Relational maintenance is a universal aspect of human relationships. As such, our family and interpersonal communication texts often include relational maintenance as a key point of discussion. Communication scholars also continue to demonstrate how understanding and incorporating positive relational maintenance behaviors is beneficial to our…

Courses Leadership, Strategic Communication, and courses within communication that include a complex group assignment. Objectives The Zombie Apocalypse (ZA) learning activity is part of a second-year course in an international master's program. The course introduces students to key concepts in strategic communication and leadership and encourages…

Design thinking, broadly understood as an organizational and entrepreneurial process aimed at innovative problem solving, has been productively incorporated by scholar-teachers in rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication. Business communication offers similar opportunities. After briefly explaining design thinking and reviewing…

While a growing body of research examines teachers' facilitation of discourse-rich classrooms, surprisingly little research is devoted to learners' responsibilities in such classrooms. In this paper, we share a theoretical model for explaining students' responsibilities in yielding mathematical learning in discourse-rich classrooms. These…

Agile, Lean, and Scrum (collectively referred to as Agile) are frameworks that help teams collaborate more effectively and transparently on complex projects. Originally developed in business and information technology, these methods have since been adapted for use in a variety of disciplines. Agile is based on iterative and incremental…

The thought of group work, or CLC Groups often strikes fear and loathing in the hearts and minds of both students and instructors. According to Swan, Shen, and Hiltz (2006) collaborative work presents the possibilities of many difficulties including a largely unequal contribution of group participants, an inability of the students to manage the…

Quiet students are sometimes misunderstood in the college classroom. Students may be quiet for reasons related to personality traits, learned behaviors, or situational factors, but regardless, their silences may be misinterpreted by their instructors as a lack of engagement in their courses. In fact, quiet students are often very engaged in the…

In response to Europe's societal challenges, such as current issues about migration, the Institute of Music Education at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz established Meet4Music (M4M), a low-threshold community music project. M4M is open to individuals from all sociocultural and musical backgrounds and ages, and provides them with…

Keith Sawyer views the spontaneous collaboration of group creativity and improvisation actions as "group flow," which organizations can use to function at optimum levels. Sawyer establishes ideal conditions for group flow: group goals, close listening, complete concentration, being in control, blending egos, equal participation, knowing…

Cell phone use is evident in society. Individuals have cell phone conversations while waiting in line at the grocery store, glance at their cell phones during meetings, check Facebook while having dinner with friends, have a meaningful phone conversation with a parent, and even text while sitting in church service. This assignment provides…

Examples of the use of various kinds of mobile information technology are explained for use in the classroom or laboratory. Individual or group work can make use of such devices, avoiding the need to move the class to a computer room or wait for a turn to use a computer in the laboratory. Many different applications are available. This article…

What is realia and theory-building? Tim Kinard and Jesse Gainer explain that when students explore using "realia," they are not just being exposed to abstract concepts or text on a page, they are using "real-life" objects to build understandings of the natural world while they builds vocabulary about it. Handling and discussing…

Writing has an important role in science education and practice. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary collaboration between English rhetoric studies and biology, seemingly disparate disciplines, we describe a model for a scientific writing and communication course. The goals of the course were to prepare students for science-oriented careers, as well…

In this article, an educational project is described that was formulated with the aim to give master's students in business communication the opportunity to experience how theory could be applied to shape practice. A 4-week project was developed in which students were urged to use communication theory and linguistic theory to manage the…

This article describes an activity in which teachers and students use music in the form of a "Mix-tape" to relate communication theory to students' lived experiences. When students identify and use their own familiar popular culture texts to explain concepts and identify relationships, they do so in ways that the course textbook cannot. This…