Know Thy Audience: Helping Students Engage a Threshold Concept Using Audience-Based Pedagogy

Students are experts at sizing up instructors, but many do not extend this analysis to non-instructor audiences, which can reduce their effectiveness in new communication situations. Audience, therefore, is a crucial threshold concept not only in Rhetoric and Composition, but in any discipline that values communication skills. How can instructors help students develop a deeper understanding of audience in the disciplines and begin to cross the threshold? In this article, I describe how a group of Professional Writing and Rhetoric students engaged the audience threshold through a semester-long, client-based project. Drawing on data collected via reflections and portfolios, written deliverables, client feedback, and instructor notes, analysis shows the students were initially overconfident in their ability to assess audiences, worked through valid emotional responses to substantive client feedback, and learned to negotiate the dynamics of multiple audiences more carefully over the course of the semester

Creative innovation takes a (team teaching) family

Team teaching can be a valuable means of enabling cross-disciplinary collaboration, interdisciplinary study, and pedagogical innovation, but the logistical and intellectual challenges can seem too daunting to overcome. In this essay, we share the story of how four faculty members from professional writing, communications, and computing sciences developed a team teaching “family” as we imagined, created, launched, and ran an innovative experiential learning program at our university. The Design Thinking Studio in Social Innovation is a semester-long program worth four full courses of credit which brought us together with 14 intrepid students from across the university to learn and apply design thinking, Scrum project management, and social innovation theories to a large-scale civic engagement project. Here we explore the faculty lived experience during the pilot semester and how our teach teaching family was crucial to our personal and professional success in this high-stress environment. We then offer tips for creating your own team teaching “family.

Creative Innovation Takes a (Team Teaching) Family

Team teaching can be a valuable means of enabling cross-disciplinary collaboration, interdisciplinary study, and pedagogical innovation, but the logistical and intellectual challenges can seem too daunting to overcome. In this essay, we share the story of how four faculty members from professional writing, communications, and computing sciences developed a team teaching “family” as we imagined, created, launched, and ran an innovative experiential learning program at our university. The Design Thinking Studio in Social Innovation is a semester-long program worth four full courses of credit which brought us together with 14 intrepid students from across the university to learn and apply design thinking, Scrum project management, and social innovation theories to a large-scale civic engagement project. Here we explore the faculty lived experience during the pilot semester and how our teach teaching family was crucial to our personal and professional success in this high-stress environment. We then offer tips for creating your own team teaching “family.

2018 Scholars at Work Conference Program

Program for the 2018 Scholars at Work Conference at Minnesota State University, Mankato on March 30, 2018

Know Thy Audience: Helping Students Engage a Threshold Concept Using Audience-Based Pedagogy

Students are experts at sizing up instructors, but many do not extend this analysis to non-instructor audiences, which can reduce their effectiveness in new communication situations. Audience, therefore, is a crucial threshold concept not only in Rhetoric and Composition, but in any discipline that values communication skills. How can instructors help students develop a deeper understanding of audience in the disciplines and begin to cross the threshold? In this article, I describe how a group of Professional Writing and Rhetoric students engaged the audience threshold through a semester-long, client-based project. Drawing on data collected via reflections and portfolios, written deliverables, client feedback, and instructor notes, analysis shows the students were initially overconfident in their ability to assess audiences, worked through valid emotional responses to substantive client feedback, and learned to negotiate the dynamics of multiple audiences more carefully over the course of the semester

Teaching Students How to Collaborate

Collaborative projects are a widespread practice in higher education, but instructors often assume that students already know how to collaborate effectively. Yet students often report that they have little or no formal instruction in teamwork, project planning, and conflict management. Keynote speaker Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark has extended her use of Agile methodology to her classes for the past several years. In this workshop, she explains how faculty can help students become effective collaborators and develop better functioning teams