have time to really continue with any of them. Now this? I’m already doing some communication work in my class. My students all participate in critiques and sometimes I help them learn how to avoid ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’—so why take on more? I don’t want to try any more new initiatives.”
It seems like there are constantly new initiatives and teaching foci for us to explore. If we were to attend every workshop that we came across in our email inboxes with a focus on new teaching and learning initiatives, we could probably keep our calendars full five days a week. And although many of you might not have engaged in a formal initiative focused on communication across the curriculum, you might have focused some attention on communication in your current assignments and classroom activities. Some of you have probably helped students learn to participate better in discussions. Others might have asked students to problem-solve in teams or in groups and helped with the process. You might have even assigned an end-of-semester presentation. For some, these efforts may not have been particularly successful. Many of you may have questioned whether the time was worth it—were your assignments really helping students achieve what you hoped? Were they really learning the content they needed to learn? Were the assignments seen by students as integral to their disciplinary learning, or just as another “hoop” to jump through? Some of you may have tried oral verbal assignments, only to have them fail miserably. So why spend more time if you are already doing this? Why engage in this particular initiative given the high risk of failure and the multiple other pedagogical options? In the next section, we tell you why, but first we ask you to look specifically at some of the challenges you may face institutionally as well as individually, when considering integrating oral communication activities into classes. Table 3.1 provides questions for examining these aspects in the context of your institution.
Table 3.1. Planning Questions: Considering the Institutional Context
| What is the mission of your institution? |
| What role does your discipline/department play in achieving the institution’s mission? |
| How do the goals of the course you are teaching fit within the institutional mission and the larger curricular objectives of the institution? |
| What logistical issues are of concern? For example, classroom design, class size, equipment availability, etc. |
| What concerns do you have about the impact of taking on this pedagogical approach in your classes at an individual level? |
| What kinds of support do you need in order to undertake this pedagogical approach? How can you find that support? |
Benefits of Communication in the Disciplines
As we have already mentioned, we suggest that you spend time and attention to oral communication (and specifically to the framework in this book) as it will allow you to better achieve a number of your instructional objectives and outcomes. As disciplinary cultures and contexts change, adapt, and transform over time, so too, will your use of this book. We do not agree with the argument that communication is like riding a bike—once you learn, you don’t forget. Communicating well, within a particular disciplinary context, is complicated by values, norms, social relationships, and power structures. The framework in this book provides applicable, flexible constructs that are meant to dive deeper in order to move beyond the surface issues related to communication. In this way, even those of you who are already doing something with communication in your courses might benefit from a new perspective committed to those disciplinary “deep waters” that are often the ones that make or break a communication event.
Yet, the question still remains—why this initiative, as opposed to the numerous others that arrive in your email inbox, especially if you have any of the concerns outlined above—all valid concerns that pose real challenges to faculty interested in incorporating communication in their courses. So, why do it? In this section we will outline benefits of this initiative for students, faculty, and programs.
Benefits for Students
As indicated earlier, there are a number of different reasons for you to incorporate communication in your courses—professional calls from industry, accreditation processes within particular disciplines, and public reportage on communication inabilities of students. Yet beneath all of these is the primary focus of communication across the curriculum—the students. Presumably, within each of these calls, lamentations, or desires is the assumption that communicating better will help students. So, the question is—how can this initiative help students?
We know from the business surveys that students who are able to communicate clearly and coherently will be ahead of the game when it comes to getting what many of them want—a job. We also know that those skills will benefit them once they enter the workplace in that they will help them cope with the realities of workplace communication events. Additionally, if your focus is on using communication to enhance learning, these skills will engage students in the processes of critical thinking, discussion, analytical questioning, and problem-solving that will not only serve them in academic situations, but in other situations in which they are called upon to learn new material or processes. Finally, communication instruction can prepare students for contexts outside of the workplace and classroom. It might make them more prepared and willing and motivated to speak up at a PTA meeting or at a town hall debate in their local community. Or, it might make them better prepared to make a clear argument about a local issue to friends or neighbors who ask for their opinion.
We will admit, some students will perceive communication work as busy work or as unnecessary to the “real” work of the discipline. Our experience, though, is that these students are either facing very typical learning challenges related to communication (that will be discussed in Section III) or that the communication activities are dropped in without a goal-based, discipline-specific focus. Therefore, when students claim that the communication feels like it is not related to their “real” work, they could be right because the activities might not have been designed in a way that intertwines with the content. With a clear goal-based rationale, careful, strategic design of discipline-based communication assignments and activities, and appropriate support and feedback to enhance learning, many of these students realize that communication is inextricable from their disciplinary lives and actually appreciate their experience in richer ways than they did prior to having it.
Benefits for Faculty
Not only are there benefits for students when they engage in communication within their discipline, but there are also benefits for the faculty. First and foremost, and we’ve said this again and again, the communication activities and constructs you choose to focus on should help you achieve your course goals and outcomes. If particular activities or assignments do not help you do this, don’t use them. Perhaps one of your course goals is to have students become more competent in responding to the public with accurate yet simple information about your discipline. A renewed focus on communication could and should help you achieve this. In terms of teaching, perhaps one of your goals is to become a more interactive teacher. Increased focus on communication could provide you an opportunity to do this. Again, focusing on oral communication will not meet all goals, but it certainly can help you achieve many of them. Another way of looking at this is that communication can help you address some of the challenges you want to fix in your classrooms. At a recent faculty workshop, for example, one of the authors was working with dance faculty who could not see how communication could fit into their course goals. When the author asked what problems students had with the course that the instructors would like to see changed, one faculty member immediately said: “They don’t understand how their movements tell the story.” Bingo. Now, the question is: How can you use communication to help students understand the narrative behind movement? At that point, the faculty member thought of a number of possibilities.
In addition to being better able to achieve your course goals or solve course problems, we have found that many faculty members experience a renewed excitement and engagement with teaching when incorporating oral communication assignments and activities. A number of early surveys done on faculty involvement with communication across the curriculum showed that faculty liked the process of using communication in their courses and found the experience rewarding as a
