Today I would like to look at common threads in articles on CAC during the late 1980s, the 1990s, and the first decade of the 2000s. I also want to discuss current questions or concerns that have emerged in articles in the past few years.

The emphasis on how Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC) courses might prepare students for corporate jobs continued through the 1980s:

The importance of the development of oral communication abilities has been documented in a number of sources. Studies of graduates, employers, and corporate executives have revealed, for example, that skills in problem solving, communication, and interpersonal relations are most valued in high tech corporations….One way of assisting students in developing oral communication competencies is the required speech communication course, and another way is to integrate communication skills into content area courses. (Hay 1)

Communication Across the Curriculum at Baruch is certainly part of this lineage of CAC programs which emphasize communication as a business skill. However, since Baruch’s Communication Intensive Courses are in Theater and other humanities departments, they represent more than just communication for business. Depending on the class and the instructor, the emphasis might be communication as effective performance, communication as the transmission of cultural understanding, or communication as a means of displaying academic knowledge. For a rich background on the development of Communication Intensive Courses at Baruch, this 2008 Change article is required reading (Warner).

The 1990s witnessed a surge of articles on the assessment of Communication Across the Curriculum courses (Cronin and Grice) as well as on the applications of new technologies (Reiss, Selfe, and Young). Email, the web, and presentation software helped to increase the relevance of CAC and CIC. This seems fitting, since (as I showed in my last post) the original idea of Communication Courses came out of training in the use of communication technologies such as the typewriter.

Despite the spread of CAC and CIC, the basic Communication Course still exists within Communication Departments Across the country, though of course it has evolved through the decades (Morreale, Worley, and Hugenberg). Alongside the notion of Writing in the Disciplines, discipline specific definitions of communication have spread through Communication in the Disciplines movements (Dannels and Gaffney).

The first decade of this century witnessed articles demanding an even greater standardization of CAC, even while acknowledging that standards of communication are developing within each discipline as much as without (Dannels and Gaffney). Articles in this decade appear to be just as likely to survey the field of CAC as they are to pose discipline-specific (CID) questions (Hyavarinen et al.). Many writers also focus on questions of practical pedagogy (Dannels, Gaffney, and Martin).

The question, then, is what is CAC today? One of the issues that CAC faces is how to balance general communication practices with discipline specific standards (Garside). New communication platforms will likely also stimulate scholarly inquiry.

I personally am interested in the ethics and human purposes of communication, but these questions are generally not addressed by authors writing about CAC; I imagine this is because moral or ethical questions are seen as disconnected from “objective” standards of communication. However, looking at our Cacophony posts from this semester, it seems as though we are continually returning to questions of how communication relates to power dynamics and identity. I wonder whether these are questions that are being asked by CAC participants in other parts of the US.

Zucotti Park, October 2011. Source: emilydickinsonridesabmx‘s Flikr photostream

Works Cited

Cronin, Michael W. and George L. Grice. “Oral Communication across the Curriculum:  Designing, Implementing, and Assessing a University-Wide Program.” 77th Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association. Atlanta, GA. Oct. 31-Nov. 3 1991. Conference Report.

Dannels, Deanna P., and Amy L. Housley Gaffney. “Communication Across The Curriculum And In The Disciplines: A Call For Scholarly Cross-Curricular Advocacy.” Communication Education 58.1 (2009): 124-153. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Dannels, Deanna P., Amy L. Housley Gaffney, and Kelly Norris Martin. “Students’ Talk About The Climate Of Feedback Interventions In The Critique.” Communication Education 60.1 (2011): 95-114. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Garside, Colleen. “Seeing The Forest Through The Trees: A Challenge Facing Communication Across The Curriculum Programs.” Communication Education 51.1 (2002): 51. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Hay, Ellen A. “Communication across the Curriculum.” 73rd Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association. Boston, MA. 5-8 November 1987. Conference Presentation.

Hyavarinen, Marja-Leena, Paavo Tanskanen, Nina Katajavuori, and Pekka Isotalus. “A Method For Teaching Communication In Pharmacy In Authentic Work Situations.” Communication Education 59.2 (2010): 124-145. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Morreale, Sherwyn P., David W. Worley, and Barbara Hugenberg. “The Basic Communication Course At Two- And Four-Year U.S. Colleges And Universities: Study VIII-The 40Th Anniversary.” Communication Education 59.4 (2010): 405-430. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

Reiss, Donna, Dickie Selfe, and Art Young, Eds. Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. ERIC Database. Urbana, IL:  National Council of Teachers, 1998. Web. 4 Dec. 2011.

Warner, Fara. “Improving Communication is Everyone’s Responsibility.” Change Nov. 2008. Web. 4 Dec. 2011.

