New U-M course teaches students how to ‘give the talk of a lifetime’

March 11, 2016
Written By:
Laurel Thomas
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Amar Ambani practices his talk in front of the class.Amar Ambani practices his talk in front of the class.ANN ARBOR—It was a slightly bizarre scene. On a recent Thursday, students stood facing—and talking engagingly to—the blank wall in a classroom on the University of Michigan campus.

“Is it possible to be true to myself and be a leader,” one student asked, “without social expectations holding us back?”

“At the end of the day, they were all going home, so I really felt lost,” said another student. “A job application is not supposed to cause an identity crisis, right?”

If you think this sounds a little like self-guided therapy, you aren’t too far off. These students were practicing the first three minutes of their 10-minute “TED talk,” which they were to deliver at a public showcase in two weeks.

The work was the only assignment for a new U-M mini-course called “How to Give the Talk of a Lifetime.” But that one assignment takes eight weeks to produce.

“TED” stands for “technology, entertainment and design.” The phrase refers to a certain kind of “talk,” as opposed to a “speech,” the latter of which implies a more formal product.

TED Talks commonly are described as “ideas worth spreading,” says Anne Curzan, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English and associate dean for Humanities in U-M’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

In a nutshell, these are talks given by anyone—from experts to rookies—anywhere about anything.

Curzan delivered a TED Talk, for example, two years ago. It was titled “What Makes A Word Real?” and has had some 1.3 million views.

This novel approach to information-sharing began with the first TED conference in 1984 and has spread, especially with the advent of the Internet. Local TED groups add the “x” after the acronym and the place. The TEDxUofM group has been on campus for about seven years. It was this local group that led to the creation of this mini-course.

Sophomores Lalitha Ramaswamy and Sophia Svoboda both were TED Talk fans and active in U-M’s local group. Both observed the enthusiasm of students attending the annual, all-day TED Talk conference on campus.

But, Ramaswamy said, “I felt that so many of the students being inspired by the conference didn’t have an avenue to do anything with that inspiration, and all those phenomenal ideas worth spreading that were generated sadly died out within the week.”

She and Svoboda put their heads together and came up with the idea of a workshop and developed a detailed plan. They asked Curzan if she would be the faculty sponsor. She suggested they pitch the workshop to LSA administrators as a one-credit mini-course instead.

The students’ TED Talk topics are equally diverse and bear witness to the open subject format. Along with those cited above, students are examining such topics as the result of people taking photos of everything rather than being present in the moment; the power of asking questions of others to help make them feel seen; the pressure of being perfect in high school; and the health benefits of standing up instead of sitting all the time.

“Public speaking tends to scare me, so I wanted to take a class that would allow me to tackle this fear,” said student Brittani Wei-Ling Chew. “I learned about controlling the pace, tone and pitch of voice, structures that work well with the storytelling, and the opportunity to ask questions to great orators.”

“I have learned a lot about how to communicate more effectively,” said student Hayley Rogers. “Even more importantly, I have learned a lot about how to express my passion.”

 

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