Breaking down walls: inter-organizational collaboration in ‘The Trifecta’

ABSTRACT

Communication education relies heavily on experiential learning, but such an approach rarely provides opportunities for students to participate in inter-disciplinary collaborations and build inter-organizational relationships. The current paper describes a simulation, called ‘The Trifecta,’ in which students in the disciplines of journalism, public relations and video production worked together to produce media content over a six-week period in a fictional municipality. Debriefing research following the simulation showed that students gained not only technical knowledge, but also began to see how to build and maintain effective relationships across disciplines as well as point out ineffective relationships. To this end, ‘The Trifecta’ stands as an example of how communication education must push toward a third paradigm which crosses into innovative problem solving from students and mentoring from instructors.

KEYWORDS:

• Simulation
• experiential learning
• public relations
• journalism
• video production

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Paul Ziek, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Communications, and Visual Arts at Pace University, where he teaches strategic and organizational communication in both the undergraduate and graduate programs. His research interest is how the communication–information–media matrix shapes organizational communication.

Katherine Fink, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Communications, and Visual Arts at Pace University. She is also an Affiliated Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale University Law School, a former Fellow of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at the Columbia University School of Journalism, and a former radio journalist.

ORCID

Paul Ziek http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9328-0387

Katherine Fink http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6479-8929