Teaching First-Year Communication Courses: Paradigms and Innovations

In this book, eleven teacher-scholars of communication provide a robust study of the challenges and opportunities facing those who teach first-year communication courses. The first half of the volume offers paradigmatic analyses, including a survey of the ecology of the first-year course, a plea to integrate our first-year courses into our research agendas, a study of the gap between scholarship and pedagogy within rhetoric, a proposal for seven core competencies to unify the various first-year communication courses, and an argument for a critical communication paradigm. The second half details innovations in classroom practice, such as the teaching techniques of social justice pedagogues, team-based learning as a model for the public speaking course, response and feedback techniques in teaching public speaking at the University of Copenhagen, teaching online speech as a new course focused on the unique challenges of digital communication, and the role of oral interpretation and performance classes in the first-year curriculum. Finally, this volume concludes with the editor’s manifesto for teaching public speaking. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Review of Communication.