Week 7 Post 3

Agency is a really frustrating thing to try to explain to people and if I'm being honest, it's not really something I understood when it was explained to me at first. Agency rarely applies to economic issues; you can give speeches about rich or poor people if you're in the middle class. It doesn't really apply to technology speeches; nobody cares that you didn't invent quantum computing if you have a good understanding of what it is. It almost never applies to issues that impact everyone like climate change. Where it must absolutely be concrete and respected are social issues. You can not give a speech about gay culture if you're straight. You shouldn't give a speech about other races as an authority figure. You should try to avoid talking about political issues in other countries unless you're doing it in an objective way. I think the best way of explaining why is with the example from a speech I watched an asian  extemp speaker give at Yale a few years ago. He claimed that there wasn't wide support for the black lives matter movement within the african american community in the united states. He was speaking from the point of view of a black person but he didn't have that agency. He went on to back that up with a study that showed that less than 1/8 black people in the US had participated in a BLM march at the time. He wasn't technically wrong but he did misrepresent the point of view of an entire community because another study published (an opinion poll) within the same month found that more than half of the black community in the US supported the BLM movement. Had he looked for the actual point of view of people who had agency to talk about the issue, he could have protected himself from screwing up like that and making himself look bad and reducing the views of an entire population to a less than factual number.
My question when I first watched the lecture series about agency was, "How am I supposed to deal with agency when the questions I'm talking about force me to speak on issues I don't have agency for?" The answer I was given is that I should do it in an objective way. Essentially, the extemper I was talking about earlier should have said 'BLM rallies have relatively low turn out' rather than 'Black Americans don't support BLM'. I thought this was very insightful and it's something I try to be conscious of when I'm giving speeches.

Comments

  1. Ms. Dunley4 December 2019 at 11:39

    Different thoughts on agency:
    Personal agency refers to one's capability to originate and direct actions for given purposes. It is influenced by the belief. in one's effectiveness in performing specific tasks, which is termed self- efficacy, as well as by one's actual skill.

    "Your ability to take action, be effective, influence your own life, and assume responsibility for your behavior are important elements in what you bring to a relationship. This sense of agency is essential for you to feel in control of your life: to believe in your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior, and have faith in your ability to handle a wide range of tasks or situations. Having a sense of agency influences your stability as a separate person; it is your capacity to be psychologically stable, yet resilient or flexible, in the face of conflict or change." from “Your Sense of Agency: Are You in Control of Your Life?” Psychology Today.

    Agency is the degree to which an individual has the ability to make decisions about their life. To have agency means to have control over your life and the decisions that you make. This is the psychology definition.

    Student agency refers to learning through activities that are meaningful and relevant to learners, driven by their interests, and often self-initiated with appropriate guidance from teachers. To put it simply, student agency gives students voice and often, choice, in how they learn.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 12 Post 2

Week 12 Post 2 Most people believe that in order to have an original idea, it can not be similar to any other ideas people have already come up with. This belief is false or else humans would have run out of original ideas long ago. In order to ensure that an idea is original, a speaker must keep their own rhetoric, body language, and stories but they may benefit by comparing their speech to one that has already been written. In doing so they can iron out some of the wrinkles with their speech and also find new materials to strengthen it with. For this exercise to be as effective as possible, the person doing it should attempt to find a speech similar to theirs in subject, purpose, and speaker. By ensuring that those elements are as similar as possible, the speaker can get the most success possible by running this drill because they will be able to draw comparisons to their speech much more easily.  This proves that public speaking is a skill rather than a talent because t...
Read more

Week 13 Post 1

 Link to source for this week:  Why Are We Scared of Public Speaking? It occurred to me that I've talked a lot about how to overcome communication anxiety but I haven't really investigated why it happens. This week is an attempt to rectify that problem. Communication Anxiety's legal name is Glossophobia  and about 25% of people report having it 4 primary factors to this fear 1) Physiology -Autonomic nervous system responsible for fear and anxiety -Audiences can be perceived as a threat, triggering "hyper-arousal" -hyper-arousal magnifies emotions like fear and anxiety, creating a cycle in which they magnify themselves -this can cause a small fear of public speaking to be exacerbated exponentially 2) Thoughts -people overestimate the stakes of communicating their ideas to the audience -people are unnecessarily critical of themselves -performance orientation vs communication orientation --performance=public speaking is a task that requires very spe...
Read more

Week 4 Post 1

Mind Shift  is a subsidiary of NPR. It is a non profit provider of free education news and information which supports parents and teachers around the world. The first article I'm working off of is from their editorial board and was published on October 3, 2016. Here is the  link to the article . Edutopia is a website published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation. It celebrates and encourages innovation in K-12 schools and focuses on how different learning strategies have different outcomes. The second article I'm working off of was written by Oli de Botton, an English teacher who has worked in educational policy as a 'government education adviser' for the UK and he has held other positions in politics. He is currently serving as the Headteacher of a school he founded in 2012 called School 21. His article was published on September 15, 2016. Here is the  link to the article . Math and Literacy (M&L) are currently the most focused on topics in school. M...
Read more