SMC Core Curriculum Course Proposal Form
Fall 2014
Electronically submit this course form and attachments to the Chair of the CCC by
October 1. Please submit a separate proposal for each desired learning goal.
1. Name of Proposer: Aaron Sachs
2. Email address: ads3@stmarys-ca.edu
3. Department/Program of Proposer: Communication
4. Name of Department/Program housing the course: Communication
5. Name(s) of Program Director/Department Chair housing the course: Dan
Leopard
6. Course Acronym, Number and Title: Communication 03: Communication Inquiry
7. Proposal is for All Sections of the course: _All_
Proposal is for instructor’s section(s) (Engaging the World only): _____
8. Course Prerequisites (if any): none
9. Unit Value of Course: 1
10. Mark with an X the Learning Goal for which the course is being proposed.
(Please submit a separate proposal for each desired goal.)
Pathways to Knowledge (at most one)
Artistic Understanding – Artistic Analysis only: ____
Artistic Understanding – Creative Practice only: ____
Artistic Understanding – Both Artistic Analysis and Creative Practice: ____
Mathematical Understanding: ____
Scientific Understanding: ____
Social, Historical, Cultural Understanding: ____
Christian Foundations: ____
Theological Explorations: ____
Engaging the World (as appropriate, generally zero to two)
American Diversity: _X__
Common Good: ____
Community Engagement: ____
Global Perspectives: ____
11. Expected Attachments:
a) Syllabus: Current course syllabus, expected to contain a course description
and learning outcomes. The course’s learning outcomes must include
coverage of the Learning Outcomes associated with the Core Curriculum
Learning Goal for which the course is being proposed.
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b) Teaching and Learning: A narrative that explains how the course will guide
students toward achieving each Learning Outcome and how coursework
(e.g., papers, exams, videotaped presentations) will be used to measure
student achievement of each Learning Outcome. Please address the outcomes
directly and one by one.
Additional Guidelines:
a) While courses and individual sections within courses may vary, the Core should
provide relatively consistent experiences. Thus our expectation is that each
section of a Pathway to Knowledge course will satisfy all the corresponding
learning outcomes. We also expect that the features of any syllabus submitted
are sufficiently generic to faithfully represent all sections of the course. The CCC
relies on department chairs and program directors to oversee a reasonable
degree of uniformity in how its courses address the learning outcomes.
b) We encourage departments and programs to develop courses so that an
Engaging the World goal can apply to all sections (in which case we will expect a
representative syllabus). We also welcome proposals from individual
instructors.
c) Any course approved for the Core must provide data for the assessment of Core
Curriculum learning goals at an institutional level. Via this proposal a
chair/program director agrees to oversee the submission of the student work
necessary for the assessment of the learning goals, and that his/her instructors
of Core courses will participate in assessment exercises, if asked. Similarly, if the
proposal is from an instructor, that individual agrees to oversee submission of
work from appropriate sections of their course.
d) (Legal and Logistical Workshop) Each instructor of a Community Engagement
(CE) course must participate in a workshop each year before the course is
taught. This workshop will outline the logistical and pedagogical support the
College will be providing to CE courses, as well as provide updates on any legal
or regulatory requirements of community-involved courses. At the workshops,
instructors will be provided information about legal and logistical paperwork
that must be completed by stated deadlines in order to ensure that each CE
course / experience can run safely and effectively.
e) (Pedagogical Workshops) Each instructor of a Community Engagement (CE)
course is required to have training in the pedagogy of Community Engagement.
Faculty who have studied the pedagogy of CE or taught such courses in the past
are invited to submit those experiences to the Community Engagement Working
Group as evidence of qualification. For faculty without previous CE experience
or training, CILSA provides regular workshops each semester that will assist the
instructor in integrating the community engagement learning outcomes into
their course. (These workshops are also available for faculty who wish a
refresher.)
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f) Faculty interested in determining whether a more permanent Engaging the
World designation is appropriate for their course may apply for a one-year
“provisional” designation. Please contact the chair of the CCC and/or chair of the
Working Group for details.
General
We regularly teach two to three sections of this course per semester.While the
department has made a commitment to having at least one tenure-track faculty
teach sections of this course per semester, we often have the majority of sections
covered by adjuncts or instructors due to the impaction of the major and our low
faculty numbers.The course is a foundational course for the Communication major,
and in the past served as a popular course of Business majors and others to fulfill
their Area A requirement.The course is thus designed to be taken by both majors
and non-majors as an introduction to the major terms, concepts, questions, and
research problems in the study of communication.