Yet, when I came to the Schwartz Communication Institute, I wondered about the origins of Communication Across the Curriculum as a movement and Communication Intensive Courses. I’d like to spend two to three posts looking at how the theory behind communication courses emerged and changed over a number of decades.

Using the chart feature of JSTOR’s Data for Research, I first took a look at how many articles have been published each year which contain the term “communication courses.” This does not include all articles ever published, but rather the articles published within publications archived by JSTOR.

The above graph shows the raw number of articles published containing that term. Clearly, most articles that reference communication courses were published in the mid 1940s to mid 1960s.

The second graph above shows the number of articles published that reference “communication courses” relative to the total number of articles published on any topic. Again, the obvious peak occurs in the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s.

Happily, the above data concurs with the usual “old school” explanation of the rise and fall of communication courses.

As you can see from the above graphs, the idea of communication courses existed prior to their rise in the 1940s. In his 1987 book Rhetoric and Reality, James Berlin associates early communication courses in the 1930s with Alfred Korzybski’s notion of “General Semantics,” an approach which sought to teach students to discern the ways in which rhetoric can distort reality (10). General Semantics rose “when the United States was concerned about the threat posed by Germany,” and was therefore largely “a device for propaganda analysis” (10). Specifically, Berlin writes that “Semanticist rhetoric was also highly influential in the communications course—the course that combined instruction in reading, writing, speaking, and listening, occupying a large place in the general education movement in the thirties, forties, and fifties” (10).

Yet, as we know, communication courses didn’t really take off until the mid 1940s, igniting what Berlin terms the “Communications Emphasis” which he claims spanned from 1940-1960. To be more accurate, I would argue (based on the data), that it spanned from 1945-1965. As a side note, the Conference on College Composition and Communication was founded in 1949, at the beginning of the wave. And what is the meaning of this rise and fall? The rise was largely occasioned by an influx of WWII veterans who went to college after the war concluded on the GI Bill.  Berlin writes that “the communications approach gave composition courses a new identity, placing them in a special program that carried with it a commitment to democracy and to the welfare of students who had just suffered the horrors of war” (106). These courses were “commonly interdepartmental” and “combined writing instruction with lessons in speaking, in reading, and sometimes even in listening” (93).

Movements in college instruction do not have neat beginning and end points. As I wrote previously, Berlin dates the Communications Emphasis from 1940-1960; he also says that there was a Renaissance of Rhetoric from 1960-1975; and there is a turn towards a student’s personal development and expression which occurs in the late 1960s.

I would attribute the fall of communication courses in the late 1960s to the last development, the rise of a style of instruction centered around a student’s personal growth and expression. This movement is alternately called “subjective rhetoric” or the “expressionistic approach” by Berlin (139). Its beginnings can be charted in the 1966 Dartmouth conference which produced John Dixon’s Growth  through English, a report which emphasized writing as a tool for  “’personal growth’” and “’the use of English studies for building an ‘inner world’” (Dixon qtd. in Berlin 149). I should note, however, that I do not have any evidence to show that the rise of subjective rhetoric caused a decline in interest in communication courses. To argue that one caused the other would likely be a logical fallacy; yet I think it is telling that the fall in discourse around communication courses coincided with the rise in discourse around subjective rhetoric.

Along with this interest in personal expression came attacks on traditional education. Berlin describes how “In a 1967 essay entitled ‘English Composition as a Happening,’ Charles Deemer attacks the university, charging that it is opposed to education because it fragments and alienates students.  Citing such figures as Normon O. Brown, John Dewey, Paul Goodman, Marshall McLuhan, and Susan Sontag, Deemer calls for the composition course to become ‘an experience’ in which the teacher’s authority is removed by having the student become an equal participant in learning” (150).

Naturally, this interest in free expression and in overturning traditional education emerged alongside the various social movements of the late 1960s.

Here, funnily enough, we can see a dramatic rise in the number of articles in JSTOR which refer to “personal growth” beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s (again, this is relative to all articles published).

So the emphasis on communication courses did decline in the late 1960s, but as we can see from the first two graphs, discourse around communication courses came back not long after. In my next post, I want to look at the ways in which communication courses were framed in the succeeding decades. Also, if I have time, I want to examine the beginnings of the Communication Across the Curriculum movement.

Listening Post: installation culled from real-time internet chat rooms, by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin

It has been hard not to take the announcement that many level two classes at Baruch will become jumbo-sized next year—increasing from 24 to 50 or 100 students—as a rejection of my work and values, as well as my colleagues’. The more experience I have, both as a student, teacher, and consultant, the more I see a need for what I’ve come to think of as “communicative reciprocity”—listening or reading and acknowledging the uniqueness of a student’s work, the back-and-forth that fosters authority based on critique and reflection.

