Inquiry-based civil discourse education

Course: Civil discourse, argumentation, debate, persuasion, political communication

Objectives: This unit activity will help students build an understanding of civil discourse and its function in society. Students will: (1) increase their capacity to examine arguments critically, (2) enhance their own ability to self-reflect critically, and (3) improve their ability to engage in civil discourse. This activity will employ inquiry-based learning strategies to apply students’ understanding of civil discourse in a dialogue with the broader campus community by partnering with campus media to develop and publish original opinion-editorial pieces.     

Combating greenwashing through public critique

Courses: Environmental Communication, Environmental Media, or Critical Media Studies courses

Objectives: This unit activity is designed to guide students in a critical examination of advertising that utilizes green appeals to sell products or brands. The assignment asks students to use concepts from media analysis, communication ethics, and social justice to critique advertising claims and potential influences of advertising on society's environmental discourse. Students should be able to identify greenwashing in advertisements, research whether the statements of the advertisements are accurate, and discuss the significance of the advertisements’ messages in shaping environmental and social thought. A secondary purpose of the assignment is to give students experience writing for a popular audience in a public forum.     

Developing discourse of renewal during a campus crisis

Course: This assignment is a unit activity designed for use in a skills-focused undergraduate public relations, organizational communication, or crisis communication course.

Objective: The goal of this activity is to increase students’ understanding of and ability to apply discourse of renewal in a crisis scenario. Students will work collaboratively to craft responses that affirm an organization’s core values in light of a tragic event.     

Reference Services and the International Adult Learner

Summary

International adult learners are a growing patron constituency. They share a number of common characteristics, notably their unfamiliarity with many library services. In addition, barriers such as language and communication differences as well as functional issues present challenges to effective service. Libraries can better meet the needs of International Adult Learners by determining what their needs are. In so doing they will be able to provide better programming and improve library instruction. In addition, libraries can partner with other community agencies and institutions to improve service for International Adult Learners. Staff training should also be undertaken to improve the ability of library personnel to interact with this particular user group.     

The Community Collaboration Stakeholder Project

Courses: Small Group Communication, or courses on social justice, collaboration, dialogue, and/or leadership

Objectives: In this semester-long project, students apply the communication skills of dialogue, appreciative inquiry, consensus decision-making, brainstorming, and principled negotiation in an authentic simulation of interorganizational collaboration     

Making a difference: A community-based campaign that promotes diversity and inclusion

Courses: This semester-long project is suited for courses on persuasion, diversity, social media, communication and technology, social advocacy, service-learning, or social justice.

Objective: This assignment challenges students to research, design, launch, maintain, and assess an anti-hate social media campaign.     

Changing resistant audience attitudes using social judgment theory’s “anchor” point perspectives

Courses: Public Speaking, Business and Professional Communication, Persuasion, or any other skill-based oral communication course.

Objectives: Students will practice the development and demonstration of persuasive arguments in this single-class social judgment theory activity to improve their ability to change resistant audience attitudes.     

The Self-Governing Journal

This article offers a distinctively rhetorical perspective on civil society that critically evaluates the relevant communication networks and informal associations in terms of their ability to mediate citizen understandings of public issues and facilitate effective public advocacy and rhetorical action. Particularly important is the role of rhetorical invention. By providing the space in which citizens collaborate, deliberate on issues of public importance, and plan courses of action, civil society acts as a type of incubator for rhetorical invention. The Highlander Folk School serves as an exemplar of how associations of civil society facilitate political awareness and democratic action. The conclusion considers potential advantages of studying civil society from a rhetorical perspective, using the Highlander case and its contributions to the civil rights movement as a starting point from which to address the interrelationships among civil society, democratic action, and rhetorical invention.     

Social media listening and Title IX training crisis: Implications for discourse of renewal

Courses: Undergraduate or graduate organizational/crisis communication or public relations courses

Objective: The goal for this single class activity is for students to apply discourse of renewal to an organizational crisis fueled through social media.     

Food as social justice: Critical ethnography as a lens for communication activism

Courses: Public Speaking.

Objectives: This semester-long service-learning activity examines access to affordable healthy food as a social justice issue, using critical ethnography as a framework to help students understand the link between activism and public speaking skills. After completing the project, students will be able to: (1) develop a narrative speech that links their respective identities to food justice; (2) adapt a persuasive message that connects a community partner's food justice goals to a target audience; and (3) communicate ethically with a public while participating in a food justice campaign.     

Global citizenship in intercultural communication: Spatial awareness of globalization through map your consumption*

Courses: This teaching unit is for intercultural communication but could be used for any course related to globalization, including public speaking, popular culture and communication, or environmental communication. Additionally, the teaching unit is well-suited for other disciplines, including geography, environmental studies, and global studies.

Objectives: Students trace the manufacturing origins of their belongings in order to analyze their connections with other countries through plotting them on a world map. Students research economic, cultural, and/or political globalization of one or two countries plotted on their map in order to consider how to practice ethical consumption.     

