The primary goal is your personal and professional growth, so there will be opportunities to tailor course experiences, activities, and projects to your personal interests.  Whatever interests and goals you pursue after this course, your enhanced communication skills will help you achieve academic, professional and personal success.

“Awareness is the essence of intelligence”

– John Dewey

Underlying Assumptions

The proposition that “People cannot NOT communicate” grounds this course.  The  issue, therefore,  involves whether we communicate mindfully and skillfully with awareness of and attention to the wide variety of issues, purposes, audiences, contexts, mediums, and methods we encounter in our personal, social and professional journeys.  Humans seek and create meaning; the communication technologies, methods, and strategies we use have many nuances with significant impacts on how we experience and convey meaning.

     A parallel proposition is that communication is imprecise and fluid.  Technologies, methods, and strategies constantly evolve in ways that the products of communication can never can be exhaustively defined or fully understood.  We must approach communication with a sense of humility and humor, knowing that our processes and products will have lives of their own and can yield ever-changing interpretations.

     Does this mean that we throw our hands up in despair and give up trying to communicate effectively and clearly?  NOT AT ALL!!  As humans there is something intrinsic in each of us that leads us to seek connection – to commune – with one another through sharing what we are experiencing and learning during our life journeys.

Purposes, Goals & Methods

Individually and together we can become more aware, mindful and skillful as communicators, and thus experience success and satisfaction about our efforts to connect, share, and learn through communication.

     During this course we will work, tinker, and play with the various modes of communication (visual, written, oral, and multimodal) to:

•Analyze communication through the concepts of stasis, context, purpose and audience.

•Develop our rhetorical skills to examine how communication relies upon various combinations of reason and logic (logos), appeals to emotion (pathos), and the credibility of the communicator (ethos).

•Become more effective in how we conceptualize and compose our communications.

•Utilize group and individual communication experiments and assignments to move beyond merely analyzing the communication processes and products of others to ourselves practicing to become more rhetorically effective communicators.

•Become comfortable with and use the awareness that we can constantly improve our work through reflection and “re-visioning” – to see our communication practices with new eyes and in new ways.

Class Resources for UN2001