On Defining At-Risk: The Role of Educational Ritual in Constructions of Success and Failure

By adopting an ethnomethodological approach to the analysis of focus group interviews with undergraduate students enrolled in and teachers of the introductory course in speech communication, this essay demonstrates that we understand to be a stable, objective aspect of reality--i.e., the inevitability of educational failure--is in fact a human accomplishment, the result of concerted, through unreflective, social action. This paper explores the ways in which students\u27 and graduate teaching assistants\u27 espousal of educational rituals may create and sustain their (or their students\u27) risk of educational failure. Futhermore, the implications of such a perspective for graduate teaching assistants of the basic courses are examined

Beyond \u27Basic\u27: Opportunities for Relevance

Recently one of my colleagues asked me if I could foresee a time when I would give up supervising teaching associates; she said it in a kindly way, but with a cringe and a shrug, as if to suggest that I was sacrificing my efforts on something beneath me…a departmental service. I’ve been coordinating our introductory public speaking course and supervising TAs for fourteen years now, and I still get this question. Each time, I explain that giving up those responsibilities would be like asking someone to uproot their research passion from, say, performance studies to instructional communication, from any old this to any old that. The question implies that the work I do to nurture, sustain and strengthen the introductory course is a labor. I would contend that our work with the “basic” course is more a labor of love, but, as with all labors of love, we undervalue our efforts

Pedagogy of Relevance: A Critical Communication Pedagogy Agenda for the \u27Basic\u27 Course

In this article, we envision how a critical communication pedagogy approach might lend narrative coherence, intellectual rigor, and a focused agenda to the introductory course. Such a paradigm shift is not only consistent with the trajectory of work in our discipline, but it will likely result in ourselves and others assigning more value and respect to our work with the introductory course. Specifically, we advocate four changes with respect to the introductory course: Challenge “teacher-proof” textbooks and curricula, engage diversity, embrace pedagogy as teaching and research, and recover and reinvigorate communication education research

Inception: Beginning a New Conversation about Communication Pedagogy and Scholarship

Drawing on past pedagogical and scholarly lines of inquiry, this article advances—in a dialogic form—several questions for future research and practice in areas of communication, teaching, and learning. The dialogic form of this article offers a metamessage, inviting colleagues to consider creative approaches to inquiry and collaboration in the 21st century. The ideas and questions presented in this essay serve to push the field beyond disciplinary silos, advance research and pedagogy about teaching and learning, and offer thought-provoking insight into what scholars and practitioners who explore communication, teaching, and learning can contribute to those inside and outside of our discipline