Beyond basic: developing our work in and through the introductory communication course

ABSTRACT

How we describe, develop texts for, and prepare the teachers of introductory courses contributes to the assumption that they are “basic”—merely disciplinary service. Innovation is essential and achieved by drawing complex research into our introductory courses and by making such courses a meaningful component of our research agendas.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical communication pedagogy
• introductory course
• metaphor
• narrative

Notes

1. Jo Sprague, “Retrieving the Research Agenda for Communication Education: Asking the Pedagogical Questions that are “Embarrassments to Theory,” Communication Education 42 (1993): 106.

2. Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (New York: Vintage, 1996), 17.

3. Omar Swartz, “Interdisciplinary and Pedagogical Implications of Rhetorical Theory,” Communication Studies 46 (1995): 130–139.

4. Swartz, 136.

5. See Sprague (1993) and Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren, Critical Communication Pedagogy (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2007) for examples of works in communication studies that call for an integration of theory and pedagogy.

6. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

7. See, for example, Deanna L. Fassett, “Beyond “Basic”: Opportunities for Relevance,” Basic Communication Course Annual, 28 (2016): 33–40. See also Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren, “Pedagogy of Relevance: A Critical Communication Pedagogy Agenda for the “Basic” Course,” Basic Communication Course Annual, 20 (2008): 1–34. See also The Center for Democratic Deliberation, “The Future of the Basic Course in Communication” (White Paper sponsored by the First Vice President of the Eastern Communication Association and the Center for Democratic Deliberation, Penn State University, 2015).

8. Alfie Kohn, “The Progressive Schools Our Children Deserve” (Keynote address, School in Rose Valley, Swarthmore College, 2004).

9. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2000).

10. Fassett and Warren, Critical Communication Pedagogy: 38. For a comprehensive review of critical communication pedagogy, including established and anticipated research trajectories, see Deanna L. Fassett and C. Kyle Rudick, “Critical Communication Pedagogy, in Paul L. Witt (Ed.), Handbooks of Communication Science: Vol. 16. Communication and Learning (Berlin, Germany: DeGruyter Mouton, in press).

11. See Lakoff and Johnson, as well as John Stewart, Language as Articulate Contact: Toward a Post-Semiotic Philosophy of Communication (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1995).

12. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 36.

13. Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass: 1998).

14. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Perennial, 1999): xxi.