activity tomorrow in class or next week in lab that makes sense given what you are already doing. Just doing something small might lead to significant changes in student engagement. In other cases, the strategic framework might spark new thinking about your courses, students, and goals. This thinking could lead you to making some changes on larger assignments. This integration does take time, but we believe it is time well spent if you are able to better achieve your goals.
Me? But . . . I’m Not Perfect
“Easy for you to say. You teach communication. You are probably pretty good at this communication thing. If I’m grading my students on their communication abilities, don’t I have to be perfect? How can I help my students when I don’t think I am an expert in communication? Won’t they start judging me? Communication specialists are much better prepared to deal with these kinds of things. I’m not the expert!”
Very few faculty members are professional communicators. In fact, many faculty members did not receive any training in communication, and if they did, it was probably informal and provided by a close mentor or colleague. Your training focused primarily on your content area—which is exactly where it was supposed to be focused. So it is definitely a valid concern when you think about opening your students up to a new experience in which you have had little, if any, formal training. When one of the authors considered asking her students to engage in a web-based portfolio assignment, she felt similar angst. She is not a web designer. How could she grade them if she was not an expert? Shouldn’t they expect their teacher to be an expert in this? Similarly with communication, you might be concerned about your own level of expertise with particular communication skills or competencies. Even if you do not worry about your own communication abilities, perhaps you worry about providing sufficient feedback on communication—given you want your focus to be on the content.
Similar to many athletic, musical, and technical skills, communication (both written and oral) is an ongoing activity that should be considered developmental. If every music teacher had to be of Beethoven’s stature, we would be short of music teachers. If every basketball coach was required to be as consistent as Michael Jordan, we would have a limited pool of people from which to choose a team. As a teacher of your content area, you do not have to be an expert communicator in order to engage in this process. You have to be willing and open to learn. Your primary responsibility is to teach and master your content area. That is why you are in the position you are in at your institution. You are a member of a discipline that has judged you competent to handle those particular content areas. The good news is that it is this content competence that opens the possibility for you to focus on communication in your courses. The strategic framework of this book allows you to take advantage of your disciplinary goals and competence and to use that competence to better understand and implement oral communication activities. As previously stated, as a member of your discipline, you are steeped in communication norms, activities, and values every day. The framework in this book asks you to bring those to the table—and with support (if possible), you will build more and more expertise. For example, using the framework of this book, a pre-med teacher can focus on the goal of teaching students how much self-disclosure might make a patient-physician interaction fruitful for both parties. A communication expert can give this faculty member the language of “self-disclosure,” or illuminate the different kinds of self-disclosure, but the teacher steeped in the experiences and values of the pre-med context can best illustrate how self-disclosure is enacted for successful communication. So, why you? Because you have the disciplinary expertise to make oral communication meaningful and useful to your students.
Send Them to a Communication Class
“Why do I have to do this? Why can’t I just send my students to communication? They have a public speaking course . . . this really isn’t my job. What are they doing over there anyway? If they were doing their job, I wouldn’t have to deal with students who did not know how to communicate.”
In many universities there are communication courses that fulfill general education requirements. Similar to freshman composition courses, which often introduce students to writing competencies, processes, and genres; general education oral communication courses are important courses for students to take—as they typically introduce students to the vocabulary of oral communication. Sometimes these courses focus squarely on public speaking. At other times, they provide a hybrid view of public speaking, small-group, interpersonal, and organizational communication. Other courses are more focused on business communication. Yet, what these courses do not do is help students understand the particular, situated communication expectations for your discipline. They might teach students how to construct a logical persuasive argument, but they do not and cannot teach them the kinds of evidence that professionals in your discipline value. They cannot teach students the types of communication events that are important to your discipline because there are too many disciplines and content areas with varied communication events—there simply would not be time. You know your discipline. You are the expert in what it means to communicate competently and coherently for your audiences, in your professional situations, and in your classroom. If all you want for your students is to have them gain a basic vocabulary about communication, or increase their confidence in generic communication situations, a communication class will suffice. In fact, it might be very important for your students to gain this exposure. We, however, hope that we have made the argument that you have the potential to help your students in much more situated and profound ways by infusing communication within your course. This book is committed to help you make communication work—within your course and your discipline—so that you see it as an opportunity to achieve your teaching and learning goals.
Not My Class
“Uh, this is fine for other people. But mine is a large class. And my students do not really have the motivation to be engaged with the material. Half the time they don’t even show up. The other half they spend on Facebook. And those who are there really just want a grade and want to get out of my class. I could never make this work. And if I tried, it would be a nightmare to grade.”
We all have particular demographic, contextual, or institution-specific issues that could make this initiative challenging. Some of you are teaching large classes in which any thought of formal communication activities is impossible. Some have particular populations (e.g., freshmen, second-year students, less academically-inclined students) for whom anything outside of the course content is a real challenge. Others have particular physical constraints that preclude any interactive, communication activities (we’ve had our share of rooms with the desks bolted down!). Perhaps others have teaching content that is not as suitable for oral communication activities or assignments.
The framework provided in this book was designed to be adaptable for individual courses, students, and disciplines. We do not assume that communication activities will fit every course, student, or faculty. We are not advocating for a global, generalized communication instruction. In fact, our focus is entirely opposite. The strategic framework is fiercely committed to the goals of your course, curriculum, and discipline. We don’t start by offering blanket, generic communication assignments, competencies, or genres. We start with your instructional objectives/outcomes, and encourage you to consider the various assignments or activities that fit with those emphases. For large classes, you might consider the instructional emphasis of learning course material—perhaps focusing on helping students better understand course readings or historical sources. For freshmen courses in which students are just getting exposed to the content in your discipline, you might choose to help students think about the most valued communication competencies within professional arenas in various disciplines. The point here is that the strategic framework is broad, and while it might not work in its entirety in your class, we hope you can glean something from it that will support your students’ experiences within and outside of your discipline.
Just Another Initiative
“Let’s see, a couple of years ago I tried the whole inquiry-guided learning thing. Then I got really excited about service learning. Hmmmm, then my department head made us
