Teaching audience adaptation using connected presentations and teamwork

Courses: Introduction to Communication, Public Speaking, Persuasion, Business Communication.

Objective: This activity increases students’ understanding of audience adaptation and improves their ability to adapt presentations to specific audiences.     

Using the outdoor scavenger hunt to teach theories of organizational communication

Courses: Communication Theory, Organizational Communication, Strategic Communication.

Objectives: Students will identify and categorize organizational discourses on their campuses; students will become aware of the ethical considerations of communication; students will recognize the different perceptions of organizational culture on campus.     

Rube Goldberg salad system: Teaching systems theory in communication

Courses: Undergraduate Organizational Communication, Communication Theory, and Small Group Communication courses.

Objectives: This single-class activity aims to engage students actively in explaining and applying systems components, processes, and properties.     

“Listening is an act of love”: Learning listening through StoryCorps

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Basic Survey Course, Group Communication, Organizational Communication, Intercultural Communication, Listening, Family Communication, Interviewing, Business and Professional Communication.

Objectives: After completing this single class activity, students will be able to: (a) define listening; (b) identify listening as a top skill employers desire; (c) explain how listening may be perceived as an act of love; and (d) critically assess ways in which their listening behaviors may be improved.     

Teaching communication and conflict as a game

Courses: Communication and Conflict.

Objectives: Through the use of a game-based framework, students will build intrinsic motivation to engage with course material and course content, and will engage their critical-thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills in relation to conflict management over the length of the course.     

The good,the bad,and the unexpected: Violating audience expectations in Clint Eastwood’s speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention

Courses: Communication Theory, Nonverbal Communication, Public Speaking

Objective: At the end of this activity, students should be able to define key components of expectancy violations theory and apply the theory to analyze violations that occurred in Clint Eastwood’s speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention.     

Understanding and representing changing work structures and practices through art

Courses: Organizational Communication, Advanced Organizational Communication, Organizing Work, Management/Organizational History

Objectives: This activity will help students to understand major shifts in the organization of work and creatively represent changing work structures and practices.     

Activating metaphors: Exploring the embodied nature of metaphorical mapping in political discourse

Courses: Persuasion, Rhetoric, Communication Theory, Metaphor Theory, Multimodal Communication.

Objectives: This activity allows students to explore the embodied nature of metaphor and its interpretative significance by using gesture and physical movement. Students also understand how, in metaphor, abstract entities are conceptualized in terms of something more concrete.     

Irreplaceable: Exploring identity and relationships through the discussion of invaluable personal objects

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Family Communication, Relational Communication.

Objectives: Students reflect on and discuss how personal objects are connected to their identity and relationships with others. This activity illustrates the ways course concepts such as relational metaphors, stories, rules, rituals, and other patterns of communication influence the meaning we ascribe to an object and how that object helps to construct beliefs about ourselves and important others. This exercise can also help students connect with each other in a supportive environment.     

Let's go toy shopping! Exploring early anticipatory socialization for careers and gender expectations

Courses: Gender Communication, Communication and Careers, Organizational Communication.

Objectives: At the end of the activity, students will be able: to identify and analyze the socialization of gender expectations, to recognize and describe how early this type of socialization can occur, to critique the early socialization of gendered career expectations through the analysis of toy-store shopping, and to propose new ways to approach this experience.     

To watch or to read? The respective influence of televised political debates and media debate coverage on citizen learning

Courses: Media and Politics, Political Communication, Political Rhetoric, Media Effects.

Objective: By taking part in a classroom activity, students will explore how cognitive frames and media frames play a role in learning from political debates.     

Creating greeting cards to understand and to evaluate Knapp’s Staircase Model of relationships

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Relational Communication

Objective: This article teaches students to explain and evaluate Knapp’s Relational Staircase Model through the creation of personalized greeting cards for each relational stage. The in-class activity encourages students to be creative and succinct in capturing the essence of an assigned relational stage in their respective greeting cards. The activity also provides students with an opportunity to apply the model to their lives and to test the validity and usefulness of the model in the hook-up culture prevalent among many college students today.     

