Educator Resources
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Teaching Public Apologia and Image Repair
Public Apology Central is designed to help teachers, students, and researchers study public apology, image repair, apologia, and related forms of persuasive self-defense. Image repair involves a wide range of persuasive defense strategies across different contexts, including politics, sports, celebrity culture, corporations, media, religion, international affairs, and everyday citizen life. When we use the term “apology,” we usually mean taking responsibility. However, the terms “apologia” and “image repair include a plethora of defensive strategies (e.g. mortification, corrective action, denial, shifting blame, minimization, and others). Cases of image repair offer students a practical way to study persuasion, accountability, crisis communication, rhetorical and situational constraints, audience responses, communication channels, and authenticity.
The resources below are organized around three teaching objectives: 1) introducing students to the theory and concepts of image repair, 2) Applying the image repair framework/strategies to real world cases of public apologia, and 3) advanced classroom applications integrating kategoria (attack rhetoric) and antapologia (responses to apologia).
Teaching the Basics of Image Repair
Use these resources to introduce students to the major concepts, vocabulary, and patterns that shape public apology and image repair discourse.
Why Is Apologia Important?
This section introduces students to the importance of public apology as a form of civic, ethical, and persuasive communication. It can be used to frame a unit on image repair or to help students understand why apologies matter and often require more than simply saying “I’m sorry.”
Video: Professor William L. Benoit summarizes his Image Repair Theory and why it’s important.
Video: Professor Kevin Stein addresses the prominence of image repair in our culture.
Apologia Terminology
This section defines the major image repair strategies students need in order to analyze public apology cases. These may include denial, shifting blame, provocation, defeasibility, accident, good intentions, bolstering, minimization, differentiation, transcendence, attacking the accuser, compensation, corrective action, and mortification.
Video: Apologia (persuasive defense) walkthrough video
Presentation: Image repair and public scandal
Flashcards: Definitions of image repair strategies with examples
Handout: Table of Benoit’s Image Repair Strategies
Patterns of Apologia
This section introduces students to broader patterns in public apology across different contexts, including politics, sports, celebrity culture, corporations, media, religion, international affairs, and lay citizen cases. It can be used to help students move from individual case analysis to larger questions about public communication trends. For example, do women take more responsibility than men for their harmful behaviors? Are men engaged in more instances of sexual infidelity than women? Are athletes more likely to claim provocation as the reason for their misbehavior?
Click here to learn more about how gender, context, time period, channel of delivery, and type of offense impact the types of strategies used.
Apologia References
This section provides scholarly resources for teachers, students, and researchers who want to study image repair theory, apologia, antapologia (responses to apologia), crisis communication, kategoria (attack rhetoric), and other related areas.
Click here for a curated list of research articles, book chapters, and books in areas related to image repair. If you are the author of a scholarly work addressing image repair and it is not included, please reach out through our contact form and we will work to get it added.
Apologia In-Class Activities
Use these resources when you want students to watch, discuss, compare, evaluate, or create examples of public apology and image repair discourse.
Apologia Video Montage
This montage can be used as an opening activity to show students how common public apology has become across many areas of public life. After viewing, students might discuss what the apologies have in common, which examples seem effective, and which seem evasive or incomplete.
Click here for the apologia video montage.
Apologia in Film
Film clips offer students a familiar way to practice identifying image repair strategies before moving into real public apology cases. These examples can be especially useful for introducing strategy recognition, audience response, and the difference between apology (mortification) and persuasive defense (apologia).
Click here for snippets of popular movies containing image repair strategies.
Apologia Assignments/Quizzes
These are some assignments and quizzes we have used to help students understand and apply the image repair theory. Generally, they include coding of strategies, case comparisons, apology rewrites, crisis response statements, archive-style case write-ups, and human vs AI image repair comparisons.
Assignment #1: Apology Construction for Mark Zuckerberg
Assignment #2: Image Repair Analysis Paper
Assignment #3: Comparative Image Repair Analysis Paper
Assignment #4: Coding an Image Repair Text (YouTuber Laura Lee)
Quiz: Understanding Image Repair (student version, instructor version, Canvas import package)
Apologia Case Discussion Guide
The case discussion guide can help instructors facilitate meaningful conversations with students about image repair events. It provides a variety of questions related to the details of the case, the effectiveness of the strategies used, the audience(s) for the image repair, the authenticity of the offender, the role of technology and other channels, and the ethical considerations in choosing a persuasive defense.
Click here for a link to the case discussion guide
Go Deeper into Image Repair
Use these materials for advanced courses, research projects, upper-division assignments, graduate seminars to teach students about the discourse that comes before and after an image repair effort.
Kategoria (Attack) and Antapologia (Responses to Apologia)
This section provides resources for instructors, including walkthroughs videos from Dr. Kevin Stein on kategoria and antapologia. In each walkthrough, he explains the different strategies and provides videos and images to illustrate them. This helps students to understand how attack creates the initial threat to image and establishes the need for the apologia, the apologia or image repair then functions to fend off those attacks and preserve the person/organization’s reputation, and the antapologia seeks to either strengthen the initial attack or to weaken the image repair.
Video #1: Kategoria (attack) walkthrough video
Video #2: Antapologia (response to apologia) walkthrough video
Presentation #1: Antapologia following Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars
Presentation #2: Jewish community’s antapologia in response to Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic tirade
Handout #1: Table of strategies for attacking behavior and character
Handout#2: Table of antapologia strategies
Kategoria and Antapologia Assignments/Quizzes
Recent examples of public scandals or other misdeeds can help students connect image repair theory to current public life, helping them to see the real-world relevance of communication theory and increase their likelihood of assessing these types of messages in the future. This section is designed to provide teachers with examples of assignments that could be integrated into their own classes when teaching about kategoria and apologia. Although these assignments do not contain graphic content, some deal with difficult subjects so please be sensitive to your students when assigning them and be willing to provide alternatives when requested.
Assignment #1: Construct an attack using the case of immigrant Harjinder Singh
Assignment #2: Construct a response to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s apologia
Assignment #3: Kategoria, apologia, and antapologia in the case of resource officer Scot Peterson’s failure to act during the Parkland school shooting
Quiz #1: Understanding Attack/Kategoria (student version, instructor version, Canvas import package)
Quiz #2: Understanding Antapologia (student version, instructor version, Canvas import package)