This teaching activity builds students' interpersonal competencies in identifying Mark Knapp's Stages of Relationships (Adler, Rosenfeld, Towne, & Scott, 2012, Interplay: The process of interpersonal communication, p. 504, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). The activity establishes a theoretical understanding of each stage and asks students to use…

Courses: Interpersonal Communication; Relational Communication. Objectives: Students who complete this activity should be able to: (1) understand the staircase model of relationships; (2) explain how social media has influenced the ways in which relationships develop and dissolve; (3) discuss advantages and limitations of the staircase model; and…

As noted by Proctor (1999), "a quick perusal of communication textbooks, instructors manuals, and conference papers suggests that film use is common in contemporary communication courses." One reason the use of film is popular is that it can engage students in higher learning processes such as applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating…

Microblogs, with their interactive nature, can engage students in community building and sensemaking. Using Weick's model of organizing as a framework, we integrated the use of micromessaging to increase student engagement in the large-lecture classroom. Students asked significantly more questions and asked a greater diversity of questions…

Although directly related to students' everyday lives, the abstract and even intimidating nature of relational theories often bars students from recognizing the immediate relevance to their relationships. The theories of symbolic interactionism, social exchange, relational dialectics, social penetration, and uncertainty reduction offer students…

Courses: Communication and civic participation course; rhetorical theory, political communication, leadership. Objective: Students will explore citizenship through role models and story-telling. (Contains 1 table.)

Long before the first day of class, students have preconceived notions about what a communication research methods class will consist of: mathematics, incomprehensible topics, boring content, and overall agony. These notions automatically make a research methods instructors' job quite difficult (Denham, 1997). Not only do they have to explain…

One of the goals for an undergraduate Communication Research Methods class is that students be able to read quantitative communication research from scholarly journals, identify the variables being studied, and understand the methodology employed. This sounds simple enough, but most students come into the class having never even seen a scholarly…

Students just starting out in communication, or those who have been studying it for a while, often have difficulty understanding the various ways to view "communication." One way to help students make sense of the field is to look at it from the various traditions in the discipline. Craig (1999) identified the similarities and differences among…

This article presents an activity that makes use of a questionnaire similar to a Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA) which elicit students' responses about their previous speaking experiences, their own definitions of anxiety and its causes, and their plans for future careers. This activity is aimed at helping students overcome…

Integrating "The West Wing" in public relations courses can effectively dramatize the concrete and abstract dimensions of public relations. In turn, students see public relations in action (albeit fictionally so) and learn much about it through structured lessons. From individual writing assignments about situations in "The West Wing," to the…