Cultural identity forum: Enacting the self-awareness imperative in intercultural communication

Courses: Intercultural Communication; any course with an intercultural communication unit.

Objectives: Students will demonstrate the self-awareness imperative in intercultural communication, explore their own cultural identities, and reflect on others cultural identities in order to build their intercultural communication competence.     

Designing imminent threat messages for an unfamiliar hazard

Course: This assignment is a unit activity designed for use in a skills-focused undergraduate public relations, organizational communication, or crisis communication course.

Objective: The goal of this activity is to increase students’ understanding and ability to apply message design concepts in an unfamiliar context. Students will work collaboratively to craft messages that include key message features in response to an unfamiliar threat.     

Leadership and Social Justice

ABSTRACT

Leaders have tremendous influence not only in their organizations but for the profession and within the communities they serve. Librarianship has strong core values that are the foundation of our services but librarians also create an environment that supports diversity of opinions. How does a library leader balance social justice while serving the broad needs of a community? Is there an inherent conflict between personal perspectives and the encompassing multiple viewpoints? Library leaders may face difficult decisions in determining social justice issues within their libraries considering personal beliefs, institutional responsibilities, and community impacts. Every library leader has opportunities to address social justice issues within libraries and in so doing, will advance community goals of inclusiveness of all members.     

The ICPSR and Social Science Research

ABSTRACT

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, is the world's largest social science data archive. The data sets in the ICPRS database give the social sciences librarian/subject specialist an opportunity of providing value-added bibliographic information. Access to the data sets is by membership in the consortium. This article gives an overview of the ICPSR database and of other services provided by the ICPSR, including sample usage statistics and reports. Research has shown that use of electronic resources, such as that provided by the data sets of the ICPSR, leads to an increase in publications by scholars. Librarians from a variety of disciplines—economics, political science, education, sociology, criminal justice, and social work—can help their researchers use the ICPSR's data sets to help further the goals of social science.     

Assessing Effective Partnerships in Intercultural Education: Transformative Learning as a Tool for Evaluation

Objectives: The goal of the Intercultural Partnership Project is to introduce students to issues surrounding language and cultural identity, with the ultimate goal of helping students see themselves as engaged participants, rather than observers, in a multicultural community. For students in the intercultural communication class, this goal echoes the overall purpose of the course. For students in the ESL class, this goal seeks to improve their communication skills through interaction with members of the target language community.

Courses: An upper division intercultural communication course and an English as a second language (ESL) class that focuses on academic skill development, with an emphasis on written communication.     

Street Crossing: Observational Research and Developing Health Communication Strategies

Courses: Advertising Account Planning, Research Methods, Health Communication

Objective: In this unit activity, students learn about conducting observational research, segmenting audiences for communication campaigns, and the importance of sharing the thinking behind their research—explaining how they operate as problem solvers.     

Star gazing: Transing gender communication

ABSTRACT

This activity implores students and pedagogues to engage intrapersonal gender subjectivity through the analytic practice of transing gender communication. Specifically, Yep, Russo, and Allen (Pushing boundaries: Toward the development of a model for transing communication in (inter)cultural contexts. In L. G. Spencer & J. C. Capuzza (Eds.), Transgender communication studies: Histories, trends, and trajectories. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015, pp. 69–89) suggest gender is best understood as: (1) intersectional, (2) a performative and administrative accomplishment, (3) multiple, and (4) self-determined. Students are asked to analyze their gender sense of self through each of the pillars in a hands-on creative activity. The end result is a means of narrating one’s own gender in relational tension with other gender subjectivities.

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Intercultural Communication, Gender and Communication, Performance Studies

Objectives: Designed to accompany a sustained conversation on questions of gender and communication, this unit- or semester-long activity imparts a critical approach to gender understanding through one’s own subjective gender experience by engaging the analytic work of “transing” (Stryker, Currah, & Moore, Introduction: Trans-, trans, or transgender? WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 2008;36(3–4):13). Further, the activity equips students with a working understanding of trans-affirming discourse including the critical capacity to de-center normative gender through lived experience. Finally, students are provided a space in which to explore and voice, through creative means, their own gender “galaxy” (Yep, Russo, & Allen, Pushing boundaries: Toward the development of a model for transing communication in (inter)cultural contexts. In L. G. Spencer & J. C. Capuzza (Eds.), Transgender communication studies: Histories, trends, and trajectories. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015, p. 70).     

Blogging in the Communication Technology Course

Courses: Communication Technology or New Media; could also be used in Broadcast Journalism, Print Journalism, Public Relations, Advertising, or other communication courses

Objectives: By creating and maintaining a blog, students will improve their research and writing skills, participate in collaborative learning, and acquire the digital literacy skills necessary for success in rapidly changing media and communication industries     

Unify and present: Using Monroe's Motivated Sequence to teach team presentation skills

Courses: Public speaking, business and professional communication, group communication

Objectives: This activity will introduce Monroe's Motivated Sequence as a way to organize persuasive arguments; improve students’ ability to deliver presentations with consistent content, voice, and style; and improve team-based delivery skills.