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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 your discipline, the evidence that is considered valid in your discipline, the competencies or skills that are important for your students to master, and the performative roles students will need to enact to be successful.

So, how can communication specialists help you? Communication specialists working in cross-curricular programs can provide you with the vocabulary from communication theory and research to help you name, understand, and teach so that you can achieve your instructional goals. From their own expertise, communication specialists can help you by asking you the questions that are important to ask in order to help you best tailor your choices to your own instructional emphases. Based on research, communication specialists can help you understand the particular issues students might face when trying to learn communication in your discipline. For these reasons, if you have access to initiatives on your campus focused on oral communication across the curriculum, we strongly encourage you take advantage of them. Even if you do not, if you have writing-across-the curriculum specialists, they can assist you in thinking about using this book as you think through multiple modalities of communication assignments and activities. This book should ideally supplement your work with these specialists. If you do not have access to these resources, we hope this book will provide the vocabulary, ask the questions, and give some insight into the teaching and learning issues relevant to oral communication in the disciplines.

We recognize that there might be some other challenges and concerns you have with incorporating oral communication in your courses. We discussed some of those institutional constraints in Chapter 1, in fact. We, however, want to address the more individual challenges (the “yeah but’s . . .”) here, because we acknowledge the valid constraints many faculty are under and the important concerns that emerge from these constraints. Our goal is not to deny that these constraints and challenges exist, but rather to provide insight on how to best handle these constraints using the strategic framework we present in this book.

Time, Time, Time . . . in Class

“Ok, so I have thirty-five students. Even if I simply have them do short presentations—say 4–5 minutes each—that will take 2–3 class periods away from my lecture material. Also, what if they don’t do a very good job with the content? Then I have to go back and review the stuff they were supposed to address. If I put them in teams to save time, well—then there’s the whole team issue. So, maybe I’ll just scrap the whole idea. Plus, I have a lot to get through and can’t waste class time.”

Statements like this are typical—many of us feel the pressures of trying to find class time to cover all the material we want. The coverage issue is an extremely valid and important concern when considering incorporating oral communication activities in your courses. We all have material that is important to provide for our students in whatever content area we are teaching. In fact, many of us spend hours and hours of time trying to figure out how to get everything in—ultimately having to make painful decisions about what readings to cut, what lectures to combine, and what to assign for out-of-class work because the in-class time is full. Time in class is particularly an issue in courses where students’ knowledge of the content is essential before they move on to other courses. Additionally, some courses are flagged for gathering assessment data in order to address accreditation issues, and therefore covering the material is essential. In other courses, students are completing a final project that necessitates a significant amount of class time. So why would you bring in something that will take precious time away from lecturing on course material?

One of the primary reasons coverage is an issue for many faculty members is that they have a narrow view of what it means to incorporate communication in their courses. The first thing that comes to mind are formal, business-like presentations—students in suits using PowerPoint, perhaps in research teams, giving 30+ minute presentations with a question-and-answer round afterwards—a situation that most definitely takes up a large amount of class time. For some of you, these high-stakes presentations are important and you can create the class time to allow them. But when these kinds of communication events are not relevant to your goals or your discipline, there are other options. The strategic framework starts with your goals—not with a presumed set of communication activities. You decide how to best use communication within the confines of your content area. The decision, however, begins with your goals. If high-stakes business presentations do not help you achieve your goals, then you should choose something else. If you are teaching a course in which the content is packed, consider using communication to help your students learn about the course material. Perhaps two-minute reading summaries or pair-and-share critical questions about the content will help students engage with the material is new ways. If you are interested in professionalizing your students, consider a variety of communication assignments that might help you do that. For a faculty member in business management, that might be a “performance review.” For someone in soil science, that genre might be a “customer response.” Or, if your goals revolve around having students critically analyze material, you could use discussions to encourage students to synthesize ideas, put information in a coherent form, listen to others, and critique ideas of others in constructive ways. These kinds of activities can help students more fully integrate course content, far beyond what they would be able to do by just listening to a lecture. The point is that you get to decide how to weave communication within and around your content so that it supports the material, instead of detracting from it.

