Business adopted a terminology of sustainability to defend, then justify, and finally explain practices that acknowledged resource limitations as inherent in the business environment. Tracing the rhetoric across a half century of business use demonstrates an expansion of the concept of sustainability to encompass managerial attention to finite…

Courses: Science communication, public speaking, technical communication, professional and/or management communication. Objectives: This activity about scientific and technical communication uses narrative principles to communicate complex information to broader audiences. Upon completion of the activity, students will be able to: (1) Explain the…

The versatility required for employment continues to change with technological advancements. Some of the top listed skills needed for a career are positive attitude, communication, time management, critical-thinking, and problem-solving (Peart, 2019). How to teach each of these competencies may take different strategies and techniques. This…

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. An optional follow-up assignment is included. A…

Skills have long been associated with productivity and economic well-being. A large body of evidence shows the value of academic and technical skills in the workplace. And in recent years, soft skills--skills that make for an effective employee, such as time management and communication--have also become increasingly valued in the workplace.…

Challenges to identity formation often emerge during college experiences as one's world view is confronted by exposure to new social circles, ideas, and cultures. Through the analysis of interpenetrating identities in the popular television show, "The Big Bang Theory," students are able to locate concrete examples of the four frames of…

This paper describes a case study of an innovative approach to teaching at an engineering school. The postgraduate course "Project Work and Communication in Research and Development (R&D)" was developed at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia. The main aim of the course was to make…

Teaching soft skills (i.e., grit, empathy, collaboration, perseverance, communication, ethics, self-management) is a task that might seem overwhelming to new teachers, but this article offers practical advice from students about how to incorporate the lessons into the classroom.

"Employers want individuals who are self-motivated, are driven, and can effectively communicate this to their work groups and supervisors" (Pence & Rowe, 2012, p. 50). Projects assigned by teachers or bosses can seem monumental, but by breaking them down into individual parts they can be managed to completion. There are many jobs…

This article is the first in a two-part series. It features 13 teaching innovations selected from the 60 "My Favorite Assignments" presented at the 2019 Association for Business Communication's annual international conference in Detroit, Michigan. Pedagogy presented includes experiential learning methods to teach how to deliver peer…

Despite academia's best efforts there still remains a gap in communication skills desired by business practitioners and those delivered by new graduates. The authors suggest that this may be the result of practitioners demanding outcome-based skills and academia teaching basic non-business-specific fundamentals of communications. An examination of…

In the technology-rich twenty-first century, students are required to actively construct their knowledge and collaboratively engage in problem solving by using such skills as adaptability, communication, self-management, and systematic thinking. In accordance with this necessity, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education…

Technology nowadays enables the remote access to laboratory equipment and instruments via Internet. This is especially useful in engineering education, where students can conduct laboratory experiment remotely. Such remote laboratory access can enable students to use expensive laboratory equipment, which is not usually available to students. In…

Establishing effective academic instruction, effective classroom management, and building relationships can all be accomplished with the application of observable and measurable practices. How an individual applies these practices will vary, yet common components of effective teaching are omnipresent. Across academic instruction, behavior…

Delivering bad news is an inevitable aspect of management. Teaching students to deliver bad news effectively and professionally can be successfully implemented into a course that addresses elements of managerial communication. In this article, we explain an experiential exercise that applies components of a three-phase model for delivering bad…