Glenn, 1991; Cronin, Glenn, & Palmerton, 2000; Roberts, 1983). As you think about refining your course(s) to increase attention towards oral communication, you might experience new insights about your discipline, content area, and teaching in the process.
Also, as you better understand the genres, arguments, competencies and performative cultures that define your discipline, you might find benefits for your own communication abilities within disciplinary and professional contexts. Perhaps you will be able to navigate those communication activities and events you are called upon to participate in with an increased knowledge about what is considered persuasive, valued, and pertinent to the audiences you interact with because you have taken the time to help your students understand and learn the same.
Finally, and pragmatically, a focus on oral communication activities could provide you with tangible products to help you evidence successful teaching and improved learning. If assessment or accreditation is a concern in your department or institution, it could be important for you to gather information that illustrates teaching development and achievement of particular learning outcomes. If you are expected to engage in research and have an interest in instructional research or the scholarship of teaching and learning, a focus on oral communication activities provides you with the opportunities to engage in research about communication in your courses or programs. Essentially, there is a possibility that some of the pressures you face as a faculty member or program director could be reduced by creating opportunities to gather information about students’ oral communication processes and abilities.
Benefits for Departments and Programs
If your department is considering a more sustained focus on communication across the curriculum, or if you are working administratively within a cross-curricular program, there are several benefits to including oral communication as one of the initiatives you implement. First, if you are in a department or program with an already established focus or educational initiative (e.g., writing, technology, service-learning), broadening to embrace oral communication will provide your constituents with more options. Perhaps faculty members you work with are having a difficult time embracing the concept of technology in the classroom, but it seems easier to consider oral communication activities given their disciplinary culture. A focus on oral communication provides them an option that they wouldn’t have had with a narrowly defined program. This option could translate to increased participation, more likelihood of sustainability, and a more diverse participant pool.
Second, providing a breadth of options could allow support for other initiatives. Perhaps, for example, faculty who fear the technology initiative but are less fearful of oral communication activities will be able to better comprehend and embrace technology as it is woven within informal speaking assignments. For those in writing across the curriculum programs (in which there is already a national movement towards including oral communication) oral communication can be used in support of writing instruction. Students in psychology, for example, could give one-minute oral presentations describing an outline of their research project (perhaps in poster session format, informally) to help them talk through the logic of the project and get feedback on it. There are a number of different ways oral communication can support writing, and/or other educational initiatives, depending on the focus on your program or department.
Finally, and again, pragmatically—there has been increased focus nationally and internationally on communication across the curriculum, and participating in this movement could provide you with an opportunity to engage in an initiative that is gaining strength, popularity, and attention in educational conversations. The national and international interest in this initiative is growing and is opening doors to opportunities that could lead to productive and interesting teaching and learning collaborations and good public relations for your department or program.
Managing Challenges
Before we move into the section with examples of different kinds of communication assignment designs, we want to return to where we started in this chapter—recognizing that you might face challenges when considering incorporating communication in your courses and curricula. Take some time to consider what those challenges might be in light of the discussion in this chapter. Table 3.2 provides planning questions to help you think about institutional challenges you may face.
As you answer these questions, we hope you begin to gain a broad sense of the communicative life of your discipline. As you continue on to the next chapters, we ask you to focus in on your own objectives and to consider various communication activities and assignments that could help you meet those objectives. Our goal is to help you align your own goals with the broader context of your discipline, your students, and your own teaching style.
Table 3.2. Planning Questions: Managing Institutional Challenges
| What distinctive challenges do you face that could influence the success of using communication in your course(s)? |
| What distinctive challenges do your students face when preparing for and engaging in oral communication assignments? |
| What distinctive challenges does your department or unit face that might influence whether or not efforts to integrate oral communication activities into your unit’s classes will be successful? |
| How would you describe the communication culture of your discipline, and in what ways would using communication activities be viewed positively/negatively? |
| How would you describe the communication culture of your students, and in what ways might that influence their participation in oral communication activities in your class? |
Section II: Designing Assignments
In this section we provide examples of the kinds of assignments that you might create in order to achieve your course objectives. The examples we discuss should by no means limit you. In our experience, faculty members are amazingly creative, and once they start looking at ways in which oral communication assignments can help them achieve what they want to achieve—whether it is better integration of content knowledge or development of professional oral communication competence—the variety of approaches developed is exciting.
4 Designing Informal Communication Activities
As we articulated in the first chapter, research shows that professional communication competence is a worthwhile pursuit in the classroom, given the multiple contexts outside of the classroom in which communication competence could make a difference in students’ lives. Similarly, we need to recognize that students can use communication within the classroom in ways that are not necessarily limited to professional competence, but more focused on enhancing their learning experience. In our experience, when faculty members think about using oral communication in the classroom, most automatically think about the formal presentation. Yet, when you think about the important learning and critical thinking processes that occur in your classroom, you may think of classroom discussions, group lab work, and small learning groups. These also involve oral communication—just a different kind of communication than the formal presentation. These kinds of communication activities—sometimes referred to as communication-to-learn activities or informal communication activities—presume a different way of thinking about oral communication in the classroom. We prefer referring to these activities as informal activities, because we believe that whether formal or informal, the communication activities in the classroom are all communication-to-learn activities.
Informal communication activities have many benefits. For example, small learning groups of three or four people can facilitate talk because it is a safer place to try out ideas before coming to the larger group. Discussion, and experience with discussion, can desensitize individuals to public talk to some extent and decrease the threat of formal presentations. This kind of interaction enables change because it is part of an on-going transaction—thought evolves while interacting. The exposure to a diversity of skills and thinking decreases myths about what others think. It helps create a realistic comparison base because students hear and are exposed to others’ work and thought. There is the potential for students to realize the equifinality of learning: the same end can be reached in a variety of ways.
