Najee Moye
The Corsair
The Gulf Coast was stricken last year by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that damaged many Floridians’ way of life. It might seem a year off in most of our memories, however not in instructor Jen Ehrhardt’s public speaking classes. This semester they conducted the Oil Spill Anniversary Conference.
The tragedy has been a theme in all of her public speaking classes since the spill in the gulf.
“I think this topic is difficult, and it is very technical especially for people that want to go into the health and engineering fields, especially since this topic is so close to home, and there are a lot of opinions running around,” Ehrhardt said.
The oil spill has created a lot of anger and frustrations for the citizens living on the gulf, from the lack of British Petroleum funding to help clean up the oily slick, to the lack of financial support from the government and the lack of beach time fun and tourism to the gulf.
“We all got to choose something to learn about, about the oil spill. For example, I choose the truth about dispersants,” Mariah Singerman, student, said.
All speech videos are on the conference Web site in an open forum.
The students have many ideas on how to make their section for the Online Conference pop.
“Our group just presented a commercial for our persuasive speech; it’s funny and serious at the same time,” student Tiffany Castillo, 22, said. “Also I advertise it at work, and by putting flyers with rip-off tabs up around campus.”
This Public Speaking assignment is not just speaking in public. There’s marketing and behind-the-scenes work that has to go in for the conference to be effective.
“It is hard to come by speech opportunities in reality,” Ehrhardt said. “If you have a message that you want to get across, the audience doesn’t just show up one day. There’s marketing, and time management involved. Some of the commercials that were filmed on the beach look like ‘Baywatch’.”
Videos from the conference can be seen at https://sites.google.com/site/oilspillanniversary/