For educators tasked with helping students become more skillful and successful communicators in increasingly diverse political and economic contexts, it is crucial to help students understand the ways that whiteness and white privilege influence interactions. However, because of its invisibility, whiteness proves difficult to talk about. This…

This article describes an activity for a course in "Intercultural Communication, Communication and Diversity" that is designed to help students better understand the concept of world views in everyday life. It also provides an understanding of how world views may be connected to values, norms, and ethnocentrism in very personal and…

The purpose of this exercise is to get students to relay and connect with the impact of ethics on public relations research. Students will begin to realize and analyze how their personal ethics influence their professional ethics choices. This is conceptualized through the completion of the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI)…

Understanding and conducting research is a complex, integral skill that needs to be mastered by both undergraduate and graduate students. Yet many students are reluctant and often somewhat apprehensive about undertaking research and understanding the underlying statistical methods used to evaluate research (Dauphinee, Schau, & Stevens, 1997).…

Communication expectancies are an important part of intercultural understanding, and are defined as cultural guidelines for anticipating behavior (Burgoon, 1995). Burgoon's 1978 expectancy violations theory (EVT) explored nonverbal violations and their outcomes (Burgoon, 1995). The theory has been identified as one approach to the study of…

The exploration of secrets summons the adage that ''what someone doesn't know won't hurt them.'' While this phrase implies that keeping secrets can be advantageous, it also foreshadows another consideration: secrets have the propensity to hurt others (Caughlin, Scott, Miller, & Hefner, 2009). Despite this, the act…

The authors describe an assignment in which first-year university students develop a sense of community by discussing personally relevant topics via the shared experience enabled by the social media tools Twitter and Paper.li. A list of references and suggested readings is included.

Audience response systems, also known as clickers, hold much promise for use in the communication classroom. Yet potential benefits notwithstanding, implementing new technology in the classroom also offers challenges for faculty who must master it themselves while managing students' learning. Successful clicker implementation, like the…

A fundamental concept in Intercultural Communication is developing an understanding of different cultural patterns. Understanding different value dimensions such as collectivism, power distance, and high versus low context cultures are important steps to gaining a facility in communicating cross-culturally. This article presents an activity that…

The workforce in the United States is becoming more diverse. To help students prepare to work and live in a diverse society, the author developed a lower-division course called "Communication Ethics and Diversity." After this course, students should be able to: (1) define diversity and communication ethics; (2) understand a variety of…

Students tend to perceive that direct communication is best. In class discussion, they've overwhelmingly conveyed their feeling that people should say what they mean and be as direct and precise as possible. Initially, they don't tend to recognize that the perception of directness is relative. What some consider clear, others consider rude. What…

This article describes an activity using Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" as a supplemental text in an undergraduate group communication course. This book will help stimulate conversation and promote easy avenues for classroom discussion. In addition to weekly quizzes over each chapter to help facilitate rich classroom discussions, the…

Individuals who work in professional settings interact with others who may exhibit a variety of cultural beliefs and decision-making approaches. Page (2007) argues that cognitive diversity (i.e., how people approach and attempt to solve problems) is a vital asset in effective organizations. Michael Scott, who portrays the inept main character on…

Invention deals with the content of a speech, arrangement involves placing the content in an order that is most strategic, style focuses on selecting linguistic devices, such as metaphor, to make the message more appealing, memory assists the speaker in delivering the message correctly, and delivery ideally enables great reception of the message.…

During recent years, some college classrooms have moved away from traditional teacher-centered lecture pedagogies toward learner-centered strategies. Relatively little empirical evidence exists to date assessing the utility of such pedagogies. This exploratory study examined the content and structure of student speech outlines from…