Critical Communication Pedagogy

Deanna L. Fassett, John T. Warren

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781452279046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

In this autoethnographic work, authors Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren illustrate a synthesis of critical pedagogy and instructional communication, as both a field of study and a teaching philosophy. Critical Communication Pedagogy is a poetic work that charts paradigmatic tensions in instructional communication research, articulates commitments underpinning critical communication pedagogy, and invites readers into self-reflection on their experiences as researchers, students, and teachers.

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Critical Communication Pedagogy

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Shifting Paradigms

As scholars, we spend so much of our time thinking about time…. How much of it there is until a deadline … whether someone is wasting our time … how to create and enjoy a spacious sense of time inside a discussion or an activity…. Time to regroup, time to change, time’s up, a time to every purpose under heaven. Time is always on our minds. But not just time … moments. Because the issue is not so much whether there’s enough time for a teacher or a writer or a professor, but whether the time was well spent, whether the moment was well rounded, purposeful, or meaningful to us, our students, our research participants…. In teaching, we live life moment by moment, looking for patterns, reliving and loving and dreading “key” moments. There are many such shared moments in our lives….

In thinking about the field—the state of communication education, instructional communication, communication pedagogy—we found that time has different shapes than we expected. As fairly linear thinkers, we expected to conceive of the discipline as we conceive of time itself: a moment to moment, processional process beginning with our foreparents and leading us, in a historical line to the present issue of Communication Education. After all, it makes sense to us, as communication scholars, to see the past influence and make possible the conditions of the present. And of course, this is mostly true; however, as we began to encounter the field, we noticed that our engagement with it failed to have the expected directionality. Instead of a line, we found the story of the field was told to us in pieces. We read Freire (1970/2003) before we found Dewey (1916/1944, 1938). We learned about the ideology of “blaming the victim” from Kozol (1991, 1995, 2000) long before we read Ryan’s (1976) treatise on the subject. We tried to read the pages of our field’s journals, but often found distraction in the pages of McLaren’s (1999) Schooling as Ritual Performance or Fine’s (1991) Framing Dropouts. Thus, the story of our field became individualized, personalized; we learned the field in pieces, as a rich collage or mosaic that generated meaning through juxtaposition rather than cause and effect.

Of course, this is often how time works—we piece together enough time here or there to accomplish the doings of our lives. We have written this book in stolen moments found in between the preparation of both memos and courses. We smuggle our time with loved ones, carefully extracted from the tasks and to-do lists of our lives. The fact of these moments’ stolen nature (like the moments we spent swimming in Ira Shor’s, 1980, 1992, 1996 critical pedagogy books) does not mean they are less valuable. Rather, it means that how we make sense of our daily lives is much more like art, like a poem or a mosaic, than like the linear pages of our high school history books. For instance, we learned to drive cars not by the manual, but by the moments stolen from our parents’ schedule or the time occupied in the driver’s education car. Those moments, as a series of lucky juxtapositions, have created the meaning making of driving—it is in the moments stolen from time and knitted together that we have crafted our driving selves. It is, of course, why we drive differently—Deanna, as a Californian, is a much different driver than John, who learned to drive in Indiana.

Thus, the idea of defining a state of the field is troubling—how do we do this in a way that actually represents or mirrors the nature of how we learn, how we make sense of ourselves as communicators and scholars in the field? Certainly, we could provide a linear description—a timeline that locates Sprague’s (1992, 1993) call for critical inquiry or Pelias’s (2000) self-interrogation of the critical life within the timeline of Communication Education. We could craft a story of the field in this way, but in doing so, we would rob the story of the field of its lived quality. Rather than try to create some order that somehow preexists us as researchers, in this unconventional review of, this interaction with the literature, we strive to steal away these moments from our sense making, to fashion them into an image for others. We paint here the field as we encountered it, offering, as one must, our own impressionistic understandings of how we have arrived at a point in time where we find a need for this book on critical communication pedagogy. In what follows, we take up our own relationships to the intersections of instructional communication and critical pedagogy, considering what each provides that the other does not. In drawing together the two perspectives, we suggest a vision for coming together that extends beyond theory and methodology to the creation of community.