I’m not saying lecture and jumbo classes might not be effective, even best, in some situations. Many professors have brought great talent, knowledge, creativity, and hard work to covering a large amount of information succinctly, coherently, and vividly. And of course, this is all contingent, you can have a demagogue in a small class. (A student told me she didn’t want to turn in a paper to her teacher that stated an opinion that disagreed with his.) But it seems nearly impossible in a class of 100 or even 50 to have the kind communicative reciprocity that recognizes a student’s developing opinion as valuable, responds with respect and consideration, and encourages more bravery, exploration, and complexity.

Often when I help students with drafts of essays, their first impulse is to mimic the teacher’s opinion and way of speaking, or to paraphrase research they’ve found online. I ask students to tell me their opinion, and then ask them to support it. When I tell them to write down what they’ve said, or when I write it down as they speak and hand it to them as a sketch for their rough drafts, students often seem surprised. To them, their own thoughts don’t seem appropriate in a class assignment.

One professor who teaches a communication intensive Theater 1041 class asks her students  to write a theater manifesto. I met with one of this professor’s students to work on her paper, and as she developed her opinions into ideas about what she thinks theater should and could be in terms of political and cultural relevance, she told me: “This is a whole different way of thinking. I never do this.” Here is a student telling me she’d never before been asked to reflect upon and develop her own observations and ideas in college before this assignment. So it isn’t a stretch to suggest it possible that a student could get a BA at Baruch without ever being asked to develop, support, and explain her opinions—about culture, politics, economics, and ethics.

In a class of 100, or 50, how will teachers foster this kind of reflection? How will teachers read and make significant comments on student writing, and get to know each student well enough to meet them where they are, in order to support and challenge them? Without a significant amount of practice in communicative reciprocity, I think that we set students up to be receivers of opinion as well as information. In the communication intensive classes we support at the Schwartz Institute, we work to help students develop and present their own perspectives in response to an assignment. And we try to support professors’ efforts to include more student writing and presentations in their classes. It’s fine that in many other classes students show their knowledge through more multiple choice and short-answer responses. But Baruch lauds itself for the diversity of its student population, and what does diversity matter if in most of their work the same answer is right for every student? What is the value of diversity if we don’t recognize the importance of developing an inclusive, reflective, authoritative political voice of one’s own?

The development of a specialized knowledge of writing instruction has been one of the most important achievements of higher education in the last forty years. This specialized knowledge of how to teach students to write will remain important. In fact, the incredible utility of this knowledge means that it cannot be confined to specialists! The birth of WAC, analogous to the invention of the web-link, has the potential to completely transform the way we conceive of the essential material of higher education. No longer can we isolate writing instruction to language classes. Could this be the idea that reverses a hundred-and-twenty year trend of increasing specialization in the curriculum?

Okay. So, once again, I have resorted to polemic (here, in the form of a strange sort-of-Hegelean fantasy). However, my conviction is a serious one. The humanities are ill served by the teaching of writing prior to the more fundamental questions. Why are we here, what do we do, how do we form the bases for our beliefs? These deeper questions, which students ponder on their own, are seldom addressed in their course work in Humanities disciplines, even though these are the questions that motivate humanistic study.

I have, tentatively, shared these ideas with my colleagues. The ideas are not well received. “If you can’t write, you can’t think. How can you work on big ideas if you can hardly sort out your words into sentences or your sentences into paragraphs?”

Further confession: I am either so prescient or so far-fetched in my thinking that I even like to imagine WAC and CAC will lead to curricular solutions to the economic problems of today’s higher education in the humanities. There are too many graduate students. Graduate education takes too long. Professorships become scarce as institutions increasingly rely on adjunct- and other temporary appointments. Meanwhile, enrollments continue to climb, especially at junior and community colleges. A caste system has formed where only “the best” professors can teach original courses, and an underclass of highly educated professionals prepare the masses by running them through a byzantine system of prerequisites for contact with the elite specialists.

Specialization in the sciences is important. In the humanities, specialization is like a derivatives market; it takes something that has a basic function, and, in trying to increase the wealth this thing produces, it fouls the thing’s basic functionality.

Let every graduate teach what he wants, but have him also armed to teach writing. Instead of, “how can you work on big ideas if you can’t write a sentence,” let it be demanded, “how can you build advanced knowledge, if you can’t teach basic writing?” The system of levels and prerequisites will fall away. The humanities will drive, and skills will ride along.

Is this really such a disgraceful idea?

I first read these stories in an experimental prose writing course a bunch of years ago, and the concept of these one-to-three page gems intrigued me. I was reminded of these stories this past semester, when, through my work supporting Advanced Accounting, a Communication Intensive Course, I found myself confronting palm-of-the-hand speeches. When I first learned that students had only two-to-three minutes to present their assigned material, I was skeptical. Two minutes to discuss a contemporary concept in accountancy?

