engaging in oral communication activities and assignments?
Like any new skill or process, oral communication does not come naturally. Although some would argue that talking is a skill that many have naturally, and therefore need no help with, we suggest that when using oral communication to achieve particular goals, there are issues that need to be addressed in terms of student support. Regardless of your assignment decisions, oral communication opens the door for a number of challenges students (and you) could face. Specifically, when asking students to participate in oral communication assignments, there is a possibility that you will need to deal with issues of apprehension, participation, difficult interactions (conflict), and diversity. This fourth decision point is about figuring out how to deal with these issues and provide students with the support they need to work through the potential challenges and be successful. As faculty, your primary job is to teach content, and we realize you probably do not have the time to fully explore these challenges. Yet, there is a wealth of information about these challenges that you could use to preempt them or diffuse them when they arise. We suggest that you seriously consider attending to these challenges because it is these that usually become critical factors in whether or not you accomplish your objectives.
Some of the questions you will need to consider within this decision point include
•To what extent do your assignments and activities open the door for communication apprehension? What fears might students have about engaging in these assignments and activities?
•What challenges do students face when participating in class activities or group discussions? Are students likely to be quiet, and even resistant to speaking up in class? Or are students eager to participate in communication activities such as discussions?
•What are student experiences with group communication activities? For example, how will you manage students who have had bad experiences with group or teamwork and who are discouraged at the prospect of being involved in yet another group project?
•What conflicts or difficult interactions do you anticipate could emerge when students work on and perform their communication activities and assignments?
•What issues of diversity (e.g., gender, ethnic, cultural) might cause challenges to students as they work on and perform their communication activities and assignments?
Section III of this book (Chapters 6 through 10) discusses each of these challenges and provides suggestions of activities and assignments to help support students who face these challenges.
Decision Point V: Evaluating Learning
Guiding Question: What assessment structures will provide the most useful information to you and your students in terms of their relative abilities to achieve your learning outcomes?
Nine times out of ten, the first question faculty members have when thinking about using oral communication in their course revolves around assessment. We recognize that assessment takes time, and assessment of oral communication might feel daunting, given your expertise is on the content of your course. Yet, assessment is tied directly to your goals, assignment design, and student support. This final decision point asks you to consider various assessment mechanisms that could help you understand the ways in which students are fulfilling your goals and the ways in which they need to improve. Additionally, we believe it is important—specifically when assessing oral communication—to consider the relational nature of assessment, and to pay attention to the ways in which you can respond to students in order to increase the potential for learning. Students often feel that when they speak, whether in front of a large group or in a small team-based setting, whether formal or informal, that they are putting themselves out there. Therefore, there is the potential that students will become defensive when given feedback. For this reason, we address issues related to this personal and embodied nature of oral communication feedback and response.
Some of the questions you will need to answer within this decision point include
•What mechanisms will you use to assess students’ oral communication assignments and activities? How formal or informal will the assessments be?
•How will you provide feedback to students?
•What face issues (i.e., ego management) could emerge when providing feedback to students on their communication performances and how can you mitigate those issues?
•What various response structures might provide students with useful feedback on their communication performances (e.g., technological, face-to-face, etc.)?
•How can you construct a rubric that reflects your communication goals and disciplinary culture?
•What kinds of rubrics will be most useful to you and your students for assessment purposes?
Section IV deals with these assessment issues and provides guidance in making decisions about response and evaluation, creating rubrics, and managing ego-related issues (facework).
Where to Start?
You might have already noticed that although we discuss each of these decision points separately, they are intricately intertwined. For example, the ways in which you assess oral communication activities need to be directly tied to your objectives and outcomes (e.g., you don’t want to hold students accountable for something that is not necessarily part of your objectives or outcomes). Writing good student-learning outcomes automatically gets you thinking about the kinds of assignments that will achieve those outcomes. And the ways in which you support students will differ depending on the challenge brought up by the differing assignments (e.g., there might not be apprehension issues if you are using low-stakes pair-and-share assignments). Finally, all of these decision points live within the broader culture of your discipline and your institution. The key here is to start with your objectives and to stay tethered to them as you move through each of your decisions. We present these decision points linearly and individually in order for you to have a clear and useful framework to follow. However, to use an analogy borrowed from one of our experiences with textiles faculty and students, these decision points are meant to be “wovens.” Each of these decision points depends on the others, and although you might choose to focus your energy on only one, we encourage you to consider the full range of these decisions so that you can take advantage of the ways in which they are integrated.
3 Considering Institutional Contexts and Challenges
If you are like many of the faculty we work with, you are probably thinking “Why me? Why should I teach communication? Why not let the communication department deal with it?” This is a good question. We do not presume all faculty members are professional communicators, or that faculty in other disciplines should have the theoretical background to teach communication in the same way as do communication faculty. This book does presume, though, that you have the disciplinary background and expertise to understand the communication life of your discipline. You are the expert on how communication is enacted in your own context. If an audience member watching your students says something like “emotion doesn’t work here” or “the visual speaks for itself,” it is likely that you can make sense of those comments in ways that are different from how we might make sense of it given our background in communication (presuming those comments are typical of your disciplinary culture). You can probably tell students pretty quickly what they should definitely not do when they give a presentation to industry sponsors (for example) or what they should do if they want experts in the field to find them credible. You probably understand the nuances of productive and cohesive teamwork in your discipline. You know the particulars about your disciplinary tradition that might influence the extent to which women participate, or the extent to which minorities become active members of communicative events. You have very good localized understandings of the types of communication events that typify
