Education Commons^™

Demechanizing Whiteness: Lessons From Theatre Of The Oppressed, Elizabeth J. Simpson

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal

The Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) provides small group techniques to strategize and “rehearse” for collaborative liberation using popular education forms of systems analysis, bolstered by practices that counter implicit biases and habituated behaviors. This essay draws on interviews with jokers at CTO-Rio to advocate the need for continual engagement of demechanizing practices both within TO and in the lives of practitioners in order to demechanize the tenets of white supremacy that we are born into, despite our essential loving nature, with particular focus on counteracting a the habit of exploiting Black suffering for creative capital.

Explicit Teaching Of Critical Thinking Skills In Communication Science And Disorders, Dana Battaglia

Teaching and Learning in Communication Sciences & Disorders

Critical thinking requires one to be abstract, continually raise questions, independently obtain and reviews evidence, and converge these experiences to offer open-minded solutions. These same traits are required for speech-language pathology students to become successful clinicians. This work describes a mixed method investigation of explicit and infused instruction of critical thinking skills in the context of one graduate-level course in a program accredited from the American Speech-Language Hearing Association. While quantitative findings only demonstrate significant positive change on select items using a Likert scale, qualitative data describe deep learning and growth in the areas of broad life-impact, expansion of knowledge, …

Using Online Sharing And Editing Tools For Classroom Collaborative Learning In Multimedia Journalism Education, Russell S. Chun 6932423

Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association

It’s no surprise to educators that collaborative learning offers a deeper level of classroom engagement, enhances critical thinking, and improves retention of information. Research consistently supports those claims (Gokhale, 1995; Johnson & Johnson, 1986; Totten, Sills, Digby, & Russ, 1991). Online tools can offer a way to enable such collaborative learning and reap those benefits. In particular, real-time, multi-user, content sharing and/or editing tools make possible group critiques of media-rich content, potentially lower barriers for participation in group problem-solving exercises, and create a unique environment for continuous self-assessment and peer learning. A careful examination of how two of these web-based …

Wiser Assessment: A Communication Program Assessment Framework, Michael G. Strawser, Lindsay Neuberger

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Learning outcome assessment is a fairly recent trend in higher education that began in the 1980s (Lubinescu et al., 2001). Today, many faculty perceive assessment reporting to be tedious, time-consuming, and irrelevant busywork (Wang & Hurley, 2012). Unfortunately, this systematic process created to use empirical evidence to measure, document, and improve student learning has in many cases lost sight of this central goal. As a result, faculty may be justified in their opinions about it. This essay proposes a framework for addressing this thorny issue via WISER. WISER is an acronym for five content pillars of the communication discipline faculty …

Experientiallearning@Socialmedia.Edu: Using The Tech Start-Up Concept To Train, Engage, And Inform Students, Stephanie J. Coopman, Ted Coopman

Faculty Publications

Undergraduate and graduate students were enrolled in an upper-division online experiential learning course organized as a technology company start up at a public university in the US. Students participated in an academic department’s social media team, publishing a weekly newsletter and producing and curating content for multiple social media outlets designed for public and university audiences, a website for the department’s students, and a career portal. Responses to survey questions provided support for Experiential Learning Theory’s cyclical learning model. In addition, students viewed the entrepreneurial approach to the team as both liberating and challenging as they engaged with each other …

Dis/Ableist Consumption: A Critical Thematic Analysis Of Avowed And Ascribed Neuro-Identities In The Classroom, Shaundi C. Newbolt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the United States, faculty and students are publicly claiming neurodivergent identities and support for the neurodiversity movement. This study uses Collier and Hecht’s cultural identity theories with Lang and Chen’s two-step process, critical thematic analysis (CTA), to examine avowals and ascriptions with four diagnostic terms, ASD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and dyslexia, of students and professors from Rate My Professors (RMP) with Ritter’s frame of RMP as a phenomenon.

A total of 1,022 posts are analyzed to understand how students resist or re-inscribe popular medical model/deficit discourse in the classroom: student avowals (N = 232), professor avowals (N = 51), …

Integrative Ethical Education: An Exploratory Investigation Into A Relationally Based Approach To Ethics Education, Drew T. Ashby-King, Karen D. Boyd

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the effect of a curricular application of the integrative ethical education (IEE) model and its effect on first-year college students’ ethical development. Using a pretest posttest design, participants’ moral judgment and reasoning were measured before and after they participated in an IEE-based academic course and compared using descriptive analysis. Results revealed that participants’ moral judgment and reasoning increased while participating in the program. These results provide initial support for the use of IEE-based curricula and academic experiences to promote college students’ ethical development. Implications for communication education and future research are …

Beyond Dissociation And Appropriation: Evaluating The Politics Of U.S. Psychology Via Hermeneutic Interpretation Of Culturally Embedded Presentations Of Yoga, Genelle N. Benker

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

Psychology in the United States (U.S.) is partially constituted by a cultural history of intellectual imperialism that undermines its altruistic intent and prevents disciplinary reflexivity. The scholarship and clinical application of Yoga exemplifies the way U.S. psychology continues to give lived authority to imperialism as part of the neoliberal agenda. Through a hermeneutic literature analysis of two source Yogic texts and peer-reviewed articles that exemplify the dominant discourse on Yoga in U.S. psychology, this dissertation identified themes that describe culturally embedded presentations of Yoga and their sociopolitical implications. Through interpretation, Yoga was conceptualized as: (a) a 5,000 year-old tradition that …

“It’S Hidden, After All:” A Modified Delphi Study Exploring Faculty And Students’ Perceptions Of A Graduate Professional Seminar In Communication, Krista Hoffmann-Longtin, Maria Brann, The Professional Seminar Delphi Working Group

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Graduate student socialization has been studied in multiple disciplines, including communication. As their career trajectories change, faculty must consider how to socialize students into the field and their subsequent careers. Using a modified Delphi survey, we examined the differences in faculty and students’ perceptions regarding the content of a graduate professional seminar in communication. Results indicate that students would prefer a focus on implicit norms and the hidden curriculum, while faculty would prefer to focus on disciplinary content. We offer recommendations for developing a course that addresses both needs and, thus, simultaneously attends to the changing job market.

Confronting Students’ Personal And Interpersonal Communication Anxieties And Needs Through Constitutive, Experiential Communication Pedagogy, Lawrence R. Frey, Emily Loker

Journal of 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.