This assignment described here serves as a meaningful way to engage students who are perhaps less involved in giving back to their own community (Galston, 2003). By engaging students in "pay it forward" experiences, this assignment can help foster a sense of active citizenship. Often political engagement is associated with acts related…

Guided by cultural identity theory (CIT), the authors offer the six-word memoir (6WM) as a storytelling vehicle to engage students in critical, reflexive (re)considerations of their cultural identities and positions. This activity's impetus is threefold. First, it recognizes the practical challenges of teaching and learning the important, yet…

As a central area of study within the discipline, theories of interpersonal communication are the bedrock of many introductory textbooks designed for use in undergraduate courses on communication and communication theory (Griffin, 2012; Littlejohn & Foss, 2010; Miller, 2004; West & Turner, 2010). Though undergraduate students are, of…

Fear of public speaking is the most common social fear experienced by the general population and can have far-reaching academic effects, including lower course grades and even an increased likelihood to drop out of college. The typical curricular approach to remediating public speaking fears in college students is to provide training in basic…

This study assesses an assignment for incorporating diversity into the principles of public relations course. The assignment is tailored to the challenges of using an active learning approach in a large lecture class. For the assignment, students write a goal, objectives, strategies, an identification of tactics, and evaluation plans for either…

This article presents a class activity where students work in dyads to select an artifact related to a course topic and, using this artifact, develop discussion questions to engage their classmates. This cultural artifact assignment is intended to, in part, answer John Dewey's call to cultivate connections between subject matter and life…

This article offers an activity which hopes to illustrate the variety of ways that the media are able to manipulate not just information but also societal understandings of critical issues and events and to connect disparate media and time periods via an activity extended over several weeks. The topic for which this series of activities was…