As the semester progressed, and I struggled to help students condense the finer points of recording intangible assets on balance sheets, I necessarily focused on the benefits of these l’il speeches. Just as Kawabata’s stories are deeply complex while also being succinct, shorter speeches have the same potential. Translator J. Martin Holman could be talking about ACC 4100 speeches when he writes of the relationship between Kawabata’s small stories and his longer works:

“The palm-of-the-hand story appears to have been Kawabata’s basic unit of composition from which his longer works were built, after the manner of linked-verse poetry, in which discrete verses are joined to form a longer poem, the linkage between each dependent on subtle shifts as the poem continues.”

While longer speaking opportunities are still crucial for our students, these palm-of-the-hand speeches can give students a better familiarity with the basic units of composition required for larger speeches. I used to think of two minute speeches as a good exercise in summarizing, editing and brevity, but they do have their structural benefits, as well.  According to Holman, Kawabata mastered this form using certain elements (the same ones that would make any Palmist speech exiting); “juxtaposition of images,” “unique perception,” and “intriguing and memorable” plots– not reductions, but distillations of larger worlds.

There are clear positives and negatives to assigning such a short presentation, but on certain days, the luxury of having a lot of time to concentrate on just two minutes of material did seem like a very Palmist exercise. Students themselves, however, don’t always see the merits of this, and, rather than viewing it as the essence of their art, are more apt to view the assignment as the gnat buzzing around their schoolwork.  How might it be possible to elevate and enliven these palm-of-the-hand speeches to the place that Kawabata realized they deserve?

I finally figured out what to write about for Cacophony! Following the advice of my colleagues at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, the best way to approach this was to write about something I am familiar with in the context of my work.  As a professor myself, I set specific guidelines and objectives when giving assignments to my students in order to avoid writer’s block because of the openness of possibilities. I don’t want to curtail, however: Cacophony’s open posting policy makes it versatile and unique.

I hope this post gives some basic guidelines for anyone out there interested in organizing debates as a classroom assignment.  The topics of the debates I am coaching are in the 12th Edition of the Management and Society textbook issued by the Department of Management at Baruch College. But you can device your own and have students do a little research to defend their positions.

The first step is to assign students to groups and divide the groups into PRO and CON sides of a given topic.   Then, provide precise instructions about the format of the debate.  For example, one format consist of a ten minute opening presentation, followed by a five minute period for rebuttal, and three minutes for conclusions, going back and forth between the PRO and CON side.  Ten minutes for the PRO, Ten for the CON; five minutes for the PRO, five for the CON; and three minutes for the PRO, and three for the CON. You can make them longer depending on the number of participants and the time available.

Make sure students understand that the objective is to persuade the audience that their point of view (in the debate) is the most valid: they need to make arguments.

In the beginning, they should introduce themselves, the issue, the point they are defending and any terms that might be unfamiliar or that might take a particular meaning in the context of the debate.  For example, in a debate that deals with whether genetically modified foods should be labeled, it is necessary to know from the beginning what constitutes a genetically modified food product.

Encourage them to read the materials a couple of times (in the management course I coach these are organized in chapters), even the reading for the opposite team.  In that way they can figure out a strategy to organize their presentation as well as anticipate the points are going to be brought up against their arguments.  It’s also important for students to practice their entire presentation out loud so they have an idea of time management as they become familiar with public speaking.  In terms of oral presentation skills,  you should emphasize to the debaters that they should not read, and should maintain eye contact with the audience,  which is a non-verbal way of engaging their attention.  Index cards are an acceptable way of keeping track of the order of the arguments they will stress, but in order to avoid reading too much from them,  suggest they write bullet points, rather than entire sentences.

If they are using numerical data such as statistics and/or percentages, remind your students that if they are hard to understand, the audience will just glaze over them.  Quantitative data should be easy to read and understand and should make a strong point.  If they are quoting textbooks or the internet, make sure they cite valid sources and not just random articles (especially online),  and that they have those sources (author’s names particularly) readily available during the debate, in case someone asks.

Time does not have to be equally split, but all students in a team must participate.  Have students dress professionally (although this is not a strict requirement).  Attire is a non verbal language that reveals many things, and it is difficult to find credible someone wearing an oversized sweater whose sleeves are longer than the arms. Lastly, remind students to keep their language appropriate and to keep their composure.   Debates can get heated,  but for as much as a Jerry Springer fight will definitely engage the audience, the loudest people are usually revealing insecurity.

The end of each debate could be marked by an open Q&A period where the audience can participate and ask questions or comments to the presenters.  Here you can explain how the topic is still current and give an informal assessment of the students’ participation.