Regardless of who teaches Communication Inquiry, the department has normed the
course as part of its programmatic goals and thus the main components of the
course, including the learning goals, most of the key concepts, and the pedagogical
approach, are consistent across all sections.This makes it well suited for Core
Curriculum designation. While individual faculty may determine their readings, or
add their own terms to those listed on the attached sample syllabus, the overall
structure and style of the course remains the same.Further, upon designation by this
committee, the course will be reviewed each semester by the department chair to
ensure that it continues to meet the requirements of the core curriculum.
Teaching
This course fulfills learning outcome 1 through a focus on the way that identity and
culture affect human communication. The course is structured into four units:
Interpretation, Rhetoric, Identity, and Culture.Through these four units, the course
helps students learn the vocabulary and concepts needed to study
communication.We use the relationship between a sender, message, and receiver as
our basic starting point, and each unit then builds, revises, and recontextualizes
each prior unit, the terms we learned in it, and the working model of
communication. The last two units on identity and culture deal most explicitly with
issues of American Diversity (.5 credit worth of the course).In addressing diversity,
the last two units look not only at key concepts and terms within identity—such as
race, gender, class, and sexuality—and culture—colonialism, hegemony, subculture, power—but also at the way that communication is affected by identity and
culture.It is in this latter sense that the examination of diversity in the course is
placed within the larger context of the field of Communication, and what makes it
integral to the course as a whole; a full analysis of the sender, message, receiver
relationship requires that we think fully about the way that the identities of those
involved in communicating, as well as the larger cultural context in which that
communication is situated.
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To put it differently, while the last two units are primarily where the discussion of
diversity lives, the necessary components for that critical discussion are woven
throughout the whole course.For example, in the Interpretation unit, the readings
on “context” and “polysemy” rely on race and the “n-word” to explore how context
can change the interpretation of a word.One activity I have done to examine this is
to also study the different ways that “context” could change the way we might
interpret the phrase “You bitch, I can’t believe you did that.” While the discussion at
this point is about “context more generally, we note the way gender is a part of the
context that influences the meaning of the phrase, setting the stage for a more indepth conversation on gender (as well as race) later in the Identity unit. The
importance of examining diversity is also evidenced in the fifth course learning
outcome: “to become more attentive to the significance of factors such as race, class,
gender, nation, and sexual orientation on the ways in which we communicate.”While
the course is not limited to looking at these issues within the United States, readings
and class discussions focus the analysis of diversity on the American context in
which the College and students are situated.
This course also fulfills learning outcome 1 through the pedagogical approach to
examining the key terms, concepts, questions, and research problems in the field of
Communication.As noted above, student learning is focused around acquiring a
theoretical vocabulary that will help them analyze the relationship between a
sender, message, and receiver.They begin with readings covering the terms,
organized into units, and build on that understanding through seminar-style
discussions focused on interpreting, analyzing, and ultimately speaking persuasively
about the texts assigned for each day.Student read mostly primary sources—some
classic (for example on authorship, Postman on the News, Butler on the rhetorical
power of language, and Geertz on culture), and many current and emerging—as
examples of the contemporary discourse about these concepts.Like seminar, the
discussion about each text and term is thus less didactic than it is developmental; it
is meant to help students think critically, in the tradition of shared-inquiry, so that
they may come up with their own interpretations about, for example, the definition
of race versus ethnicity and how that functions to rearticulate inequality in the
United States.
With each new term, students also must return to the touchstone of sender,
message, and receiver to think about how that term modifies the understanding
they have about that communicative relationship. For example, in the Interpretation
unit, concepts focus on the ways that we derive meaning from texts.In the Rhetoric
unit, we begin to examine the way that senders embed arguments in texts, or the
ways that texts are persuasive.In the Identity unit, students layer on an examination
of the identity of sender and receiver(s), and the way that complicates how meaning
gets communicated through a text.Then in the Culture unit, we return to think about
the broader Cultural context in which people communicate, and examine how that
too influences this communicative process in multiple ways.Finally, students
synthesize all of their learning through a final project.It could take the form of
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recording their learning of these terms within their Theoretical Vocabulary
Resource Book, using it as a source for not only compiling uses of the term in the
course and the field of Communication, but also as a locus for reflecting more deeply
on the terms (in this way the TVRB is also a site for learning).For example, student
must reflect on the ways they have seen the terms used in class texts as well as how
they might be able to apply that term to their own lives outside of class. It is in this
final space that students discover the myriad threads that connect all of these terms
together, and thus the complicated ways they all influence communication. Students
might also write a final paper that asks them to similarly synthesize many of these
terms through researching an outside concept, or complete a comprehensive final
exam, or some combination of the above.In summary, as evidenced in the syllabus
by the explanation for attendance/discussion and the terms assigned for discussion
each day, as well as the final cumulative assignment, this course teaches students to
think critically about issues and concepts related to diversity so that they may make
their own analysis of how (and why) aspects of social diversity affects
communication in our society (the US).
