Communication Across the Curriculum and in the Disciplines: A Call for Scholarly Cross-curricular Advocacy

Abstract

Communication-across-the-curriculum (CXC) programs provide assistance to other disciplines on the teaching and learning of communication—meeting an increasingly important need for students not only to be content specialists, but also coherent communicators. Research emerging from this initiative details programmatic challenges and emphases, but also provides insight into the unique interdisciplinary issues involved with teaching communication in other disciplinary cultures. Through a systematic thematic analysis, this review provides a synopsis of CXC scholarship over the past 25 years—highlighting three distinct eras of CXC scholarship that illustrate differing approaches to negotiating the mission of interdisciplinary change: cross-curricular proactiveness, cross-curricular skepticism, and cross-curricular curiosity. Over this time period researchers in this scholarly discussion have engaged in work that has produced detailed program descriptions and assessment, transferable instructional resources, and increasingly more discipline-specific empirical results and theoretical contributions. To increase CXC's impact, though, future scholarship could respond to pressing challenges by adopting a stance of cross-curricular advocacy that is proactive in ways characteristic of early research but with a more focused commitment to empirical rigor, theoretical sophistication, and reflective scholarly partnerships.

Keywords:

• communication across the curriculum
• communication in the disciplines
• speaking across the curriculum
• meta-analysis
• cross-curricular scholarship

Notes

1. For the purposes of this paper, we use the acronym “CXC” to refer to the initiative because it is most generic. “CAC”, another generic acronym, is often used now by WAC scholars to indicate a broadening of their initiative to include other modalities of communication.

2. Because WAC and CXC scholarship has developed along separate paths, we do not focus our meta-analysis specifically on WAC research. To the extent that articles emerged within the CXC database, we reviewed them, but did not purposely focus on WAC as a search term for our database.

3. For a listing of publications included in each of the databases see http://www.ebscohost.com (Academic Search Premier and Communication and Mass Media Complete) and http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/resources/html/collection/about_collection.html (ERIC).

4. The coding scheme and codebook are available from the authors upon request.

5. We comment on this because we noticed that in the earlier years, some Communication Education journal editors published more articles per issue than others. Given in our other analyses, though (of the full database) the unit of analysis was the article (and not page numbers) and given the main unit of reference in scholarly publication is the article (not page numbers) we ran the analysis for number of articles.

6. It is important to note that although the eras that characterize CXC scholarship do generally reflect the programmatic developmental path of the CXC initiative, it is possible, that individual CXC programs have not been in complete alignment with the eras defined by the scholarship. A more accurate analysis of CXC program development would require surveying program directors (e.g., Dannels, 2001a). Given our focus for this project was on CXC scholarship, we did not do this.

7. It is notable that significant publications have emerged within specific engineering journals that focus on communication instruction, but these were not used as part of the overall database for this project. Engineering Education represents the most likely journal in which these articles occur and they typically describe communication programs in curricula and/or courses; and/or assessment data emerging from those programs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deanna P. Dannels

Deanna P. Dannels (M.Sc., University of Utah, 1995; Ph.D., University of Utah, 1999) is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Teaching Assistant Development in the Department of Communication and the Associate Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC

Amy L. Housley Gaffney

Amy L. Housley Gaffney (M.A., Kent State University, 2006) is a doctoral candidate in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC