https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3913-3030
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ABSTRACT
Communication skills are essential to employment and to society’s smooth functioning. Universities are a prime environment for students to learn and hone these skills. However, communication within the academy has historically been conceptualised narrowly due to logocentric forces. When students experience different communication modes, it tends to be in a siloed fashion where they learn about one skill at a time, leading to a fragmented, uneven experience. As such, this study seeks to understand how communication is defined, assessed, and supported in Australian university introduction to communication classes. It does this first through reviewing relevant unit outlines to see how they define and position communication by mode (written, spoken, or visual). Second, using a national survey, academics who coordinate relevant units provided more concrete details about how their units are structured, supported, and about barriers that exist for equipping communication students to work in today’s multi-modal digital world.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The unit coordinators weren’t necessarily the same individuals who designed the units. In some cases, unit coordinators were assigned to these introductory units on short notice and/or inherited them already designed.
2. The term ‘unit’ is used for consistency and refers to a single subject. This usage varies widely across the institutions studied and, depending on that context, ‘units’ were also called courses and subjects.
3. Some institutions have multiple iterations of the unit delivered either at the same campus or on different domestic campuses and this accounts for the potential for multiple individuals from the same institution to complete the survey.
4. Organisational units often had multiple disciplines in their names (eg, The Faculty of Arts, Business, Law, and Education) so the raw number of instances is higher than the number of institutions in the sample.
5. Six institutions did not structure their academic units beyond the Faculty or equivalent level and three institutions used the term ‘School’ to refer to a broad grouping of disciplines and were classified as Faculties, for consistency.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
T. J. Thomson
Dr T. J. Thomson is an award-winning visual communication and media scholar. He recently published “To See and Be Seen: The Environments, Interactions, and Identities Behind News Images” (winner of the NCA 2020 Diane S. Hope Book of the Year Award) and is the 2019 Anne Dunn Scholar of the Year. T.J.’s research focuses on how visual journalism is produced—by whom, in what environments, through which processes, and with what results. He also examines visual self-representation on social media and everyday image making.
Glen Thomas
Dr Glen Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Professional Communication at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, where he teaches corporate writing and editing, science communication, and academic writing. In 2012, he received a national teaching award for his inspirational and transformative teaching of professional writing.
Lesley Irvine
Dr Lesley Irvine is a qualified teacher, journalist and has completed a Doctor of Creative Industries. She currently coordinates several communication units at QUT. Lesley has travelled extensively throughout Queensland conducting communication courses as well as teaching professional and speech communication in Hong Kong. She has also run private communication coaching for broadcasters, politicians, business leaders and students. Her research area is public speaking anxiety.