It is worth remembering that using communication in the classroom can be about both developing students’ abilities to communicate orally and developing students’ abilities to understand course content. Part of the answer to the in-class time crunch is that in order to be successful, the oral activity should clearly help students learn the course material. In Chapter 3 we will discuss this particular goal in more detail. For now though, consider oral communication as integrative, rather than additional. Oral communication assignments and activities should not simply be add-ons, created to meet an abstract requirement. Course content must be fully integrated into the requirements for the activity.

Time, Time, Time . . . Out of Class . . .

This sounds like a great idea if I didn’t already have three syllabi to prepare, an evaluation report to write, a faculty retreat to go to, and—oh yeah—that is only before the semester starts. Then there’s the undergraduate committee, the scholarship committee, the publications committee—I actually think I’ve also agreed to be on a committee on committees! And then—keeping up with email questions from students, excuses about missing homework—sick grandparents, dying pets, technology problems . . . ah! Like I said—great idea. I just don’t have any extra time during my day to think about this or make this happen. I already work long hours after I leave the office—there’s just not enough time.

Sound familiar? One of the primary challenges faculty face when considering the possibility of adding communication activities to their course(s) is time. Regardless of the type of institution you are in, there are likely to be a number of requests, requirements, and commitments eating up your daily time slots. Not that these are necessarily negative activities—in fact, many of them are extremely important and are simply part of what we, as faculty, signed up for. But oftentimes the daily activities that we engage in leave very little time for us to focus our attention on initiatives such as communication across the curriculum. And if we are asked (or required) to engage in such initiatives, we find the time—but do so at times regretfully, at times unwillingly, and at times even spitefully.

If we could add more hours to the day or relieve you of some of your duties so that you could focus on communication across the curriculum, we would (and we would probably become rich in the process!). Time is an issue—an important one. Many of you have particular professional, personal, or administrative commitments that make such an initiative challenging. We understand that these constraints might be overwhelming. Our goal with this framework is to make your time spent on your course more efficient. The strategic framework does not necessitate you to completely revamp your course. It is flexible and rests on you making choices that fit within your disciplinary context and help you achieve your instructional emphases. Your choices might, in fact, support the teaching tasks you are already spending time on in your course preparation. If this is the case, you might be able to jump right in—try a small activity tomorrow in class or next week in lab that makes sense given what you are already doing. Just doing something small might lead to significant changes in student engagement. In other cases, the strategic framework might spark new thinking about your courses, students, and goals. This thinking could lead you to making some changes on larger assignments. This integration does take time, but we believe it is time well spent if you are able to better achieve your goals.

Me? But . . . I’m Not Perfect

“Easy for you to say. You teach communication. You are probably pretty good at this communication thing. If I’m grading my students on their communication abilities, don’t I have to be perfect? How can I help my students when I don’t think I am an expert in communication? Won’t they start judging me? Communication specialists are much better prepared to deal with these kinds of things. I’m not the expert!”

Very few faculty members are professional communicators. In fact, many faculty members did not receive any training in communication, and if they did, it was probably informal and provided by a close mentor or colleague. Your training focused primarily on your content area—which is exactly where it was supposed to be focused. So it is definitely a valid concern when you think about opening your students up to a new experience in which you have had little, if any, formal training. When one of the authors considered asking her students to engage in a web-based portfolio assignment, she felt similar angst. She is not a web designer. How could she grade them if she was not an expert? Shouldn’t they expect their teacher to be an expert in this? Similarly with communication, you might be concerned about your own level of expertise with particular communication skills or competencies. Even if you do not worry about your own communication abilities, perhaps you worry about providing sufficient feedback on communication—given you want your focus to be on the content.