Rather than focusing on all of the problems and tensions around these issues within some (not all) universities, I thought I might mention a few basic elements often emphasized by community-based organizations:

First, assessment should be truly collaborative or it can quickly become extremely divisive. Transparency seems really important here. Asking for all kinds of information about someone’s classroom, students, and teaching without being clear about how that information will be used can be a great way to alienate faculty members.

This leads to the second point, which is that assessment should serve as a means of improving the overall quality of education in a particular department or discipline or university rather than as a policing mechanism. While it’s important to be aware of areas that need improvement, highlighting best practices is equally, if not more, important.

Finally it seems important to start and finish with the people actually doing the work, in this case, faculty members teaching writing and using writing as a teaching tool. Being aware of the needs of these folks allows the assessment to be more than charts and graphs. This way the information gleaned from this assessment project can be put to practical use. This is also a good incentive for faculty members to cooperate and provide useful data. It can even make it possible to enlist their help more directly. While faculty and administration often have different priorities, they don’t have to conflict. I think both groups have some stake in assessment and, if designed and implemented properly, it can help both meet their goals.

photo credit: ·júbilo·haku·

Don’t get me wrong: I heart the web.  My students and I blog together and exchange links, and I’ve been a longtime Blackboard defender.  But computers in my actual classroom?  I’m not so sure.

For the first five to ten minutes of the class, as I introduced myself and gave an overview of our objectives for the day, I was interrupted by thirty deafening renditions of the little tonal song Microsoft has chosen to indicate “Windows is starting up!!”  Then, when I put the students into groups, the long, u-shaped computer tables forced them to sit in awkward rows, and I found it difficult to rove from group to group to answer questions.  By the end of the workshop, I could see that some students were dividing their attention between me and the screens in front of them.

Rather than simply conclude that computers don’t work in a discussion-based classroom, I’m seeking some suggestions for how to make them work.  How could we use computers to keep students focused on content, rather than making content compete with the computers?

I am currently working with the Great Works of Literature faculty at Baruch on an assessment for the Great Works course. The faculty is interested in evaluating the learning goals for the course. The first step was to talk with the faculty about what they teach, how they teach it and what they feel about it. These are always great discussions and I believe fundamental to making a good assessment. At one point a faculty member stated that reading was a central part of the course and that she was, among other things, teaching in-depth reading. I was quite struck by this thought of reading and how the Great Works of Literature course taught students to engage with different texts and make inferences to the world around them through reading.

David Frost and I thought a lot about how to incorporate reading as part of the assessment process and how to design a prompt to fit with the specifics of reading for a Great Works of Literature course. The obvious was to ask students to read a short text and respond to it. But the difficulty was to find a reading experience that mirrored what goes on in the course.  Reading literature from multicultural environments and then exploring the relationship between the different genres and cultures is an essential part of the course.  But this is not easy to assess, and as most faculty say, even to grade.

For this assessment we are going to try an experiment; a pool of short texts will be available for the faculty to choose for the prompt. The students will be reading pre and post prompt texts that might be different in author or culture but the same in length and complexity and genre. The texts will also relate to authors or literary periods that the students studied during the semester.

The hope is students will be reading, and responding to the reading, in the same way they do in the course. The second hope is we will be able to draw out meaningful information about the students experience in the course as well as any increase in comprehension and knowledge. Everyone involved in this assessment is pretty excited about this experiment and its creative use of texts for the prompt.

I am too, as I hold in my breath to see if it really works.

I was reminded today that I once drafted a set of learning goals for writing and speaking at the undergraduate level for a project headed up by our office of advisement and orientation. While these goals implicitly inform the curricular support and development work of the institute, they have not been codified beyond the document I created in 2006 (before I learned about Bloom’s taxonomy). These goals have not seen the light of day beyond their very limited original context. With that, I thought I’d post them for discussion. Take a look and let us know if you find these useful and/or whether you’d recommend revisions. Here we go:

By the end of their undergraduate experience students should be able to:

• comfortably pose pertinent questions to faculty both in and out of class
• demonstrate proficiency in a number of everyday written genres (email, letter, etc.)
• demonstrate sensitivity to audience in oral and written communication – write and speak in a manner appropriate to audience – articulate similarities and differences in addressing different audiences (email to peer vs. email to faculty, conversation with parent vs. conversation with prospective employer)
• demonstrate awareness that all communication is purposeful – each individual communication is meant to accomplish a particular goal or set of goals – sensitivity to purpose
• grasp rhetorical purpose of own written work (what is this paper, email, memo, etc. meant to accomplish? What do I need it to do? What should it accomplish?)
• articulate how they might go about accomplishing purpose of given communication (in order to accomplish X in my email to my professor, I need to make clear that Y and establish Z before making the argument that A)
• work responsibly and productively as a member of a group – to communicate appropriately with all group members
• comfortably speak before an audience – impromptu and prepared presentations
• articulate own understanding of how they can become better communicators (what do I need to work on to become a better writer/speaker?)

