This activity allows students to consider how they self-identify by labeling their identities publicly on three Post-It notes for the class to see and how they may neglect to assign social identities to the way in which they see themselves. Doing so pushes students to make invisible identities more visible, which Cooks (Pedagogy, performance, and…

Courses: Public Speaking, Business and Professional Communication, Persuasion, or any other skill-based oral communication course. Objectives: Students will practice the development and demonstration of persuasive arguments in this single-class social judgment theory activity to improve their ability to change resistant audience attitudes.

Social class remains one of the chief prisms through which reality is interpreted. It is vital for a student to understand how this prism influences their internal representations of themselves and others. In this activity, social class is viewed as a social construction of perceived financial and/or economic status developed through societal…

Young adults and teenagers spend a significant amount of time each day using social media, but very few of them have thought about the ethical implications of what they post or view on these platforms. This activity provides students with the opportunity to (1) log and evaluate the amount of time and types of posts they are creating on social…

Journalistic skills courses often involve the production of a media project such as a multimedia website, which requires students to decide which media in their multimedia toolkit can best convey the story. To make the right match between content and form, students should understand the advantages of each of the available modes of communication.…

This single-class activity augments the popular desert island activity to include a secret insider who aims to influence their group covertly. The motivation for this augmented activity is twofold: (1) to highlight and dispel notions of invulnerability to groupthink and (2) to provide an opportunity to engage in small-group decision making. To…

Analysis of political and visual arguments is a key exercise traditionally included in undergraduate argumentation courses. This activity teaches students how to identify and analyze political candidate arguments presented on visual social media platforms, demonstrating how argumentation theory applies to social media campaigns. In the exercise,…

Jada Pinkett-Smith, Willow, and Gammy are hosts of the internationally renowned "Red Table Talk," where family members and A-List celebrities join the Facebook Live streamed conversation about personal and controversial issues. This proposed activity builds upon black feminist thought and utilizes the format of the "Red Table…

Courses: This single-class activity is designed for an intercultural communication class. It is suitable for any course that requires a discussion about identities. Objectives: This activity helps students enhance their understanding of the concept of identities. It allows students to comprehend multiple identity markers (e.g. race, gender, and…

Courses: Communication Criticism, Rhetorical Criticism, Family and Communication, Gender and Communication, Popular Communication, and theory-based courses. Objectives: This activity engages students in dynamic, supportive, social discussion groups; helps them to identify and review the central ideas from the reading; and creates a record of their…

Courses: Introduction to Communication Studies, Rhetorical/Media Criticism, Political Communication, Language and Social Interaction. Objectives: The aims of this single-class activity are (1) to emphasize the complexities of communication competence; (2) to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate communication behaviors; and (3) to…

Courses: Undergraduate or graduate organizational/crisis communication or public relations courses. Objective: The goal for this single class activity is for students to apply discourse of renewal to an organizational crisis fueled through social media.

Courses: Persuasion, Compliance Gaining. Objectives: In this single-class activity, based loosely on the video-game sensation Pokémon GO, students learn about, enact, and "capture" a variety of compliance-gaining tactics. Along the way, they gain awareness of various approaches to persuasion, the implications of using such approaches,…

For the communication theory course to be successful, instructors must tap into their students' lives and create a sense of how communication theory is not only relevant to their needs, interests, or goals, but also practical when applied to their social, personal, and organizational relationships. One way in which instructors can create a sense…

This original teaching idea for a semester-long course encompasses a team-based project in which students worked together to create persuasive campaign materials for a local community health organization. The purpose of this project was for students to apply learned concepts related to theories and principles of persuasion to a real-world…