Basic Course in Communication

Unfolding the Foundation of the Discipline

Not yet formally known as the “basic course in communication,” it was, nevertheless, the focal point for the development of the discipline. The basic course began as a groundswell of public speaking teachers advocating for the disciplinary distinction from English in 1910. The movement began at grassroots conferences organized by public speaking teachers (and elocutionists), who eventually banded together, to advocate for an independent speech association and speech departments throughout the country.

The issue of public speaking independence from English festered for years without a clear plan of action among these “basic course” educators until 1913. During that year, James M. O’Neill presented a provocative keynote address at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) conference where he claimed that no productive work would be accomplished in speech until it was free of English. The following year, 17 speech teachers broke away from the NCTE to organize the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking (NAATPS).

Public speaking (decades later known as Communication) as a profession was a reactive formation to divorce itself from English and establish an autonomous intellectual trajectory for the future—largely due to the basic course. Simultaneously, the discipline—originally comprising basic public speaking course teachers—attempted to carve out a fit for itself in the academic landscape and initially define its intellectual borders around public speaking. It started by assigning the title of “Public Speaking” as its identity. The modern era of communication studies in the United States began with basic course public speaking teachers. These teachers taught public speaking, not rhetoric, oratory, or elocution—the basic public speaking course.

By 1915, the first conference of the newly found association drew 60 members and continued to grow at an exponential rate over the next 5 years. The first reference to the “[basic] course” occurred in October 1915. Thomas C. Trueblood (an elocutionist) published an article in The Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking that advocated the basic course should (a) focus on public speaking and (b) function as a gateway course for other advanced communication courses.

Trueblood’s article sparked a sequence of seven articles, published from 1917 to 1918 in The Quarterly Journal of Speech Education (formerly The Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking), about the basic course in communication. The content of these seven articles described the targeted population for enrollment and the types of speeches included as part of the basic course’s curricula at each individual institution. The variation reported in these articles about basic courses led to the formation of a “basic course committee” at the Eastern Public Speaking Conference in 1919. The committee was charged with the responsibility of offering recommendations of best practices for designing a basic course in communication. Findings of the committee supported a basic course that was (a) offered as a one-semester course to meet a minimum of three hours weekly, (b) capped at a maximum of 25 students per section, (c) functioned as a prerequisite for other advanced courses in speech, (d) provided an overview of the field of speech to students, and (e) included an overview of vocal dynamics. The endorsed title by the membership for the basic course was “Principles of Speech.” The first 10 years of The Quarterly Journal of Speech (formerly known as the The Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking and The Quarterly Journal of Speech Education) are littered with debates about the appropriate goals of oral communication instruction for the basic course or what is the basic course in communication. Members of the fledgling discipline continued to teach [Page 88]the basic course while simultaneously defining itself as more than public speaking and attempting to capture the impetus of the basic course in communication.

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