•How can you construct a rubric that reflects your communication goals and disciplinary culture?
•What kinds of rubrics will be most useful to you and your students for assessment purposes?
Section IV deals with these assessment issues and provides guidance in making decisions about response and evaluation, creating rubrics, and managing ego-related issues (facework).
Where to Start?
You might have already noticed that although we discuss each of these decision points separately, they are intricately intertwined. For example, the ways in which you assess oral communication activities need to be directly tied to your objectives and outcomes (e.g., you don’t want to hold students accountable for something that is not necessarily part of your objectives or outcomes). Writing good student-learning outcomes automatically gets you thinking about the kinds of assignments that will achieve those outcomes. And the ways in which you support students will differ depending on the challenge brought up by the differing assignments (e.g., there might not be apprehension issues if you are using low-stakes pair-and-share assignments). Finally, all of these decision points live within the broader culture of your discipline and your institution. The key here is to start with your objectives and to stay tethered to them as you move through each of your decisions. We present these decision points linearly and individually in order for you to have a clear and useful framework to follow. However, to use an analogy borrowed from one of our experiences with textiles faculty and students, these decision points are meant to be “wovens.” Each of these decision points depends on the others, and although you might choose to focus your energy on only one, we encourage you to consider the full range of these decisions so that you can take advantage of the ways in which they are integrated.
3 Considering Institutional Contexts and Challenges
If you are like many of the faculty we work with, you are probably thinking “Why me? Why should I teach communication? Why not let the communication department deal with it?” This is a good question. We do not presume all faculty members are professional communicators, or that faculty in other disciplines should have the theoretical background to teach communication in the same way as do communication faculty. This book does presume, though, that you have the disciplinary background and expertise to understand the communication life of your discipline. You are the expert on how communication is enacted in your own context. If an audience member watching your students says something like “emotion doesn’t work here” or “the visual speaks for itself,” it is likely that you can make sense of those comments in ways that are different from how we might make sense of it given our background in communication (presuming those comments are typical of your disciplinary culture). You can probably tell students pretty quickly what they should definitely not do when they give a presentation to industry sponsors (for example) or what they should do if they want experts in the field to find them credible. You probably understand the nuances of productive and cohesive teamwork in your discipline. You know the particulars about your disciplinary tradition that might influence the extent to which women participate, or the extent to which minorities become active members of communicative events. You have very good localized understandings of the types of communication events that typify your discipline, the evidence that is considered valid in your discipline, the competencies or skills that are important for your students to master, and the performative roles students will need to enact to be successful.
So, how can communication specialists help you? Communication specialists working in cross-curricular programs can provide you with the vocabulary from communication theory and research to help you name, understand, and teach so that you can achieve your instructional goals. From their own expertise, communication specialists can help you by asking you the questions that are important to ask in order to help you best tailor your choices to your own instructional emphases. Based on research, communication specialists can help you understand the particular issues students might face when trying to learn communication in your discipline. For these reasons, if you have access to initiatives on your campus focused on oral communication across the curriculum, we strongly encourage you take advantage of them. Even if you do not, if you have writing-across-the curriculum specialists, they can assist you in thinking about using this book as you think through multiple modalities of communication assignments and activities. This book should ideally supplement your work with these specialists. If you do not have access to these resources, we hope this book will provide the vocabulary, ask the questions, and give some insight into the teaching and learning issues relevant to oral communication in the disciplines.
We recognize that there might be some other challenges and concerns you have with incorporating oral communication in your courses. We discussed some of those institutional constraints in Chapter 1, in fact. We, however, want to address the more individual challenges (the “yeah but’s . . .”) here, because we acknowledge the valid constraints many faculty are under and the important concerns that emerge from these constraints. Our goal is not to deny that these constraints and challenges exist, but rather to provide insight on how to best handle these constraints using the strategic framework we present in this book.
Time, Time, Time . . . in Class
“Ok, so I have thirty-five students. Even if I simply have them do short presentations—say 4–5 minutes each—that will take 2–3 class periods away from my lecture material. Also, what if they don’t do a very good job with the content? Then I have to go back and review the stuff they were supposed to address. If I put them in teams to save time, well—then there’s the whole team issue. So, maybe I’ll just scrap the whole idea. Plus, I have a lot to get through and can’t waste class time.”
Statements like this are typical—many of us feel the pressures of trying to find class time to cover all the material we want. The coverage issue is an extremely valid and important concern when considering incorporating oral communication activities in your courses. We all have material that is important to provide for our students in whatever content area we are teaching. In fact, many of us spend hours and hours of time trying to figure out how to get everything in—ultimately having to make painful decisions about what readings to cut, what lectures to combine, and what to assign for out-of-class work because the in-class time is full. Time in class is particularly an issue in courses where students’ knowledge of the content is essential before they move on to other courses. Additionally, some courses are flagged for gathering assessment data in order to address accreditation issues, and therefore covering the material is essential. In other courses, students are completing a final project that necessitates a significant amount of class time. So why would you bring in something that will take precious time away from lecturing on course material?
One of the primary reasons coverage is an issue for many faculty members is that they have a narrow view of what it means to incorporate communication in their courses. The first thing that comes to mind are formal, business-like presentations—students in suits using PowerPoint, perhaps in research teams, giving 30+ minute presentations with a question-and-answer round afterwards—a situation that most definitely takes up a large amount of class time. For some of you, these high-stakes presentations are important and you can create the class time to allow them. But when these kinds of communication events are not relevant to your goals or your discipline, there are other options. The strategic framework starts with your goals—not with a presumed set of communication activities. You decide how to best use communication within the confines of your content area. The decision, however, begins with your goals. If high-stakes business presentations do not help you achieve your goals, then you should choose something else. If you are teaching a course in which the content is packed, consider using communication to help your students learn about the course material. Perhaps two-minute reading summaries or pair-and-share critical questions about the content will help students engage with the material is new ways. If you are interested in professionalizing your students, consider a variety of communication assignments that might help you do that. For a faculty member in business management, that might be a “performance review.” For someone in soil science, that genre might be a “customer response.” Or, if your goals revolve around having students critically analyze material, you could use discussions to encourage students to synthesize ideas, put information in a