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Оглавление2 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 Point I: Considering Institutional Context
Guiding Question: How do oral communication assignments fit with the institutional mission, the department objectives, and your disciplinary culture?
Before you think through your work within your specific courses, it is important for you to consider the contextual issues that might surround your particular course and discipline. How you integrate oral communication activities and assignments into your course occurs within the context of your institution’s goals as well as your discipline’s expectations. Consider the institutional mission, and the ways in which that mission fits with the local region and community. What historical issues influence this mission? How do these relate to the role of your discipline within the larger institution? What other initiatives (such as writing across the curriculum) are present and how are they implemented on your campus? How does your particular department contribute to larger initiatives, a broader sense of your discipline, and/or institution? If you are in a department that is one of many within your larger discipline, what historical or current departmental issues are relevant to your department’s activities? How does the class fit within the larger curriculum? What is the communicative culture of your discipline, department, and curriculum?
There are also considerations related to logistical issues: What are the realities you face in terms of elements such as time, space and students’ demographic? What are your students likely to face relative to expectations in other courses that they are taking—for example, if all major courses require extensive group work, will students be able to fully participate if they are expected to be fully functioning group members in four different long-term group projects?
Finally, there are considerations about the impact of using new kinds of pedagogy in your own teaching and upon how your teaching is evaluated. To what extent have you had some experience working in other communication-related initiatives? How prepared do you feel for turning over some control in the classroom to student discussion? How ready do you feel to assess oral communication efforts of students? What kind of institutional support is available to you to help you develop your pedagogical approaches? What kinds of criteria are used to evaluate you as a teacher, and do they take into consideration investment in new pedagogies?
Once you have a better understanding of these institutional considerations, it is important to consider the cultural, disciplinary issues that will impact the teaching and learning of communication. Some of those could emerge from particular historical traditions in your discipline, others might emerge from standards of practice that have become entrenched in the way in which the faculty and students in your discipline go about approaching communication. Yet others possibly emerge from the pragmatics of your students, faculty, and institutional structure. These situated, disciplinary issues are important to understand because the teaching and learning of communication within your courses will be driven, in many ways, by the context in which it is occurring. Chapter 3 addresses this decision point in more detail.
Decision Point II: Articulating Objectives and Outcomes
Guiding Question: What are your instructional objectives for incorporating oral communication in the classroom and what communication outcomes do you want your students to achieve?
As you think about incorporating oral communication in your course, consider the reasons it might be beneficial for your classes. What purpose could oral communication serve in the larger context of the course? The answer to this question will help you in defining broad instructional objectives for incorporating oral communication in your classroom. For some, you might want to use oral communication in a supporting role—to push students to engage in the reading more thoroughly or to help students talk through their opinions and ideas about course content. For others, you might want to help students master certain professional communication skills they can later use in the workplace. Yet, others might be most concerned about using communication to encourage students to participate as active citizens of their local and national communities. Instructional objectives are typically written in the goal-statement form, beginning with “My goals for using communication in this course include . . . ” or “The purpose of this communication activity or assignment is . . .” Sample instructional objectives are:
•to become familiar with critical thinking approaches necessary for understanding course content, issues, or problems
•to increase group cohesiveness
•to increase student responsibility for learning in the class
•to become proficient at asking questions in the context of your discipline
•to develop facilitation and discussion skills
•to increase awareness and skills for dealing with group conflict
•to be able to use vocabulary needed for professional contexts outside of the classroom
•to learn how to do close reading of texts
•to gain insight into a particular author’s work
•to develop the ability to address a hostile audience.
Instructional objectives or goals are not exactly the same as specific communication outcomes, although they are clearly related. Not all of our objectives or goals as teachers are measurable, yet it is important to articulate that we have them. We may, for example, have an objective that students will become more ethically sensitive, or have empathy for alternative points of view. It would be difficult to measure these kinds of objectives, yet they still provide direction. Student-learning outcomes, on the other hand, are measurable, and as such they can be evaluated should we choose to do so. Therefore, beyond your broad-scale instructional objectives or goals, it is important to identify the specific communication outcomes you want your students to achieve by taking your course. It is possible your institution will refer to these outcomes as “learning objectives” as there are varied definitions for objectives and outcomes dependent on the context. For this context, though, outcomes identify the desired capabilities you want students to have when they leave the course, as opposed to goals that are broad statements of purpose, and at times what we simply hope will happen for students.
One often-used framework for articulating objectives and outcomes is Bloom’s taxonomy. While there have been revisions to this taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2000), and there has been some controversy about its use, we believe it is useful to consider the three major classifications of student learning outlined by Bloom and colleagues (1956): cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. The cognitive domain deals with what you want students to know—the “recall or recognition of knowledge and the development of intellectual abilities and skills” (Bloom, 1956, p. 7). The affective domain deals with values, attitudes, and interest. Finally, the behavioral domain (or psychomotor learning, the term used by Bloom) is focused on motor skills, and commonly is related to speech, handwriting, and technical proficiencies (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1964).
When you are writing course-based outcomes and when you are designing assignments, it might be helpful for you to think about which domains you want to focus on. In Chapter 4, for example, when we discuss outcomes for informal activities, you will often be focused on the cognitive domain and affective domain (what you want students to know and value after engaging in communication), whereas when you design more formal assignments (Chapter 5) that typically have a grade or greater credit value attached to them, you are often adding a psychomotor domain (what you want students to be able to do, communicatively, as demonstrated in the assignment).