Critical communication pedagogy as a response to the petroleum industry’s neoliberal communicative practices

Courses: Professional Speaking, Business and Professional Communication, Environmental Communication, or any course covering topics related to neoliberalism and the environment.

Objectives: In this single-class activity, students will first examine the possible environmental effects of fracking near the Bakken Oil Formation in North Dakota. Second, students will evaluate how the petroleum industry obscures the effects of fracking through the use of corporate ventriloquism. Third, students will respond to the petroleum industry’s power by utilizing critical communication pedagogy.     

Teaching qualitative research methods using Undercover Boss

Course(s): Research Methods, Qualitative Research Methods, Organizational Communication, Business Communication

Objectives: After completing this class exercise, students should be able to identify the major components of a qualitative research study, along with the ethical dilemmas that come with doing qualitative research.     

Appreciative coaching for student academic and professional development

Negative self-talk and appraisals of self-efficacy can damage students’ abilities to do well in college and lead to self-fulfilling prophesies where students fail to meet their academic and professional potentials. This multi-class activity uses appreciative coaching to help students utilize a positive mindset and achieve academic and professional goals. This coaching model, based on the tenets of appreciative inquiry, begins with a topic selection and then progresses through four stages: discover, dream, design, and destiny. The coaching process can assist instructors and students in focusing on the positive aspects of student performance, increase self-confidence, motivation to do well in courses, and proactive career planning, and create a positive learning environment.

Courses: Business Communication, Freshman Seminar, Professional Development, Senior Capstone

Objectives: The objectives of this activity are for students to (1) practice positive reframing, (2) appraise and identify their strengths and skills, (3) select goals, (4) create action plans to reach goals, and (5) be empowered and take responsibility for their academic and professional progress.     

Creating a collaborative “hot clock”: Using smart phones to motivate students’ learning in news interviewing and reporting

Courses: Survey of Mass Media, Broadcast Journalism, News Writing, Media Programing, Communication Technology.

Objective: Employing the concept of a “hot-clock radio format,” the purpose of this unit activity is to motivate students’ collaborative learning in news reporting, interviewing, and media programing via smart phones.     

Diapers full of … pampered,hugged, and “luved” babies: Teaching ideological criticism through diapers

Courses: Communication Criticism, Rhetorical Criticism, Introduction to Rhetoric, Introduction to Communication, Media Studies, and Persuasion courses.

Objective: The aim of this activity is to introduce and explain the method of ideological criticism through commonplace advertising.     

Teaching health campaigns by doing health campaigns

Courses: Health Campaigns, Health Communication, Communication Campaigns, Public Relations Campaigns, Persuasion.

Objectives: Students will demonstrate their ability to work effectively both individually and in teams to apply health communication theory to emerging, practical, on-campus health issues via formative research, multimodal message development, community engagement, and effective presentation of findings.     

Speed-Discussion: Engaging students in class discussions

Courses: Communication Criticism, Rhetorical Criticism, Family and Communication, Gender and Communication, Popular Communication, and theory-based courses

Objectives: This activity engages students in dynamic, supportive, social discussion groups; helps them to identify and review the central ideas from the reading; and creates a record of their ideas that they can draw upon in later discussions. By the end of the activity, students should be able to (1) provide their own examples for difficult communication concepts, (2) work effectively with their peers, (3) understand a given case-study from a variety of perspectives, and (4) be prepared to contribute to a whole class discussion regarding sensitive, complex, and/or theoretical communication topics. Speed-Discussion is not a graded activity but rather a fun, low-risk, discussion activity that primes the pump for a dynamic, discussion-based class experience.     

Teaching technological determinism and social construction of technology using everyday objects

Courses: Communication Technology, Communication Theory, History of Communication, Media and Society.

Objectives: Students will develop an understanding of the two principal theories of technology and culture: technological determinism and the social construction of technology.