You Think You’re a Comm Ed Scholar?

It was my first job interview and I was so nervous. In the moment of the interview, I was asked to define myself in the field. This, I had been taught, was tricky business. I remember in graduate school in a meeting, my faculty asked a similar question: Who do you think you are becoming? I responded confidently that I was a performance studies scholar interested in pedagogy and culture; however, I thought I was also a generalist. When they stopped laughing, they informed me that I was no generalist and I had better begin to embrace it. It was then that I began really publishing; with only the perceived luxury of a generalist position to fall back on, I had better make a stand.

So I was standing in front of the search committee when a communication education scholar I admire asked me to define myself; taking a gulp of air, I said: “I’m a performance scholar centrally, but I also see myself as an intercultural scholar. I also see myself as a communication education scholar.” The definition was strategic; I wanted this scholar in communication education to see in me, her potential new colleague, an ally. I wanted her to see, in my definition of myself, an image similar to her sense of herself. I wanted to appropriate the image of communication education so it would help me get this job. And while I had very little idea of what made a communication education scholar at the time (except that I had published in Communication Education already and felt this helped me qualify), I had found that definitions matter.

“A communication education scholar? You think you’re a comm ed scholar?” Puzzled at this response, I noted my recent publication in the journal of that same name, pulling cut pages out of my bag as evidence. She smiled, “Well, publishing in Communication Education doesn’t make you a comm ed scholar.” It was then that I realized the ground of communication and pedagogy was not as stable as I had previously thought.

Box Checked

My first experience with “communication education” was a box I checked on my application to Southern Illinois University for the Ph.D. It was simple enough in my mind: “I like to study communication…. I like to study education…. If I check this box, I’ll get to study both.” Little did I know there was more to it than that. There is a long and well-documented history (see, for instance, Sprague, 1993) of what constitutes communication education, and how that is and is not the same thing as instructional communication. This is a distinction that matters very much to other people, even if it hasn’t been an especially salient distinction for me; Sprague (1993) is very eloquent in her call to “ask the questions that are ‘embarrassments to theory,’” to ask the questions that other researchers overlook as too practical, too applied, too pedagogical (p. 106). Every time I think about blending together the two areas into an amorphous “CE/IC,” Sprague challenges me to consider the ways in which this blurring of the borders is enabling for some and perhaps harmful for others. Too often I find myself quick to focus on the “scholarly,” on writing something I think will be “appropriate” for Communication Education, and I fail to answer Sprague’s call; often, I overlook how teaching communication studies is a distinct area of study in its own right (and not simply something everyone does … so no one has to study it).

This distinction poses something of a dilemma for me: How do I define myself in this field? I suppose you could look to my C.V. (my curriculum vitae) to see how I label myself. And I suppose that’s a function of two considerations: (1) the effects I think that label will have on the reader, and (2) whether or how I want to foreground certain intellectual and political commitments. For a long time, I labeled myself as part of “pedagogical studies,” a suggestion from my adviser. At first, I liked how that sidestepped the question of communication education or instructional communication; I made the case that I was concerned with how scholars, in a variety of disciplines, study pedagogy. But the question of how this was communication nagged at me—why not study pedagogy in an education program?

* * *

I first proudly proclaimed I was an instructional communication scholar.

We’d stopped for a Coke at McDonald’s. For those of you who know a little about the Midwest, you know that one way to measure the size and stature of a town is to total up the number of McDonald’s restaurants it has; ours was a four-McDonald’s town, maybe 40,000 people soaking wet, during the school year when everyone’s absorbed in classes, eating cheeseburgers, whatever. It was my happy task, as a first year doctoral student, to give tours of the town to the two candidates for our “comm pedagogy” hire. And I was actually happy to give the tours, as it gave me some insight into the process I’d have to pursue myself in a few years.

