Communication Administration as a Tri-Voiced Sustainable Community

Books and authors have challenged the focus on “me” alone, rejecting “individualism” that seeks to stand above social context and constraints (Tocqueville, 1955; Arnett, 2019; Arnett, 2020), “narcissism” that falls in love with one’s own image (Lasch, 1985), and “emotivism” that limits decision making to personal preferences (MacIntyre, 1984). Contrary to a focus on an individual abstracted from a social context, one finds an emphasis on community (Arnett, 1986). When, however, a conception of community embraces only those empirically present, it becomes an abstraction oblivious of the phenomenological considerations of persons before and after the present moment. This essay textures the notion of community with an emphasis on sustainability as a background for communication administration decision-making. A sustainable community finds definition through the following practices: 1) walking between the extremes of the openness of relativism and the closure of ideology; 2) acknowledging locality as a love of place respectful of other localities, unlike provinciality, which dismisses the importance of another’s sense of home; and 3) attending to tri-voiced contributions inclusive of those who came before us, those “not yet” here, and those immediately present. Listening to these three voices permits one to do communication administration guided by a vision of sustainable community

Dialogic Education in an Age of Administrative Preening

Text of the address given by Ronald C. Arnett, recipient of the 2016 Paul H. Boase Prize for Scholarship, granted by the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University for outstanding scholarship in the field of communicatio

The Praxis of Narrative Assessment: Communication Competence in an Information Age

The article suggests addressing communication competence from a perspective outside the behavioral orientation to communication. Dialogue presupposes both the general public and the academy meeting one another in serious conversation about educational assessment. Ignoring assessment will not make persistent calls for accountability disappear. The routine use of negation of authority leads the way for a powerful enemy to take the public stage from the spectators who by that time have confused the critical life of a spectator with active participation in the culture for too long. Assessment is an inescapable part of the evaluation process. How to determine when communication praxis is occurring? The first step in narrative assessment is to ask students to identify practices from the workplace. The second step is to discuss communication theory that can be applied to the observed practices. In this phase, the student connects theory to the practice in order to generate a theory-laden understanding .In the third step, practice is translated into praxis (theory informed action)

Educational Assessment as Invitation for Dialogue

This article offers a communicative foundation for viewing the act of educational assessment as an opportunity for dialogue with a larger public in the U.S. There are three main areas which comprise an invitation for dialogue with the public: the politics of assessment, foundation for dialogue about the communication discipline and the proposal for a dialogic communication with the public as a way to create shared meaning about the process of communication. Invitation to dialogue envisions communication as socially constructed. Both self and other are central to the emergence of truth. The wise communicator is careful, but in the midst of all the documentation and struggles in the assessment effort there is a hope fueled by the praxis of dialogue. If opposing voices can work together on the campus with the public, perhaps the entrance into the twenty-first century will be enhanced from the praxis of cautious dialogue-dialogue that invites the highest quality of education that a community of discourse can envision

The Undergraduate Teaching Assistant: Scholarship in the Classroom

This essay casts the role of the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant (UTA) within a Kantanian sense of imagination—the not yet pushes off of the actual and the tangible (Kant, 1781/1963). The UTA accesses a temporal glimpse into a professional scholar/teacher vocation through experience in a lived context that unites teaching and scholarship. The role of the UTA offers what Martin Buber (1965/1988) called “imagining the real” (p. 60), a moment of creative ingenuity that begins with the doing of concrete tasks within the profession

Departmental Excellence: Constituencies in Tension

This article explores the question of departmental excellence within historicity and temporality and the political demands of multiple constituencies. If one accepts excellence as a rhetorical construct of political significance for a college campus, then one requires knowledge of the primary constituencies shaping this political debate. The eventual political outcome is shaped through the interplay of three constituencies: the discipline, the local campus and the larger public. The task for every department that wants to pursue excellence is to know, understand and operate within the hidden curriculum of a campus that socializes faculty to the ongoing mission of that particular institution

Communication and Professional Civility as a Basic Service Course: Dialogic Praxis Between Department and Situated in an Academic House

Communication departments frequently offer basic service courses to other campus departments or schools. A communication course sensitive to the mission of the university or college of which it is a part, as well as to its own mission, allows programs that include such a course in their curriculum to distinguish themselves from competing programs. Additionally, such a mission-sensitive course further defines departmental and university identity, assisting in institutionalizing a mission. Offering such a course provides an opportunity for dialogic praxis to occur between departments situated within the context of a local institution. Dialogic praxis involves knowledge of one\u27s own position, listening to the position of the Other, and recognition of the social and historical situation in which both parties are situated, and application, and collaborative application. Duquesne University\u27s Communication Department designed a course entitled Communication an Professional Civility for the Physician Assistant Department through a process of dialogic praxis. This course addresses issues of working on a task with others from a variety of professional perspectives with different standpoints within a local organizational home centered around a clear mission. This course provides a public discourse approach to basic communication issues within a complex modern organization