The Centrality of Communication in Academic and Professional Life

Communication plays an essential role in every academic discipline and nearly all professional occupations. Whether producing a published article or a training manual, giving a conference presentation or a weekly sales report, or designing a website for a corporation, the professional who assumes the position of communicator assumes a position of importance. When a person's ideas and experiences are prized, he or she is asked to convey them-in speech, in writing, in images. And continued success in most fields requires good communication skills. In most professions, the ability to facilitate the understanding and application of good ideas is usually a step toward and assurance of professional success, as is the ability to pose and solve problems and thus, think critically about experience.

Since every academic department holds the responsibility of encouraging its students to be successful professionals, every department has the responsibility to foster effective communication.  This responsibility needn't overwhelm instructors.  Communication-intensive pedagogy requires neither a sacrifice of traditional concerns nor complete (and paralyzing) revisions of courses. Instructors in all disciplines can easily integrate a concern for communication and rhetorical skills-and use this concern to promote the understanding of course material.

The status quo has great momentum.  As we implement Communication Across the Curriculum, people will have legitimate concerns that when we change our pedagogy, we risk losing, or losing sight of, our fundamental mission of educating students.  It is therefore important that we consider at the outset some of the misconceptions people will likely share about CAC:

1.       Emphasizing Communication and Critical Thinking Will Take Time Away from the Need to Address Content

2.       Communication-Intensive Assignments Are Unsuitable in Some Courses

3.       Adding More Communication-Intensive Assignments to a Course Will Bury the Teacher in Paper Grading

4.       Many Teachers Do Not Have the Professional Training to Teach Communication  (From John Bean, Engaging Ideas 11)

One of the larger purposes of this guide to Communication Across the Curriculum is to dispel these misconceptions.  Lest they remain too long in consciousness, let's address some of them at the start.

Misconception #1: Emphasizing Communication and Critical Thinking Will Take Time Away from the Need to Address Content. 

Based on the experience of teachers who have decided to emphasize writing and other forms of communication in their courses, we know that doing so does not restrict coverage.  In fact, teachers find that students actually learn more, and more deeply, essential material.  Teachers also find that in many cases emphasizing communication and critical thinking in a course can increase total coverage (Bean 9).  Because students learn more efficiently and deeply when asked to communicate their learning, teachers have to spend less time in class reviewing material that should already have been learned and students remain engaged because they know new material is coming and that they will be responsible for articulating their understanding of it.  Active learning is a key feature of CAC, and active learners absorb content eagerly and more permanently.

It is probably true that teachers will themselves not spend as much time lecturing about course content.  Too often and too easily, we equate our having said something with students having learned it.  But study after study shows that students do not learn effectively from lectures.  Experience tells us the same thing.  When students are not responsible for articulating their learning, new information is always ephemeral to them, regardless of how important we may perceive it to be.

We believe that teachers should continue to stress content goals for their courses, then find communication-intensive activities that will help them and their students achieve them.

Misconception #2: Communication-Intensive Assignments Are Unsuitable in Some Courses. 

On the contrary, communication-intensive assignments are suitable for almost all courses, even ones in quantitative and technical fields far removed from English or Speech 101.  What's required is that teachers re-conceptualize what a communication-intensive assignment might be.  It need not be a 20-page term paper of the sort produced in a high school English class.  There are many forms of communication that can help students learn and articulate their learning.  Not all of them are of the formal variety, nor are they always final research projects.  Many teachers in engineering, mathematics, and science, for instance, have found it useful for students to reflect upon their thinking processes as they solve problems critical in the subject area.  They have found it equally valuable to have students learn the disciplinary methods of inquiry and analysis, with students communicating these methods orally or in writing as they learn to apply them to particular problems. 

This guide contains many suggestions for incorporating written, oral, visual, and electronic communication into courses without disrupting the traditional goals of a course or, to put it more positively, suggestions that will help students learn what they should be learning, regardless of the content.

Misconception #3: Adding More Communication-Intensive Assignments to a Course Will Bury the Teacher in Paper Grading. 

It could, but once teachers learn to appreciate that traditional methods of responding to student writing may not be as effective as they once thought, they will see that there are ways of avoiding such frustration.  First, not all student writing needs to be graded.  Some of it should be responded to, of course, but when not compelled to justify a grade, teachers find that such responses go quickly because they are more like readers' reactions.  Our suggestion to teachers is that they respond to student writing as teachers, not as editors, and not always as evaluators.  Students learn to communicate more effectively when they know that they're writing to a reader who hears what they say and reacts to it, not punitively or by marking errors, but with attention to content, to whether they have explained a principle or concept accurately, or whether they have written a cogent analysis.  Second, students can also learn to use feedback from peers (e.g., through peer review or collaborative projects) and to become responsible critics of one another's work.  This guide contains many suggestions for managing "the paper load."  In the end, we agree with John Bean that "the key is to decide how much time you are willing to spend on student writing and then to plan your courses to include only what you can handle-always remembering that you do not have to read everything a student writes" (11).

Misconception #4: Many Teachers Do Not Have the Professional Training to Teach Communication. 

