This article provides best practices that instructors can use to affirm and support marginalized students' mental health with a specific focus on students of color. Recently, campuses have witnessed renewed calls for diversity and inclusion in the wake of anti-Black violence. Advocates have called for needed structural changes. To build upon these…

Using critical discourse analysis, I critically examined the National Communication Association's (NCA) standards for public speaking competency to determine what type of ideal speaker the standards would produce. Highlighting NCA's emphasis on "suitable" and "appropriate" forms of communication and the use of Standard American…

Violence is a significant issue impacting the physical, mental, social, and economic health of our learning communities. For decades the discipline of peace education has explored the effects of nonphysical violence on students and educators, as well as ways to create more peaceful, less violent, and equitable educational practices. While…

This study analyzed the National Communication Association (NCA) members' perceptions regarding the effectiveness of their own and their peer presentations and the challenges they faced when preparing and giving conference presentations. Overall, participants (n = 187) feel fairly content with the effectiveness of NCA conference presentations and…

The COVID-19 "pivot" created challenges for instructors in adapting their teaching strategies to the various forms of technology available for virtual delivery. One positive outcome discovered for teaching an introduction to debate class was the use of Blackboard's discussion board feature to assess student learning regarding…

In March 2020, teachers in the K-12 school system were forced to transition from in-person instruction to a variety of virtual teaching models due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This unprecedented change required extensive communication between teachers, students, parents, and administrators. This study explored communication during the March-May 2020…

Because the communication discipline values action, civility, and service, it has placed emphasis on the integration of service-learning in its courses. Service-learning has the potential to bridge the gap between the classroom and the community by employing social justice pedagogy--activism that takes critical learning to sites of hegemony.…

The COVID-19 pandemic posed numerous challenges for instructors and students. Professors, for example, struggled to quickly and effectively migrate face-to-face courses to remote teaching modalities. What had not been anticipated, however, were the additional challenges to be managed when returning to face-to-face and in-person teaching. This…

This study reviews the traditional culminating graduate student experiences, theses, and comprehensive exams, as well as a newer, more professionally relevant option, applied research projects. We conceptualize applied projects as student-led, client-connected, hands-on, experiential projects that address a real-world communication problem or…

It is imperative that today's advertising, journalism, mass communication, and public relations students are prepared to engage in corporate activism and corporate social responsibility communications once in the workforce. This article explores the need for incorporating equity-based pedagogy, using feminism as one of many approaches, into…

The COVID-19 pandemic created an exigency for educators to reevaluate their approaches to the classroom with one major dimension being course modality. This study uses the Instructional Beliefs Model to examine the impacts of course modality (i.e., hybrid versus face-to-face formats) and students' communication growth mindset on student engagement…

Research has established important links between student sense of belonging in the classroom and levels of academic engagement, motivation, and persistence (e.g., Jang et al., 2016; Reeve, 2012) yet more work is needed to identify specific teacher communication tactics and strategies that can foster sense of belonging and increased engagement.…

Using a dialogic framework as the backdrop to course curriculum, I developed an Oral Communication course for pre-med students with the goal to enhance students' public speaking skills while also incorporating health communication and applied communication research and activities to create opportunities for engagement. I propose best practices for…

The purpose of the article is to compare and contrast higher education and research among public relations and journalism students of middle-class and working-class origin. The paper applied Bourdieu's theory of "habitus" to analyze prejudices against the working class, explores whether working-class students express an anti-education…

The rapid development of the COVID-19 pandemic during the spring 2020 academic semester resulted in many international undergraduate students evacuating the United States to return to their home countries. Some faced government-mandated quarantine in a designated quarantine hotel upon their entry into the country which overlapped with the end of…