I’m chauffeuring my first candidate, West Virginia, today, showing her where the faculty live in town, where the students live, what the rec center is like. Most of the day has been pleasant, and she’s warmed up enough to talk with me about my studies. She’s surprised I don’t yet know what I want to do for my dissertation. And it’s true, at the end of my first year, I don’t know. I do know I don’t want to write about “at-risk students,” and at this point in my studies, I’m just beginning to strategize as to how I’ll work with critical theory. West Virginia asks me what classes I’m taking—an innocent enough question. “Focus Group Methodology, Ethnomethodology, Special Student Populations, and Contrasting Educational Philosophies.” And that’s when she asks—judges—challenges—“Philosophy? What’s that got to do with instructional comm?”

It’s not that I don’t understand her question. West Virginia has had a very prestigious preparation for her work in instructional communication, including completing a prescribed series of courses in statistical methods and programmatic research. I was supposed to take Inferential Statistics, but was allowed to substitute with a course of my choosing (I chose Performance as Methodology). What I didn’t understand was how I was supposed to turn off the Dewey, and Counts, and Freire, and McLaren, and Apple, and Giroux, and all the other educational philosophers who had already shaped my thinking. What I didn’t understand was how philosophy wasn’t a foundation for the study of instructional communication … or really any kind of communication….

* * *

So, I tried on the mantle of “communication education.”

“But you’re not just comm ed—you do other things too!” My performance studies colleagues, all well meaning, are quick to convince me that I am a performance studies scholar too; their comments suggest that if I would only stop dragging my feet and play along, I would be one of them. Perhaps that’s true; perhaps I spend far too much time thinking about what I don’t know, what I can’t do, what I’d still need to read, say, publish in order to fit in with them. But they’re my friends, and it’s nice to be wanted … and I’d like to believe that if I were to publish in Text and Performance Quarterly, they would take it as an opportunity to say “See? We told you so!”

“But you’re not just comm ed—you do other things too?” Prospective tenure track hires in my department always seem to come to a crux in our conversations: Either they grant that I’m the “comm ed” person—that one member of the faculty who supervises TAs and asks questions about assessment and publishes exclusively about those endeavors—or they probe for my “real” interest, the motivation that moves me to write while I’m working at my day job of preparing future teachers, biding my time as a “basic course director” until I can have the luxury of tenure and (relatively) uninterrupted time to pursue other, certainly grander questions (perhaps about Buber or Butler or de Certeau or Foucault …).

It’s the “just” that interests me, a just that implies “those that can, do [certain kinds of research] and those that can’t, teach [and teach and teach].” A just that suggests one cannot specialize in pedagogy, that a scholar concerned with pedagogy is, by nature, a generalist (and that being a generalist is somehow less scholarly). A just that suggests pedagogy is not, in itself, research, but rather a synthesis of research, a sharing of what others have done. As someone who refuses to accept that a classroom is “just” a classroom, that what we do there as teachers and students has little to do with the “real world,” I cannot accept that pedagogy is “just” conveyance, transmission. If pedagogy is, in the Freirean sense, a process of knowledge construction (or, as Lather, 1991, suggests, a process of working together to create generative, transformative spaces), then the classroom is a site of theorizing, of (re)constituting social, cultural and economic relationships. Pedagogy is research.

* * *

Frustrated, I turned away from labels that didn’t quite fit. To call myself instructional communication meant that I would be othered or marginalized by my peers who do similarly termed research. To call myself communication education would mean I would be perceived by my colleagues in other areas of the discipline as having no research focus, as having nothing other than the classroom, as though that weren’t a rich enough area of study, replete with cultures, identities, politics, power, pain, and pleasure.

This is to say that the policing of the boundaries between paradigmatic perspectives isn’t obvious, isn’t a matter of barbwire and unambiguous signs. It’s the reactions of a more senior scholar at dinner, or over Cokes at the local McDonald’s, or in a letter regarding your latest submission. As Kuhn (1996) taught us, the nature of a discipline is to evolve slowly and socially, not in terms of radical, earth-shattering breakthroughs. Our field grows in terms of who speaks with whom, who can say what and when, and what sense people make of transgressions. And so, policing the boundaries is equally subtle, a matter of asking the well-placed question, of justifying the grade just so, or of whom the editor chooses to review a given manuscript.

