Critical Andragogy and Communication Activism: Approaches, Tensions, and Lessons Learned from a Senior Capstone Course

Abstract

Courses: Any upper division or senior capstone course in social activism or persuasion

Objectives: Students will: reflect on the role of communication in the maintenance and change of cultures and institutions, including ways in which their own communication upholds and/or challenges the status quo of their relationships, organizations, and society; articulate some of their own values and enact them through communication within an activist organization; and apply, and contribute to, theory about how to make the world a better place through communication

Notes

1. Through consensus, we defined activism as “efforts to promote awareness of an issue to change or preserve the status quo through communication, regardless of compensation, and consistent with one's values.”

2. The organizations involved can be roughly categorized according to their missions, as follows: peace, justice, and human rights (three students); military change; environmental protection (two students); animal welfare (five students); intercultural understanding; ethnic identification; voter registration; community development (two students); nutrition (four students); medical advocacy (five students); child welfare (four students); and other (three students).

3. We spent approximately one class session reviewing content analysis and qualitative interviewing techniques to supplement the research methods course which served as a prerequisite for COM 4413.

4. One student, for example, wrote the following semester that she was using much of what she had learned in the course as a public relations intern for her church, another wrote that she was applying the material as a researcher for a nongovernmental organization in Morocco, and a third was hired as a communication coordinator for a local advocacy organization.

5. I also worried that students, under the purview of my course, would support organizations whose missions contradicted my values. Because I was clear about the primarily educational goal for the course, although, this ended up not causing me any difficulty.

6. For this course I followed my usual practice of grading based on performance criteria. For courses such as this, that are especially student centered, I find that grade distributions tend to be higher than for more lecture-based courses. I attribute this to differences in student motivation.