Teaching writing, speech, and visual communication effectively is indeed an art that requires specialized training.  However, every teacher knows how to read and how to be honest with their reactions.  The trick, actually, is to avoid trying to emulate forms of response that we think English teachers would appreciate (e.g., marking errors, which, by the way, is not all that writing teachers do or should do when they respond to student writing.)  As knowledgeable professionals in their field, teachers do know how to respond to and evaluate content.  They also know when writing is unclear, either because of conceptual or mechanical problems.  Communicate those reactions to students, and avoid the urge to teach students mechanics in the context of learning course material, which can be enormously frustrating, time-consuming, and, most importantly, ineffective.  Research shows that as they become familiar with the content of the discipline, students do improve their formal communication skills.  They just need sufficient opportunity to articulate their understanding and to receive feedback on whether their understanding is misguided or on the mark.

Incorporating Communication into Your Course

If you decide to make communication an important part of your course and would like to make sure that concern for communication does not overwhelm the course (or you), you should first determine what role communication will play in a particular course. You will need to determine the relationship between communication and (1) your role as instructor (2) your goals for students (3) your course and your discipline in general.

1. About your role as instructor, consider the following questions

Ø       What are your strengths in the classroom?

Ø       What do you enjoy most about this particular course? Least?

Ø       What demands does this course place on you? How might communication instruction change that?

Ø       What do you count as instructional success for a class period? A unit? A test or lab? The entire course? To what extent do writing and speaking relate to this success?

Ø       What is your role in this course? Instructor? Mentor? Colleague? What type of communication does this relationship suggest would be appropriate?

Ø       What would be your mode of assessing students under ideal conditions?

2. About your goals for students, consider the following questions:

Ø       What do you wish to accomplish in this course? What should students be able to do after a semester under your guidance? What is the relationship between this course and the university experience? This course and the experience of non-majors?

Ø       What immediate contributions does this course make to students' work in the university? If a student were to leave school after taking this course, how would it benefit him or her? What long term benefits does this course offer?

Ø       What would you like to accomplish with writing in this course? Foster critical thinking? Promote thoughtful reading? Provide a place for students to explore key issues and situate them in the history of ideas and in contemporary society? Determine how well students are learning course material? Gauge students' ability to synthesize new ideas?

Ø       What value does this course place on informal communication? Formal communication? Revision of ideas and their presentation? Group work?

Ø       What kinds of written, oral, and multimedia communication do you expect students to use to convey their ideas about the course when they are done? How do students prove that they have sufficiently understood the course material? What kind of communication about your course and a student's understanding of material would you enjoy? Final exam? Journal article? Report? Presentation? Webpage featuring course ideas? Documentary of experience in the course?

3. About your course and your discipline in general, consider the following questions:

Ø       What is the relationship between this course and the major in this discipline? Between this course and graduate education? Between this course and entry into the profession?

Ø       What kinds of communication do professionals in your field regularly use? What forms of communication are marks of the highest success? What forms of communication are making advances in your field? Disappearing? To what extent should this course prepare students for these communicative norms? If your course does not provide students with practice in these modes of communication, are there courses that will?

Ø       What kinds of employment might majors in your field (and students in your course) obtain? In what popular media do topics in your course regularly appear? Who are the authors of this information?

After you have answered these questions, use your responses to develop your plan for incorporating communication. You do not need to answer all the questions, and the questions will not provide a blueprint. You should use the questions, rather, to obtain a clear idea of what a particular course should train students to do and how you feel about that particular course.

When you do turn to the incorporation of communication in a course, you should likely begin with parts of the course that you enjoy and feel comfortable with. If, for instance, the course contains a certain section that you enjoy, begin by developing assignments that can be used in that section. And look for areas in which concerns for communication and instruction in writing and speaking can be integrated without increasing your workload; this approach will prevent the communication aspect of a course from becoming a burden. You might, for instance, consider substituting a report for a test.

The use of communication in your course should certainly be guided by the course goals. Use writing and speaking to meet goals, not to add to them. If students need to master the basic vocabulary and techniques of a field through this course, then use communication as a way to introduce students to terminology and methodology and to help them master these aspects of the field. The communication exercises in the course should meet the needs of the course.

The following pages present some ideas on how to use communication to meet the goals of your course. They contain various assignments that belong to one of three categories:

Ø       Informal assignments that encourage students to use communication to learn, and emphasize the connection between attempts to communicate and cognition

Ø       Semi-formal assignments that serve as preparation for major course projects that emphasize the idea that writing is a process that involves planning, preparation, and revising

Ø       Formal course projects that emphasize the importance of using effective communicative strategies and communicative conventions to convey an understanding of course material

The assignments that instructors develop for particular majors and courses will naturally differ from the assignments of other majors and courses. An effective CAC program should not foster generic "writing and speaking" assignments. Rather, the writing and speaking assignments should emerge from the relationships between each course and the CAC goals. Naturally, the assignments will differ. But they should, in some way, incorporate and display two of the goals of CAC:

1.       The use of communicative approaches as modes of critical thinking, problem-solving, and learning

2.       Instruction in the communicative conventions of each course's discipline

Ideally, a CAC program transforms all courses into places where ideas are exchanged in a variety of ways, where students "are no longer passive but active learners, junior colleagues who are engaged with their subject matter in a way that emulates the professional discourse community" (Susan McLeod, "Defining Writing Across the Curriculum," Writing Program Administrators 11.1-2 [Fall 1987]: 19-24; 23). An effective CAC program will make the curriculum "a comprehensive environment of literacy and learning" (McLeod 23).

Go to next section

Return to the CAC Guide index