Similar to many athletic, musical, and technical skills, communication (both written and oral) is an ongoing activity that should be considered developmental. If every music teacher had to be of Beethoven’s stature, we would be short of music teachers. If every basketball coach was required to be as consistent as Michael Jordan, we would have a limited pool of people from which to choose a team. As a teacher of your content area, you do not have to be an expert communicator in order to engage in this process. You have to be willing and open to learn. Your primary responsibility is to teach and master your content area. That is why you are in the position you are in at your institution. You are a member of a discipline that has judged you competent to handle those particular content areas. The good news is that it is this content competence that opens the possibility for you to focus on communication in your courses. The strategic framework of this book allows you to take advantage of your disciplinary goals and competence and to use that competence to better understand and implement oral communication activities. As previously stated, as a member of your discipline, you are steeped in communication norms, activities, and values every day. The framework in this book asks you to bring those to the table—and with support (if possible), you will build more and more expertise. For example, using the framework of this book, a pre-med teacher can focus on the goal of teaching students how much self-disclosure might make a patient-physician interaction fruitful for both parties. A communication expert can give this faculty member the language of “self-disclosure,” or illuminate the different kinds of self-disclosure, but the teacher steeped in the experiences and values of the pre-med context can best illustrate how self-disclosure is enacted for successful communication. So, why you? Because you have the disciplinary expertise to make oral communication meaningful and useful to your students.

Send Them to a Communication Class

“Why do I have to do this? Why can’t I just send my students to communication? They have a public speaking course . . . this really isn’t my job. What are they doing over there anyway? If they were doing their job, I wouldn’t have to deal with students who did not know how to communicate.”

In many universities there are communication courses that fulfill general education requirements. Similar to freshman composition courses, which often introduce students to writing competencies, processes, and genres; general education oral communication courses are important courses for students to take—as they typically introduce students to the vocabulary of oral communication. Sometimes these courses focus squarely on public speaking. At other times, they provide a hybrid view of public speaking, small-group, interpersonal, and organizational communication. Other courses are more focused on business communication. Yet, what these courses do not do is help students understand the particular, situated communication expectations for your discipline. They might teach students how to construct a logical persuasive argument, but they do not and cannot teach them the kinds of evidence that professionals in your discipline value. They cannot teach students the types of communication events that are important to your discipline because there are too many disciplines and content areas with varied communication events—there simply would not be time. You know your discipline. You are the expert in what it means to communicate competently and coherently for your audiences, in your professional situations, and in your classroom. If all you want for your students is to have them gain a basic vocabulary about communication, or increase their confidence in generic communication situations, a communication class will suffice. In fact, it might be very important for your students to gain this exposure. We, however, hope that we have made the argument that you have the potential to help your students in much more situated and profound ways by infusing communication within your course. This book is committed to help you make communication work—within your course and your discipline—so that you see it as an opportunity to achieve your teaching and learning goals.

Not My Class

“Uh, this is fine for other people. But mine is a large class. And my students do not really have the motivation to be engaged with the material. Half the time they don’t even show up. The other half they spend on Facebook. And those who are there really just want a grade and want to get out of my class. I could never make this work. And if I tried, it would be a nightmare to grade.”

We all have particular demographic, contextual, or institution-specific issues that could make this initiative challenging. Some of you are teaching large classes in which any thought of formal communication activities is impossible. Some have particular populations (e.g., freshmen, second-year students, less academically-inclined students) for whom anything outside of the course content is a real challenge. Others have particular physical constraints that preclude any interactive, communication activities (we’ve had our share of rooms with the desks bolted down!). Perhaps others have teaching content that is not as suitable for oral communication activities or assignments.

The framework provided in this book was designed to be adaptable for individual courses, students, and disciplines. We do not assume that communication activities will fit every course, student, or faculty. We are not advocating for a global, generalized communication instruction. In fact, our focus is entirely opposite. The strategic framework is fiercely committed to the goals of your course, curriculum, and discipline. We don’t start by offering blanket, generic communication assignments, competencies, or genres. We start with your instructional objectives/outcomes, and encourage you to consider the various assignments or activities that fit with those emphases. For large classes, you might consider the instructional emphasis of learning course material—perhaps focusing on helping students better understand course readings or historical sources. For freshmen courses in which students are just getting exposed to the content in your discipline, you might choose to help students think about the most valued communication competencies within professional arenas in various disciplines. The point here is that the strategic framework is broad, and while it might not work in its entirety in your class, we hope you can glean something from it that will support your students’ experiences within and outside of your discipline.

Just Another Initiative

“Let’s see, a couple of years ago I tried the whole inquiry-guided learning thing. Then I got really excited about service learning. Hmmmm, then my department head made us do portfolio-based assessment. These were all fun, but I didn’t 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 teacher (e.g., Cronin & 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.