Bakersfield College’s Communication department faculty publish a new textbook in a collaborative effort.

Andrea Thorson. Picture taken from the CSUB website

The textbook, called Contemporary Public Speaking: How to Craft and Deliver a Powerful Speech, was primarily authored by Andrea Thorson, who attended Bakersfield College from 2000-2002 and was a nationally recognized forensic competitor and coach. She now teaches public speaking and several other communication courses as a full time member of the Communication department here at Bakersfield College.

The other contributing authors are Mark Staller, Michael Korcok, Helen Acosta, John Giertz, and Debra Thorson, all of whom have significant experience in speech and debate and are decorated competitors and coaches. The authors of this text have over 150 years of combined experience teaching the public speaking course.

“Our book recognizes the importance of multicultural teaching and diversity in public speaking. This textbook incorporates multiple voices, perspectives, and approaches. We believe this contemporary, collaborative endeavor creates more space for the classroom instructor’s own voice (Thorson et. al, 2013, preface). The text offers the standard components but offers unique additions including chapters on language, reasoning,and software presentations.

The primary reason the textbook was crafted was to prepare for a bid to the Open Educational Resource OER that is coming up in the next year or so. OER would make it so that selected published texts would become free to all students in California in e-book form.

The text has recently been adopted by a CSU and is set to become an e-book by next year. Congratulations to these amazing Bakersfield College faculty!

Tagged: Andrea Thorson, Bakersfield College, communication, Debra Thorson, Helen Acosta, John Giertz, Mark Staller, Michael Korcok, textbook, writing