Building Bridges Between Communication Studies and Community: A Praxis-Approach

In an effort to demonstrate the field’s usefulness and essentiality to our world, communication studies’ praxis orientation needs to be clearly pursued and publicized. Implementing service-learning into the communication studies classroom could achieve this goal. Through extending the scholarship of Britt (2012) and Pollack (1999), this article proposes that communication educators ground and articulate their service-learning pedagogy from three different paradigmatic lenses; the experiential paradigm, the social change paradigm, and the citizenship paradigm. Moreover, communication administrators ought to understand the different paradigmatic foundations, which drive service-learning enactment, in an effort to not privilege one perspective over another. The service-learning literature is vast and discusses service-learning’s history, definitional ground, and benefits. This article responds to one criticism of service-learning and provides a way in which communication educators and administrators could respond. By implementing service learning from a clearly articulated paradigmatic foundation, the pedagogy’s praxis orientation is strengthened, opening up the opportunity for more bridges to be built between academy and community

Embracing Commonplace: Creating Ground for a Life of Rhetorically Engaged Civic Action

This project responds to the question: How do communication educators encourage students to enact the communicative practices necessary for a life of rhetorically engaged civic action? In responding to this question, the academic field of communication studies is recognized as a site for implementing the lessons of rhetoric, democracy, and civic engagement. This project contributes to the civic engagement scholarship from a communication studies perspective by foregrounding human communication as an essential component of the civic engagement process. As an interpretive inquiry, the philosophical thought and the pragmatic action of twentieth-century rhetorician and social activist Jane Addams (1860-1935) provides a hermeneutic entrance point for identifying and understanding the ways in which faculty members in higher education might conduct service-learning in a more responsive and engaged manner. Practicing situated communicative service-learning, a pedagogical approach that embraces the historical moment and the challenges facing service-learning on today\u27s college campus, provides one possibility. Addams\u27s philosophical thought and communicative practices inform the integration of situated communicative service-learning into the communication studies field and college campus through the understanding of commonplace stemming from the Greek understanding of topoi (Aristotle). This praxis-centered approach to service-learning provides ground for students to understand the rhetorical and communicative practices necessary for a life of engaged civic action. By grounding individual communicative practices in a communication classroom setting, communicative habits can grow and flourish in communities

Food and Consumer Economics

Agricultural economists first carried out demand studies in order to understand determinants of farm prices and incomes. The shift to a focus on consumer welfare began with studies of the role of food and food assistance in standards of living. Now the profession is more concerned with how information and quality attributes influence consumer behavior. Agricultural economists' empirical work in this field has informed the development of household production theory, hedonic price theory, definitions of poverty thresholds, complete demand systems, and survey and experimental techniques to elicit preferences. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.