Teaching First-Year Communication Courses: Paradigms and Innovations

In this book, eleven teacher-scholars of communication provide a robust study of the challenges and opportunities facing those who teach first-year communication courses. The first half of the volume offers paradigmatic analyses, including a survey of the ecology of the first-year course, a plea to integrate our first-year courses into our research agendas, a study of the gap between scholarship and pedagogy within rhetoric, a proposal for seven core competencies to unify the various first-year communication courses, and an argument for a critical communication paradigm. The second half details innovations in classroom practice, such as the teaching techniques of social justice pedagogues, team-based learning as a model for the public speaking course, response and feedback techniques in teaching public speaking at the University of Copenhagen, teaching online speech as a new course focused on the unique challenges of digital communication, and the role of oral interpretation and performance classes in the first-year curriculum. Finally, this volume concludes with the editor’s manifesto for teaching public speaking. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Review of Communication.

Pat J. Gehrke is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of South Carolina, USA. He has two decades of experience in teaching communication, has directed first-year communication courses, and has conducted system-wide communication competency assessments. He publishes in the history of communication studies and communication ethics, including The Ethics and Politics of Speech (2009).