communication across the curriculum for many years; her faculty development commitments and practices cannot be unraveled from what she has learned from her collaborations with Chris. Finally, she would like to thank Karl Lehmann and Emma Grace Lehmann; this project took attention and time and they were there, throughout, always with loving smiles and hugs.
Patricia Palmerton would like to acknowledge the pioneers of Speaking Across the Curriculum, Robert O. Weiss of DePauw University, and Charles Roberts of East Tennessee State University who provided support and insight to her in the early stages of her work on communication across disciplines. She is also grateful for the help and support of Hamline University faculty, in particular Alice Moorhead, for her pedagogical insights, and James Francisco Bonilla and Colleen Bell for many long discussions about diversity in the classroom. Finally, she is indebted to her good friend and mentor, Robert L. Scott, for his insights into rhetoric as epistemic, which has influenced her thinking about the implications of communication pedagogy.
Amy Housley Gaffney would like to thank Deanna Dannels and Chris Anson for providing strong role models of what cross-curricular work should entail. She extends thanks to the students and faculty who have been open to exploring new ways to understand competent communication in teaching, learning, and research. She also thanks Jon D. H. Gaffney (Eastern Kentucky University) for continued discussions about curriculum, pedagogy, and life in general.
Finally, the administrators, faculty, and students we have worked with over the years from many disciplines have made this project possible. In your struggles and triumphs, you have brought to life the work in this book; propelling us to continuously share our passion for communication across the disciplines. You deserve our utmost thanks.
Section I: Oral Communication—Why and How?
In our experience, faculty members have mixed feelings when it comes to teaching students about oral communication. On the one hand, you might believe it is a good idea to provide your students with experience in discipline-specific communication activities. Yet, you might also think the teaching of speech would feel like an add-on to the content-focused work you do in your courses and, hence, is less central to your mission. You might truly want to help students learn to be better communicators, but you might also have limited ideas about how to do so. In this introductory section, we discuss these issues, provide a rationale for including oral communication instruction in your classes, and attempt to address some of the more common concerns that faculty members like you express when integrating oral communication activities and practices into the classroom.
1 Why Include Oral Communication in Your Course?
What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.
—Frank R. Pierson
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.
The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.
—Stephen King
Be sincere; be brief; be seated.
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt
From American presidents to CEOs, inventors to aviators, and authors to film directors—the importance of communication can be seen in cliché after cliché, heard in motivational speech upon motivational speech, and read in one inspirational book after another. Its importance is not debatable; its presence in our lives, a given. Yet, doing it well requires conscientiousness and effort. Doing it poorly can have devastating consequences. And as with many things, teaching it well is a completely different beast than actually mastering it yourself. Furthermore, teaching it well when it is not your primary area of study, course content, or research may seem like a challenging task. This book is meant to help you in this endeavor— to teach communication within your discipline in a way that serves your own instructional goals. By incorporating communication in your courses, you have the potential to help your students learn what it means to interact as a member of your discipline, to prepare your students for future success in the workplace, to engage your students in the course material in more thoughtful ways, and to encourage civic participation and responsibility. Helping students learn to communicate well is helping them learn to be confident, thoughtful, and proactive agents of change. Helping students use communication to learn course material is helping them learn to be independent, invested critical learners. Helping you learn to help your students communicate is what this book is about.
Why Oral Communication? Why Now?
The quotations at the beginning of this book illustrate the widespread recognition of the importance of communication. There is evidence, as well, in a number of different arenas (beyond popular quotations) to support the centrality of communication. In the business world, for example, what is clear is that businesses and industries are consistently recognizing communication competence as critical and necessary for college graduates. Key points include
•The National Associations of Colleges and Employees’(NACE) 2015 Job Outlook Report describes results of a survey of employers on the qualities that make up an ideal candidate for a job. Communication skills (the ability of students to write and speak clearly) ranked high, with nearly 80 percent of respondents identifying team work skills, 73.4 percent identifying written communication skills, and 67 percent identifying verbal communication skills as attributes sought on a candidate’s resume (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2014).
•CollegeGrad.com conducts a survey on employers’ desired qualities for new college graduates every two years. In the past two surveys, the second identified “most important” quality was a student’s interviewing skills—ranking above GPA, internship experience, and computer skills (retrieved from http://www.collegegrad.com/press/whatemployerswant.shtml).
•Silicon Valley employers surveyed reported wanting new employees to have better communication skills—including the ability to use vocabulary appropriately and the ability to professionally use language (Stevens, 2005).
•In two qualitative studies completed by the Microsoft Corporation on struggles new employees faced with socialization in the Microsoft workplace, new employees identified communication as a key struggle—articulating the need to learn to work in large teams and to learn how to ask good questions of colleagues and managers (Begel & Simon, 2008).
•Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, on behalf of the California Foundation for Commerce and Education and funded by the Gates and Hewlett Foundations, conducted a survey and focus groups among California business leaders to get their opinions on public education. One emerging theme was a desire for graduates to have skills such as communication, personal responsibility, and a better work ethic—skills well suited for the workplace. In fact, 55 percent of the respondents rated “communication skills” as the highest priority for educational focus (Tulchin & Muehlenkamp, 2007).
•Robert
