Confronting Students’ Personal and Interpersonal Communication Anxieties and Needs through Constitutive, Experiential Communication Pedagogy

Today’s college students are experiencing unprecedented high levels of anxiety, resulting in devastating effects. This essay challenges communication educators to respond directly to this significant issue by employing an experiential pedagogy that offers students constitutive opportunities to initiate, experiment with, and receive feedback about new communicative behaviors that will enable them to interact well and achieve positive outcomes in high anxiety-inducing interactions. The essay explicates how that constitutive, experiential pedagogy informs the course “Communication and Human Relations,” enabling students to acquire communication competencies to reduce their anxiety about and to manage effectively their personal and interpersonal communication difficulties

Communication Education for Social Justice: How Instructors Conceptualize Communication Activism Pedagogy (CAP) and Teach CAP Courses, and Challenges They Experienced Teaching CAP Courses

Communication activism pedagogy for social justice (CAP) is a relatively new approach to social justice education in the communication discipline. CAP teaches students in the classroom about social justice and then has them engage in social justice communication activism (SJCA), &ldquo;us[ing] their communication knowledge and resources to work with [oppressed] community members [and/or activists] to intervene into and reconstruct unjust discourses in more just ways&rdquo; (Frey &amp; Palmer, 2014a, p. 8). Because CAP is less than a decade old, the limited scholarship about it is has been either conceptual essays explicating CAP (e.g., commitments and principles) or case studies of the SJCA engaged in by students in courses in which instructors employed CAP. This qualitative, applied, survey study sought to contribute to the literature by investigating how instructors employing CAP conceptualize that pedagogy, especially in relation to Frey and Palmer&rsquo;s (2014a) original conceptualization; teach courses using that pedagogy (&ldquo;CAP courses&rdquo;); and challenges they experienced teaching those courses. To study those foci, I solicited and analyzed syllabi of courses in which instructors employed CAP, and I interviewed some of those and other instructors who use that pedagogy. The findings showed that interviewees&rsquo; conceptualization of CAP generally aligned with how it originally was conceptualized, although some wanted to broaden CAP&rsquo;s view of the communication activism in which students engage, from requiring that it promote social justice to students choosing the focus of their activism, even if it was directed toward creating and/or perpetuating social injustice. Perhaps most important, instructors&rsquo; conceptualizations of CAP did not align with how they taught CAP courses. Specifically, although most instructors oriented their courses toward social justice, most did not require students to participate in SJCA, making them critical communication pedagogy, not CAP, courses. Moreover, when SJCA was required, instructors allowed students to engage in on-campus activism and to choose whether to have partners, rather than, as per CAP&rsquo;s initial articulation, students engaging in activism off-campus in collaboration with oppressed community members and/or social justice activists. Finally, interviewees identified three sets of challenges they had experienced teaching CAP courses that were associated with students, community partners, and the U.S. university context. I discuss the significance and implications of the findings for theorizing CAP and teaching CAP courses and offer recommendations that include an expanded typology of CAP instruction comprised of &ldquo;Pre-CAP&rdquo; courses that prepare students to engage in SJCA, &ldquo;CAP-Light&rdquo; activities that engage students in short-term SJCA (in addition to or in place of a semester-long assignment), and CAP courses that have inclusive policies about where and with whom students engage in SJCA.</p

Investigating Dimensions of Trust in Public Discussions of Diabetes Led by Certified Diabetes Educators

The givens of “trust” and “credibility” are often glossed over in research concerning the efficacy of community-based approaches to health issues. This research focuses on one type of community intervention aimed at increasing citizens’ interest in acting to address diabetes: a series of community discussions led by Certified Diabetes Educators (CDEs). We take a critical discourse analysis approach to answering several questions including: How does the discourse between CDEs and participants work to establish or hinder the CDEs’ credibility

Interview with Emily Loker

Emily Loker of Portland, Maine, discusses music, ceramics, and writing. She talks about the financial constraints of certain kinds of making and about the intersections of art and activism.https://digitalcommons.portlandlibrary.com/pplhistory_makers_audio_interviews/1008/thumbnail.jp

Social Justice Track of Social Movements Online Asynchronous Master

This course shell is for a social justice track in a communication-focused Social Movements course. The course shell includes a syllabus, assignment descriptions and rubrics, lecture slides and audio, and assigned readings.</p

Investigating Dimensions of Trust in Public Discussions of Diabetes Led by Certified Diabetes Educators

The givens of “trust” and “credibility” are often glossed over in research concerning the efficacy of community-based approaches to health issues. This research focuses on one type of community intervention aimed at increasing citizens’ interest in acting to address diabetes: a series of community discussions led by Certified Diabetes Educators (CDEs). We take a critical discourse analysis approach to answering several questions including: How does the discourse between CDEs and participants work to establish or hinder the CDEs’ credibility?Note from Christy Standerfer: I have made the changes requested regarding the DOIs but did not add issue numbers as all the journals were paginated by volume, not issue, and APA does not call for issue numbers of journals paginated by volume. I added a comment that indicated this as well as a reference. One other thing -- I used the "old' DOI format without the htpp as I could not find the http format for many of the citation only the DOI -- Kathleen indicated in her note that either was acceptable. The only reference that is still a bit wonky may be the Schuller, Jenkins & Neal citation -- it is from a supplement of a paginated by volume journal (Diabetes). While the articles in the regular issues have DOIs, the ones in this supplement do not.</p