There are a number of different formulas for writing student-learning outcomes. For example, the A.B.C.D. framework refers to writing outcomes that identify: the audience/target of the outcome, the expected behavior, the conditions under which this behavior will be expected, and the degree/standard by which acceptable performance will be judged (Heinich, Molenda, & Russell, 1989). Another highly adaptable structure is the S.M.A.R.T. framework for writing student-learning outcomes that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-sensitive (Doran, 1981). To the extent that these frameworks help, use them. However, we suggest that as you adapt and use these frameworks, you do so in ways consistent with your context.
A couple of examples might illustrate how objectives/goals and outcomes could work together in a course. First, in a mechanical engineering design course, instructional objectives and outcomes could be as follows:
“One objective of this course is to engage you in communication events that simulate professional contexts in the engineering design industry.”
For the same course, the learning outcome could be:
“By the end of this course, students will be able to translate technical material into understandable language for a lay audience during a design prototype presentation.”
In a composition course, you might have this instructional goal:
“This course will provide you with experience in expressing written ideas in an oral communication setting.”
A student learning outcome supporting this objective could be:
“By the end of this course, students will be able to translate written work into oral talking points for a public presentation.”
In a modern dance course, you might have the following as an instructional objective/goal:
“The goal for the course is to help students develop multimodal ways of thinking and talking about dance.”
The student learning outcomes for this course might be:
“By the end of this course, students will be able to articulate, in succinct performance review presentations, the rationale behind a series of movements within multiple eras of dance.”
You might notice that these objectives and outcomes blend communication and content in varied ways. Content-oriented goals/objectives are the meat of your course—and they essentially articulate what you want your students to learn in terms of course material. For some of you, there will be distinct content-oriented goals and communication-oriented goals. For others, your content and communication goals will blend. For example, in a software engineering course, the following outcome blends content and communication:
“By the end of this course, students will be able to accurately and succinctly diagnose unreported bugs in new software applications in impromptu managerial role plays.”
In an anatomy and physiology course, you might have separate content and communication outcomes:
“By the end of this course, students will be able to identify different parts of the skeletal, muscular, lymphatic, and respiratory systems” and
“By the end of this course, students will be able to accurately synthesize information about the human body when analyzing health and disease cases.”
How you articulate your content/communication outcomes is up to you. What is important is that you begin to articulate these objectives and outcomes so you can get a sense of how communication fits within the larger context of the course. Although we will spend additional time on teachable, measurable, and observable outcomes when we move to evaluation, it is critical that you begin writing those outcomes now, at the beginning of the process. They will stand as a map to help guide your decisions about assignment design and evaluation. Table 2.1 provides you with questions to help you think about the relevant objectives and outcomes for your course.
Table 2.1. Planning Questions: Relevant Objectives and Outcomes
| What are your key content-focused objectives and/or outcomes for the course? |
| What current assignments help you achieve your content-oriented objectives and/or outcomes for the course? |
| What are your key communication-focused objectives for the course? |
| What particular communication outcomes do you want your students to achieve by the end of this course? To what extent are they cognitive, affective, or behavioral? |
| What current assignments (if any) help you focus on your communication objectives and outcomes? |
Guiding Question: What assignment or activities can you design to achieve your oral communication goals and outcomes?
As you might have noticed, the process of identifying measurable student-learning outcomes leads you to consider the assignments within which those outcomes can be realized. The third decision point focuses on designing assignments and activities to achieve your objectives and outcomes. When thinking about the nature of the assignments, you will need to make decisions about the stakes, structure, and format of each assignment. Specifically, some of these assignments will be very formal, high-stakes events. Others might be very informal activities with little, if any, credit attached. You might structure some of these assignments as collaborative (e.g., team-based), or you might structure them in combination with other assignments (e.g., writing). Additionally, you will need to decide what type of oral communication activity you will have your students engage in during and outside of class. Some might look like traditional public presentations, and others might be more focused on teamwork or small-group communication competencies. The structure and nature of the communication assignment or activity should directly flow from your communication objectives and expected outcomes. If one of your objectives is to help students understand their readings more critically, then you can consider a wide variety of oral communication activities or assignments that could achieve that objective. Your decision, though, should be to go with whichever option is best aligned with the outcome you expect students to demonstrate. It might not make sense, for example, to have students give a formal thirty-minute presentation to achieve the objective of understanding readings more critically. A more aligned activity might be to have students rotate, with each student providing a two-minute critical review presentation in which they articulate the argument of the reading and one criticism of it to start the day’s discussion. An alternative might be for each student to pose two questions for clarification and one or two questions for evaluation in a two-minute informal presentation to the class. The point is, you get to decide how to construct oral communication activities and assignments, but those decisions should align with your goals.
Some of the questions you will need to consider in this decision point include
•What type of communication assignments or activities will best meet your objectives? (e.g., presentation, small group or team-based, one-on-one, etc.)?
•Where on the spectrum between formal (high stakes) and informal (low stakes) will the assignments or activities fall?
•What particular constraints do you want to place on the assignment or activity in order to focus students on your communication goals?
•What guidelines do you want to give students about the assignment or activity in order to focus them on your communication objectives?
•Are there ways to scaffold assignments and activities so that they work together to meet overall course goals (see Chapter 5 for a discussion on scaffolding)?
These questions will get you started. Chapters 4 and 5 of this book provide information on designing both formal communication assignments (often used to foster professional communication competencies) as well as informal communication activities. These chapters also provide information about how to scaffold these activities and assignment to best meet your desired goals.
Decision Point IV: Supporting Student Learning
Guiding Question: How can you support the distinct oral communication challenges your students might face when 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.
