume.  Speech anxiety does not disappear by the end of the semester but, rather, many students no longer feel the need to preface their speech by saying that they are nervous. Working together in an environment where students are encouraged to talk about the relationships in their lives creates a safe classroom community. Furthermore, working together in small groups and sharing speeches about their friends (another course assignment), the students become visibly more connected to each other.

In a class with a friendship theme, discussions of identity are inevitable. Understanding how identities intersect with relationships is a key in our discussions of the complexity of friendships. In particular, LGBTQ+, racial, and neurodivergent identities are frequently discussed as we approach subjects like relationship anarchy and cross-cultural friendships. Understanding the complexity of friendship, the many forms it can take, and the ways that society does or does not value friendship makes the community of the classroom transform into a space where students “elevate” some relationships, like friendships (Birdsong 54). A major takeaway from the course is that friendship is varied and its variation is important in fulfilling different needs in our lives. Furthermore, this community continues in their group speech groups and in some cases becomes their safe space in class. Collaborating with the same group all semester, as well as smaller mixed group discussions in class, the students develop a sense of community in this general education classroom.

Conclusion 

We certainly acknowledge that this themed section does not work for all students and instructors as an expertise in this area or at least a willingness to learn this content is needed in order to make the course work. Furthermore, not all students may be in a position to talk through some of the hard conversations about friendships that take place in the classroom due to their past experiences with friendships, which is why we always let students know weeks in advance about the theme and that there are multiple sections of the course without this theme. However, we feel that this theme can be replicated in other general education courses such as communication, writing, rhetoric, popular culture, art, literature, history, and others because regardless of students’ career trajectories, we feel this content and its outcomes are applicable to all students as they navigate their personal and professional lives.

Works Cited  

About Us.” School of Integrative Studies at George Mason University, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, integrative.gmu.edu/about/about.

Birdsong, Mia. ow We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. Hachette Books, 2020.

Cicero. “On Friendship.” The Norton Book of Friendship, edited by Ronald A. Sharp and Eudora Welty, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991, pp. 71-79.

Garver, Eugene. “The Rhetoric of Friendship in Plato’s Lysis.” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, vol. 24, no. 2, 2006, pp. 127–146. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rh.2006.24.2.127

hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. 1st ed. Florence: Routledge, 2010.

Nehamas, Alexander. On Friendship. Basic Books, 2016.

Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and other Hangouts at the Heart of the Community. Da Capo Press, 1999.

Sow, Aminatou, and Ann Friedman. Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close. Simon &Schuster, 2020.

St. Onge, Jeffrey. “On Radical Friendliness: Productive Citizenship in an Age of  Division”, Rhetoric Review, 39:1, 45-58. 2020 doi: 10.1080/07350198.2019.1690371

Valenzano III, Joseph, et al. The Speaker’s Primer. Fountainhead Press, 2020.

Vernon, Mark. The Philosophy of Friendship. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.