How new—or old—should evidence be that is provided in answers to questions in order to be deemed legitimate? How do the rules of evidence differ in history from graphic arts, economics, anthropology, or mathematics? Is discussion tightly organized in your discipline? Or, is there an expectation that creativity flows from wide-ranging tangential forays? Are agendas crucial to success? Or, are agendas seen as something that unnecessarily curtail creativity? What evidence is appropriate to sound credible as a speaker in political science? Engineering? Religious studies? Art? Should evidence have been gathered using the scientific method in order to be acceptable? Furthermore, what about organizational structures? Argumentative forms? Professional standards? Additionally, how are expectations for oral communication similar to and/or different from expectations for written communication in your discipline? Are there other forms of communication competence that are valued in addition to writing and speaking? How do all expectations for varied modalities and competencies intertwine? Although these variations in communication competence often go unaddressed, they do exist, and students have to manage them. In this book, we advocate for teaching students how to understand those variations so that they can work within them. Many faculty members tend to assume that students will somehow discern what the variations are. The astute students will. However, many students will never understand that there are criteria being applied that are not just arbitrarily chosen by their professor but are part of a larger cultural system. In a parallel example, students may learn how to write a lab report in an introductory chemistry course and, in doing so, may implicitly learn to differentiate that writing from more creative pursuits. The cultural norms surrounding writing in the sciences are well documented, but such norms are not always clearly conveyed to students.
What does this mean for us as teachers? We need to think proactively about what these rules are for our students—whether in small-group discussions, interactions to facilitate close readings of texts, presentations to illustrate professionalism, or teamwork aimed at advocacy of a particular political agenda—and help students learn to think proactively about them as well. We cannot possibly map all of the elements in any given situation that point to the specific behaviors that will inevitably be competent in that situation (see Pearson & Daniels, 1988). Rather, we need to work with students to help them learn how to discern the characteristics of all situations—academic, professional, interpersonal, civic—that they encounter. We need to help them understand communication within the disciplines, rather than communication as a generic skill that works in the same way in every situation. We also need to help them figure out how to learn what the rules are. Instead of charting a map of competence, we must look at how such maps are constructed and teach students how to discern the nature of that construction. We cannot separate what we are teaching—and what we are asking of our students—from the contexts within which they are functioning. Communicative competence implies knowledge of cultural, social, and interpersonal rules that will facilitate the negotiation of meaning among the participants. Part of our task it to help students gain this knowledge so that they can enact behaviors that are appropriate and successful in their various communication situations.
2 A Strategic Framework for Communication in the Disciplines
The question now is simply—Where do you start?
First, we acknowledge the constraints under which you are able to work with students. In many cases, you have very limited time to devote to anything other than your course subject. In many cases you do not have the opportunity for an extended mentoring relationship with students because they take one class with you and move on. How can you help students learn to be confident, thoughtful, proactive agents of change in nine or fifteen weeks while at the same time covering the material you need to cover; keeping up with the dramas of the classroom; grading homework, quizzes, and tests; managing attendance; considering excuses; responding to student emails; and perhaps every once in a while actually reading new material for the course in your “free” time? It is possible if you take a focused, discipline-based approach to oral communication. Your best chance at engaging in oral communication in your courses and your best chance to maximize your impact with students is to do so with your feet firmly planted in your own disciplinary traditions, norms, and contexts and using those to help guide your choices about how oral communication fits in. This book will provide you with a framework—a trellis, if you will—to act as a support for exploring how oral communication can contribute to your own disciplinary and course-based content, activities, and goals.
Before we introduce the framework of this book, we want to recognize that many of you have come to this initiative as a result of outside forces. It could be that your campus has an established communication-across-the-curriculum program that has invited you to participate. Perhaps your campus has a writing across the curriculum program that has incorporated more attention to speaking and they are looking for people who might be interested. It could even be that you are feeling pressure from the administration to participate in more teaching and learning enhancement activities. Or, if you are an administrator, you could be feeling pressure from the alumni, industry, or accreditation agencies to produce outcome-based evidence of student learning and communication competence. It could also be that your campus or department is not involved with these initiatives, but you have become curious and intrigued by the possibility of doing something new in order to revitalize your departmental participation. Whichever of these “sparks” (or perhaps there are others, too) has brought you to this book, our goal is to provide you with a framework and practical supplements to that framework to help you consider, seriously and efficiently, a focus on oral communication in your classrooms and curricula. The premise of this book is that focused attention to goal-based, discipline-specific oral communication activities can benefit teaching and learning in significant ways, facilitating engaged and interactive learners and teachers, proficient and coherent soon-to-be professionals, and participatory citizens within and outside of your classroom.
While there are many reasons to consider oral communication as a viable contribution to your classroom, the task of incorporating oral communication in your courses could be a daunting one, especially if you are already teaching a packed curriculum, dealing with larger and larger classes, or managing other instructional initiatives. The framework we present is not intended to simplify this task, but rather to provide you with a number of options to explore using that which you already know—your discipline. One of the key assumptions of this book is that oral communication is a situated activity that, when taught across the curriculum, is best implemented with a discipline-specific, goal-based foundation. We do not start with the five oral communication assignments that every student should participate in or the oral communication skills that should be present in each course, nor could we even establish what assignments or skills should be included in every class. Instead, we suggest several decision points and elements to consider while developing your own approach to teaching oral communication in your own discipline.
As you move forward, we encourage you to be strategic in locating where oral communication best fits within your instructional emphases. To help you explore these issues, we propose a framework that focuses on five decision-making points about oral communication: Consider institutional context, articulate oral communication instructional objectives and outcomes, design oral communication assignments and activities, support students’ learning, and evaluate learning. These decision points follow a traditional instructional design model that moves from institutional context to goals to design to implementation, and then finally, to assessment. Figure 2.1 provides an illustration of these decision points.
Figure 2.1. Strategic Framework for Oral Communication in the Disciplines
We tailor this model to oral communication in the disciplines by highlighting the situated nature of these decisions. For each decision, you should consider the particular norms and values of your course and discipline so that you can construct a learning environment that is useful and authentic to the students involved. We will introduce each of the five decision-making points in brief here, and then will expand on them in later chapters by providing teaching resources for each of the constructs.
Decision
