As rhetorical scholars who regularly teach Communication and Women's/Gender Studies courses at a politically conservative university in the United States, Tasha N. Dubriwny and Kristan Poirot are keenly aware of the ways "Dobbs" has made abortion an all-too-relevant yet equally "dangerous" topic form any gender and/or health…

Guided by rhetorical and relational goals theory, this study explores medical students' preferences for effective teaching using a "build-a-professor" design. Using a budget methodology, medical students (N = 177) created their ideal clinical or nonclinical medical school educator by prioritizing 10 teaching behaviors and characteristics…

Contingent faculty are often under-resourced, suggesting that crucial aspects of our discipline receive inadequate support. Moreover, while the discipline increasingly relies on tenure-ineligible faculty, it has made few contributions to the scholarship on academic casualization, an employment trend in which temporary contracts replace stable…

Symbolic convergence theory provides a framework to examine how group consciousness and meaning are formed. Because dialectical tensions are present in all human interactions (e.g., a need for flexibility and structure), group consciousness involves converging on meaning in the face of dialectical tensions. This research combined symbolic…

Protection motivation theory (PMT) explains people's adaptive behavior in response to personal threats. In this study, PMT was used to predict rhetorical dissent episodes related to 210 student reports of perceived classroom problems. In line with theoretical predictions, a moderated moderation analysis revealed that students were likely to voice…

This essay investigates the challenges involved with enacting bell hook's vision of education as the "practice of freedom" in the midst of the current growth of societal inequality for immigrants. Based on their scholarly analysis of the current political and educational setting, and on their experiences, the authors organized the essay…

Instructors do not always meet students' expectations. Instead, they may be perceived as engaging in misbehaviors or unfair teaching practices that ultimately lead to student dissatisfaction. When this happens, students have a variety of options including dissenting rhetorically. Though much is known about why students dissent, in the current…

Extending research on instructional dissent beyond student reports, this study examined the potential for students' expressed dissent to have deleterious effects on faculty members. Instructors (N = 113) completed surveys about students' instructional dissent regarding their classes and reported their own burnout, commitment, satisfaction, and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate if college students' verbal aggressiveness and argumentativeness traits promote their tendencies to engage in instructional dissent (i.e., expressive, rhetorical, vengeful). Participants were 172 undergraduate students who completed a self-report survey measuring these traits and their dissent practices…

This case study of the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland demonstrates the need to consider course sequencing in the communication curriculum. The investigation assessed whether the order in which undergraduates took courses predicted grade performance. Students' (N = 6,166) grade data from earlier courses were used to…

Anthony Fleury proposes a Communication Against the Disciplines paradigm as a counterpoint to Communication in the Disciplines approaches to teaching communication across the curriculum. Contrary to Fleury's contention, however, learning about discipline-specific communication conventions can indeed promote the goals of liberal education and…

This essay examines the recent debate over the politics of American education, particularly the accusation of liberal bias by members of the Right such as David Horowitz and Students for Academic Freedom. It draws parallels between the contemporary movement for an "Academic Bill of Rights" and the historical context of the "Powell…

Embraces a communication in the disciplines (CID) theoretical framework and explores meanings associated with speaking competently as an engineer. Indicates five important features of speaking in engineering: simplicity, persuasiveness, result-oriented, numerically rich and visually sophisticated - all of which invoke the skill of translation.…

Employs seventeenth- and eighteenth-century U.S. women's rhetoric as a case study to argue that the rhetoric of muted groups can and should be included in U.S. public address courses. Draws on theories of social history and literary criticism to illustrate how women's texts might be introduced into the classroom. (MG)

Examines speech communication defined problems of reticence and/or communication apprehension pointing out the inappropriate use of the medical model to deal with such problems. Suggests that a specialist called a "rhetoritherapist" deal with these problems through training in various rhetorical subprocesses. (MH)