Discuss.

Each student holds one of the thin little clickers and answers the questions you placed in your Power Point slides. You can see the results immediately (or hide them from the class if you choose).

We were apprehensive about having to learn new software and then adjusting it to work with a Power Point presentation and a workshop we have been working on for months already. But it worked very well. The IT resources tech support person was happy to train us, it took barley half and hour. A little experimenting later and we were able to figure out how to make it work for us. It was as easy as creating additional slides to add to our Power Point. But the benefits were clear: we were able to ask students to respond to questions which then allowed us to introduce a related element of the workshop, or helped us explain a point we were making, or, at the end of the session, we were able to ask student to asses the workshop: what they learned, found useful, found challenging. After the session, with a click of a button, we printed out a report with percentage and graphical representation of the answers (see the fragment of it at the picture attached to this post). We designed very simple “yes” and “no” questions but the possibilities are endless.

The added bonus is that the box of clickers for students is brought to the classroom and then taken away after the class is over, by an IT person. You don’t even have to pick it up. Hopefully, some of our Institute’s PCs will have the Turning Point installed. You can also try it on your home PC. Give me a holler if you need help figuring it out.

I love this quirky little how-to clip, mostly because the audio doesn’t match up to the video, making poor Leila look like she needs her own mandated visit to the house of corrections. But I can relate to Leila and her message, and I’m willing to admit that I stumbled upon this video in a moment of desperation, when I was brainstorming different approaches to this question of encouraging solid eye contact in oral communicating.

As most of us have probably discovered by now, when we’re providing feedback on speeches, merely repeating “you need to make more eye contact” doesn’t do the trick. (And really, why should it?) Most of the speakers we work with know full well that eye contact is something they should shoot for—they’ve seen this on speech evaluation forms and read about it dutifully in their Intro to Public Speaking class way back when. But if they commit this same “offense” in every presentation they make—staring at the PP screen, or at the floor, or at their hands, or note cards—when does the practice actually come in?

And, just as importantly, how do we invigorate our own approach to this thorny delivery snag? Some days, “make more eye contact” becomes the easy go-to, that dull phrase you know you’ll probably say before the student even begins. But isn’t commenting on eye contact just another way of saying that they didn’t make a connection with their audience? If we wanted to get all Eckhart Tolle on this post, we could extend it into the idea of being fully present (which has plenty of resonances in actor training). We all know how magical it can be when someone gives really great eye—that mixture of confidence, care, and connection– but how is it best learned?

I’ve tried a few new things in my recent quest to investigate the power of the Connecting Eyes. In the classroom, I’ve become more emboldened to push away the chairs and try out some of the better eye contact exercises that I know of, forcing people to get used to going eyeball-to-eyeball. Some of these exercises transform the room into a sort of communications gym class, which is a little hard to get used to, but not a bad thing at all. Does this have more successful outcomes in student performance? Hard to tell, exactly. But it certainly increases comfort and community among the students.

And during my BPL sessions with student groups, I’ve changed my approach. Instead of allowing the students to run through their entire presentations before I provide my feedback, I now occasionally stop them mid-stream, prompting them to re-do an entire section, this time focusing on, say, sustained eye contact. I know some of you out there have run your practice sessions like this for quite a while, but I’m just now catching on to its real benefits. I had been skeptical of the logic of isolating one element and potentially distracting the speaker with it, but I’m now thinking of these sessions as true rehearsals; if they can’t “run through” their work multiple times, what are the chances that a pattern of poor delivery will be broken?

Via Laughing Squid.

The Institute
To understand how the Institute was created—and has grown into a model for developing and supporting communication-intensive curricula—you have to look at the college’s history and its extraordinarily diverse student body.

Baruch’s beginnings stretch back to 1847. Its Newman Vertical Campus is now located at Lexington and 24th Street in Manhattan, one block from the original site of the Free Academy, the country’s first free institution of higher education. In 1919, the City University system created a school of business and civic administration on the site of the Academy. The next year, it added a master’s degree in business administration. In 1953, the college was renamed in honor of Bernard M. Baruch, the statesman and financier who had been instrumental in the college’s creation. In 1968, Baruch College became a freestanding college within the City University of New York. The College currently encompasses the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Public Affairs, and the Zicklin School of Business—now the largest school of business in the nation.

Even in its early years, the college was known for its diversity, drawing its student body from the immigrant populations that called New York City home. Over the years, those populations have changed from Italian, Jewish, and German to today’s immigrants from countries such as Turkey, Uzbekistan, and China. Approximately one-third of Baruch students were born outside the U.S., and half are the children of immigrants. About 90 percent of Baruch’s undergraduate students graduated from New York City’s public and parochial high schools, and more than half come from families with an income of less than $44,000 annually. The college’s nearly 16,000 students speak 110 languages and come from 160 countries—prompting publications such as U.S. News and World Report and the Princeton Review to name it “the most diverse university in the U.S.”

