The College of Arts and Sciences is launching new public speaking courses for Spring 2024, which students can now register for at their respective registration times.
The courses are still undergoing the approval process for the BU Hub, Boston University’s undergraduate general education program, and will be offered across four different disciplines: one with the writing program, one in the Core Curriculum program, one in the Spanish language program and one in the Chinese language program.
The idea behind creating these courses stemmed from an initiative to create more options for BU Hub units for students, as well as giving students with different disciplines and cultural programs the opportunity to connect, said master lecturer Alison Carberry Gottlieb, who will teach the Spanish language section.
“We’re hopeful that students who take our public speaking courses will feel confident after their experiences at BU using their public speaking skills in the real world, both for professional purposes and for personal purposes as well,” Carberry Gottlieb said.
Carberry Gottlieb, Catherine Klancer, Marisa Milanese and Yating Fan co-designed the courses. Milanese, a master lecturer in the writing program, said that together, they made a syllabus that has three main shared assignments: telling a narrative, a civic engagement group project and a TED Talk.
“Our goal is to infuse it with the spirit of play so that students shed their inhibitions, have fun in the process and develop a level of confidence that they have long wanted and have asked for,” Milanese said.
There is a focus across the sections on social activism and civic engagement. The goal is for students to learn effective strategies for public speaking and to be able to curate persuasive arguments on causes that are important to them, Gottlieb said.
“I really pushed for this for a long time because I think that being able to be articulate and persuasive in front of an audience is actually part of being an educated person and a very important skill to have,” said Klancer, a senior lecturer in the CAS Core Curriculum. “And we’re also concerned about how uncivil civil discourse can oftentimes be.”
Milanese said it’s not only important for students to understand the significance of public speaking and how it’s not always talking behind a lectern, but also a way for students to receive oral messages and be good listeners.
“We wanted students to understand how public speaking also matters, in citizenship and civic engagement,” said Milanese. “How can the ways that we share our words orally really help to connect us to issues that matter to our communities and can make us more engaged citizens?”
The courses are available to students who have completed the first-year writing seminars, as well as the required courses for each respective language.
“You can get your oral expression [HUB unit] in different kinds of ways, but this is a class for people who are going to be speaking in public or out there making statements in public,” Klancer said. “This would be a good class for them because we’re really going to be focusing on honing that skill in particular.”
The classes will have 16 students in them, Milanese said. However, there are plans for each of the sections to cross over and present to each other.
“The thing about public speaking is that there are universalities here,” Carberry Gottlieb said. “There are certain core elements that are skills and strategies that speakers can use in any language.”
Alexa Burke, a sophomore in CAS, thinks the class could be beneficial for students whose major involves a lot of public speaking.
“I think it’s really good for people who don’t feel that comfortable and need to focus on it more,” said Burke.
Merve Temel, a freshman in the College of Communication, thinks the creation of public speaking courses would be helpful as she would be able to use the information from those classes in other courses as well.
“I think it’s a good idea for BU to implement public speaking courses in CAS because I know for myself and a lot of other people that we don’t struggle with assignments, but we do sometimes struggle with public speaking and presenting,” said Temel.
Emma Messerian, a freshman in Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, said that the courses would be a good opportunity for students to get introduced to public speaking and try something new.
“I know that personally, public speaking is one of [the] fears I get. I get very nervous so I think that that class would be a good opportunity to try it out in a safer space,” Messerian said.
While public speaking is a big fear for many students like Messerian, Carberry Gottlieb said it’s all about getting over that initial fear and registering for the class.
“I am certain that the idea of public speaking can be an almost paralyzing thought for people, and taking a course that will focus on that might be pretty scary,” Carberry Gottlieb said. “But, if you’re ever going to try and learn some of these strategies, and [if] you’re ever going to try to get over that fear that a lot of people have public speaking, this is going to be the environment to do it … We’re going to be cultivating an environment of complete and utter comfort.”
