ABSTRACT

This essay honors the teaching methods practiced by Robert Hopper as experienced by one of his students. I completed my doctorate in communication under Hopper’s supervision in the summer of 1996.

One of the works favored by Hopper in his courses on social interaction and performance was Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus. If a champion of conversation analysis had existed among the ancients, it surely might have been Socrates, a teacher with an appetite for learning. Just as surely, Hopper’s appetite for learning kept his classes vibrating with a dynamic spirit of face-to-face conversational inquiry, no mean feat in the 1990s of multimedia and distance-learning.