“The college always had to operate with the knowledge that for many of its students English wasn’t just their second language but sometimes their third or fourth,” says Professor Paula Berggren, who has worked extensively with the Institute to enhance students’ writing and oral communication skills in Great Works of Literature courses, which all Baruch students are required to take. Moreover, “in the U.S., we don’t know how to communicate even if we’re native English speakers.” By the mid-1990s, the combination of a school devoted to teaching business skills and a diverse and underprepared student body had created a situation in which “Baruch was turning out competent vocationally trained students who lacked an ease with communication,” Berggren says.

Baruch faculty members weren’t the only ones who noticed the problem. Over the decades, Baruch had gained a reputation for turning out highly capable business majors who got very desirable jobs in accounting and other business sectors. But major employers reported that Baruch graduates sometimes lacked confidence, sophistication, and facility in business communication. The problem wasn’t lost on the college’s alumni either—including Bernard L. Schwartz, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Loral Space & Communication, who had graduated from Baruch with a bachelor’s of science degree in finance. He believed that Baruch needed to do a better job of teaching students real-world communication skills in addition to their core studies. In 1997 he donated the initial funding to create the Institute that now bears his name, with the expressed wish to help Baruch students become more effective communicators.

There are a number of ways to teach and enhance oral and written communication, from required communication-specific courses and formal academic support units to loose, informal programs driven primarily by individual faculty members. Baruch created an organization that operated somewhere between those two extremes. A few core principles and organizing structures were set down that have guided the Institute, but room was left for creativity and evolution stimulated by the changing needs of faculty and students and by technological developments.

The Institute isn’t housed under a specific department—English or communication studies, for instance. In keeping with the idea that communication is everyone’s responsibility, it operates under the Office of the Provost and remains independent of any one department’s requirements or direct control. It also receives private funds (including ongoing support from Schwartz), giving it flexibility in the breadth, depth, and scope of the programs it offers. It invites outsiders, most notably from the business world, to discuss communication issues that are of importance to the employers who hire Baruch students. Each year, the Institute hosts an annual symposium that brings together faculty and business executives to explore areas of mutual concern, such as the role of new technologies in shaping criteria for effective communication in academic and business contexts.

(Read the rest here)

The significance of being proficient in language, both written and spoken, is emphasized throughout a student’s academic career at Baruch. From Freshmen Seminar to Business Policy 5100, students are exposed to the various forms of communication and the countless reasons pertaining to why proficiency is relevant. Courses designated as Communication Intensive Courses or CICs are designed and implemented by faculty members, with the help from the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute to help students become more effective writers and speakers.

Read the whole article here.

Edupunk (here are musings and run downs by Mike Caulfield, Stephen Downes, and D’Arcy Norman) is a new name for ideas that have been bouncing around the progressive edublogosphere for some time, namely, that higher education humanity needs an alternative to proprietary course management systems and the philosophy of teaching and learning that they implicitly promote. At the core of edupunk are older pedagogical stances unrelated to technology: an ethic of self-reliance, the valuation of student-centered experiential learning, and the rejection of the “banking concept of education.” Edupunk seeks to update and adapt these ideas within the rapidly evolving realm of edutech.

I’m coming a little late to this particular conversation (last week I was DIYing the walls of my house with a wallpaper steamer and buckets of paint– domesticpunk), and hope I can add something to the celebration/elaboration. Seems to me that “edupunk” is a useful term, though, like all metaphors, it breaks down in the end. It has successfully congealed and branded the thinking that’s at the core of the unease many of us working in this field have with the way things are done at most schools. It’s good that it’s been picked up by the Chronicle, and it’s fantastic that more people are finding their way to Jim’s blog these days.

I fear, however, that the attention to the phrase may distract from the work that produced it. For instance, I’ve been been trying to square the circle of my dislike for punk music and culture with my love and appreciation for the work of the cats who’ve rallied to this term. I see a rejectionist ethos and cliquish sense of superiority behind much punk music and culture, and I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of the edutech movement that I feel a part of. I’ve always been more of a funk and soul man myself, and think that the affirmation native to those genres, the love and depth of feeling at their center, are much more pleasant (and just as useful) rhetorical and political stances. A brilliant administrator I once worked with, wise enough to know what she didn’t know and to defer to folks like Jim and Zach Davis on all things digital, once said, “we want to use technology to seduce students to our pedagogical goals.” That seems more Barry White than Johnny Rotten.

