ABSTRACT
Greening Epideictic Speech' is a unit-length activity that tasks students with developing and delivering an original ceremonial address that shows consideration of the 'more-than-human world'. By infusing epideictic rhetoric with environmental topoi, this activity instructs students about an oft-delivered genre of speech all whilst responding to the posthuman call to showcase humanity's entanglement with the more-than-human world. The next step in this activity requires that students further refine the scope of their speech, a process that grants students agency to determine what species of nonhuman or instances of natural disaster they want to research and discuss. Accordingly, a successful speech of inspiration might locate racism as a disparaging communal value, indicate how the natural disaster created conditions that exposed such a flaw, and declare a set of values that the community might adopt in moving forward that will better aid citizens in both responding to the tragedy at hand and living with less systemic violence.