* * *

The field came together for me in an instant, sitting with my cat in the midst of stacks and stacks of paper in my cluttered “office,” late in the process of writing my dissertation. I could only draw from critical pedagogy work in as much as I could justify it as communication studies scholarship (and not some other field, say, educational foundations). I was writing a dissertation I’d avoided, a dissertation I didn’t especially want to write. Early on in my graduate coursework, I took a class on the communication needs of students at risk, a class that exposed me to the vein of scholarship that purports to address these needs, scholarship that casts students as deeply flawed (and, at times, as cancerous or as educational Typhoid Marys). I felt very passionately about challenging this work, making it the focus of a number of conference papers, classroom presentations, and the like, and it wasn’t long before my peers started asking me questions like “So, are you writing an at-risk dissertation?” Already interested in language, and especially metaphor, I bristled at the idea of writing a dissertation that would continue to uphold, however well intentioned or unreflectively, a deficit or “at-risk” model of student failure.

I pored over issue after issue of Communication Education (before the dawn of sophisticated Internet search engines and our national organization’s electronic archive), looking for anything that might help me—pieces on power, which would turn out to be elaborate considerations of behavioral alteration techniques and methods (BATs and BAMs), pieces on culture, which would reveal whether communication apprehension transcended cultural and/or national boundaries—anything that would officially sanction my interest in critical pedagogy so I could keep broad swaths of my idea. Jo Sprague’s (1992) essay “Expanding the Research Agenda for Instructional Communication: Raising Some Unasked Questions” appeared to me, as if in a vision, from the unlikeliest of places: a pile of articles in the corner of my then still-prelim-ravaged office. Maybe a year before, one of my professors had passed along a copy to me, saying that Sprague’s work would be key; at the time, I couldn’t believe that would be so. Nothing in my field looked like anything I wanted to do; remember, I was reading Dewey and Freire, metaphorically resting my feet on the stacks of Communication Education I didn’t think had anything to offer me. It’s worth noting that there’s so much to be found between the covers of that journal, if only you know how to look, how to recognize what you’re seeing.

Sprague’s work—I quickly read every article I could find—brought our discipline’s efforts at understanding communication in the classroom into sharp focus for me. Today, when I teach graduate students how to understand the paradigmatic strands of communication education and instructional communication research, I ask them to read Sprague (first 2002, and then 1993 and 1992). And, when I want to help them understand the roots of critical communication pedagogy—where outside scholarship infiltrates and is made meaningful in communication scholarship—I still ask them to read Sprague (1992, 1994). In her work in the early 1990s, Sprague offers us a useful distinction for understanding classroom-oriented work in communication studies: (1) Communication education explores how best to teach communication by considering questions like what is disciplinarily specific about communication instruction that, by necessity, sets it apart from science instruction or art instruction. (2) Instructional communication is the study of communication as it plays out in a variety of instructional contexts, from the one-to-one tutoring session to the training and development seminar to the kindergarten classro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Stolen Moments in Critical Pedagogy and Communication
• Interlude: How to Read This Book (or, My Dad Read This Book)
• Chapter 1. Critical Communication Pedagogy: Shifting Paradigms
• Chapter 2. Naming a Critical Communication Pedagogy
• Chapter 3. Critical Communication Pedagogy in the Classroom
• Chapter 4. Writing, Researching, and Living: Critical Communication Pedagogy as Reflexivity
• Chapter 5. Compromise and Commitment: Critical Communication Pedagogy as Praxis
• Chapter 6. Nurturing Tension: Sustaining Hopeful Critical Communication Pedagogy
• Conclusion: Grappling With Contradictions
• Appendix
• References
• Index
• About the Authors