In that spirit, I present: edufunk.

photo(shop) credit: skywaltzer

Or, how about yet another metaphor: edujazz.I sense in the discourse around edupunk an appreciation for messiness, even a distaste for form. I’m not sure this lends itself to the best teaching. The pedagogy that I’ve been exposed to and have practiced as a teacher of history is much more like jazz… lay down a structure, and leave plenty of space for improvisation. This allows a variety of types of learning to happen in a classroom, acknowledges that both facts and the skills to interpret them are important areas to work on, and encourages our students to explore from within material that we’ve laid out with a set of goals in mind. I’m all for the “guide-by-the-side” approach to teaching… but the work that went into the Ph.D. I’m about to earn does qualify me, I think, to do a bit more than that at times.

This metaphor is translatable to how we, as instructional technologists, nurture critical approaches to online learning, particularly in how we can “seduce” talented teachers to experiment with new forms. Our Institute is incredibly lucky to have the autonomy to deploy and develop whatever software we deem pedagogically appropriate, so to a certain extent we are isolated from Blackboard. Baruch’s IT shop also recognizes that an institution of higher learning should offer a range of solutions to its community, even if those solutions compete with one another. BCTC blesses and supports our experimentation.

Yet Blackboard still runs wild at this university, and we are constantly engaging with faculty members and administrators who refuse to see the differences between the solutions we promote and what BB offers. BB’s appeal is in its antiseptic pre-fabrication, in the very fact that it doesn’t force faculty to take the extra steps to really consider how Web 2.0 and distributed learning open up new pedagogical possibilities. As a result, many faculty graft onto it existing modes of learning, fearful of allowing technology to “get in the way.” They get on Blackboard, get off, and move on.

Some faculty members do use Blackboard quite successfully, particularly for collaborative projects. Good teaching is good teaching, no matter where it happens or how it happens. Our job as instructional technologists, I think, is to explore the new possibilities and modes of learning that Blackboard happens to work against. If that software gives faculty members what they need to accomplish what they want, then so be it. But if faculty are interested in making full use of distributed learning, in continuing to learn themselves, and especially in truly empowering students, they need other solutions.

Edujazz, emphasizing structure and improvisation, can help reach out to faculty who are reticent to give up their control and jump into the pit with the edupunks. This argument evolves from my work in an academic service unit, where my job is to help a wide-range of faculty members experiment with this stuff. Such work requires, and benefits from, sensitive responses to their concerns. An anti-authoritarian, anarchic response will ultimately accomplish little. The DIY approach of edupunk is a great goal, but often times DIT– Do It Together–is necessary, and even preferable. Helping faculty members translate their pedagogical structures to a new environment goes a long way towards mollifying their concerns about the impact of technology on their students’ learning. The students, if the structure is sound, can handle the improvisation.

Now, behind the scenes, hell yeah, I’ll cavort with the punks. Jim’s named a movement, even if the contours of that movement still haven’t yet been fully defined. The politics of this stuff and the consideration of the logic of capital are deeply important, and should constantly be a part of the conversation. If a university is going to spend millions on a limited and problematic application, it should probably be able to explain why that solution is better than cheaper alternatives. I haven’t seen that done yet.

Until it is, there’s work to be done. So, edupunks, edufunks, eduheads, or whomever: keep doing your thing.

As Figure 1 and 2 below show, BLSCI fellows support faculty teaching a number of distinct Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) across a variety of disciplines. As Figure 2 shows, the largest representation of faculty teaching CICs is in departments that have traditionally placed a heavy emphasis on both written and oral communication, such as English, Modern Languages, Marketing, Management, Performing Arts, Sociology and Anthropology. However, the institute has also supported CICs in departments that have not traditionally incorporated communication intensive elements into their curricula, such as Accountancy, Natural Sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and environmental sciences), and Computer Information Systems.

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When we look at these data and hear about all of the great work going on at the Institute during our staff meetings, what we often don’t take into consideration is the amount of expansion that has taken place over the past ten years. As Figure 3 demonstrates, the number of faculty supported by BLSCI has steadily increased, reaching a peak of 144 last year. The number of faculty currently teaching CICs is nearly three times what it was ten years ago. Despite some minor fluctuations, the number of sections of CICs has also increased dramatically. Specifically, as shown in Figure 4, the number of sections of CICs offered last year is nearly five times as many as there were in 1997.

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There is no doubt this kind of institutional growth contributed to BLSCI’s being awarded the Hesburgh award. However, the most interesting growth going on at the institute is arguably what happens on a more micro level among students, faculty, and fellows throughout continued mentorship and collaboration. Although we all get to observe this in our individual work, it’s often hard to demonstrate this kind of growth across the institute. As we keep on thinking about and celebrating growth at BLSCI we continue to think about ways to assess it. It’s my hope that this post will spark some ideas among readers on how we might approach this kind of assessment next semester.