As with the above, this course fulfills learning outcome 2 via the structure and
pedagogical approach of the course.Structurally, the same two units on identity and
culture help students critically approach how social categories and structures of
power may affect the human person. Both units focus on the ways that these social
categories may affect not only the human person, but also how that person
communicates and makes sense of the world through communication, again using
the sender, message, receiver relationship as a touchstone.In this sense, students
must address the value of diversity in terms of communication and the person
rather than leaving it as a neutral concept. Further, several of the key course
concepts explored in the course deal with social categories and power as they affect
people, including (but not limited to): representation, power, agency, identity, class,
race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, culture, ideology, hegemony, and
post/colonialism.Students are asked to understand these concepts, their utility
within the study of communication, how they shape the ways we communicate, and
how they might be used to make sense of the world and texts outside of class.This is
summed up in the fifth course learning outcome quoted above as well as the fourth
learning outcome: “Apply the knowledge acquired through reading and thinking
about the theories described above to texts outside of the classroom.”It is also
captured in the above description of the way students learn about each term,
starting with readings, then class discussion (shared-inquiry), revision of the
sender, message, and receiver relationship, and finally a capturing that learning in
the synthesis required in a cumulative assignment like the Theoretical Vocabulary
Resource Book, especially the elements of the TVRB that require students to apply
terms like race, hegemony, power, and gender outside of the classroom
(“Application”).
Learning
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Students will analyze aspects of social diversity in the US (LO1) and explain how
social categories and structures of power affect the human person (LO2) with the
assignments required in the course. While individual instructors may require
slightly different assignments in their sections, all instructors—under the
supervision of the department chair—will include two types of assignments, each of
which addresses the learning outcomes: unit projects and final projects.
Unit Projects: The first type of assignment is tied specifically to each of the four
units (Interpretation, Rhetoric, Culture, and Identity), asking students to examine
and reflect on, or even practice the human activities of interpretation, rhetoric,
culture, and identity. They do so with attention to and employment of the
theoretical readings in each of the four units, and projects may include interviewing
others for their interpretation of some artifact and/or writing up their own
interpretation, a rhetorical analysis paper or construction of a rhetoric artifact, an
autoethnographic articulation of identity paper, and creation of a cultural artifact or
analysis of one’s own/other’s culture in a paper.
Final Projects: The second type of assignment is a final substantive project that
requires students to employ key vocabulary terms/concepts in a way that
demonstrates their understanding, of those concepts, their ability to apply them
within a disciplinary context, and the connections between these concepts and
texts/experiences outside of the class. This final assignment could take the form of a
Theoretical Vocabulary Resource Book, as described above, or a final paper using
key terms and course texts to research a topic not directly covered by the course.
The attached syllabus offers examples of both types of assignment. Both types of
assignment fulfill each of the two learning goals and produce artifacts that can be
assessed.
Learning Outcome 1: The assignments tied to the two units on Identity and Culture
are especially focused on helping student analyze aspects of social diversity and
how they affect society in the United States of America by requiring that students
understand how identity and culture effect communication. These unit
assignments—as evidenced in the description in the sample syllabus—require
students to analyze aspects of social diversity in US by thinking about the identity
groups and cultures they belong to, and evaluating the way that these personal
aspects of social diversity affect society through communication. Similarly, in
requiring students to gain a theoretical fluency in a number of key course terms
about social diversity—including identity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and
sex—the cumulative assignments further help students analyze diversity in an
American context.The Theoretical Vocabulary Resource Book described above, a
frequently used final project, is also crucial to student learning on this outcome, and
offers an excellent opportunity to assess student learning around the terms,
reflections on the terms, and the importance of the terms in the field of
communication.
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Learning Outcome 2: Both the unit specific and final cumulative assignments help
students explain how social categories and structures of power may affect the
human person.The projects for the Identity and Culture units specifically require
students to analyze how these social categories of identity and cultural membership
have personally affected them in society. The final assignment further helps
students analyze the ways that social categories and power may affect the human
person through the lens of communication by requiring students to gain a
theoretical fluency in a number of key course terms linked to social categories and
power—including identity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, hegemony, culture,
ideology, agency, and power—and requiring that they apply these to contemporary
issues in both the study of communication and current American society (the
Theoretical Vocabulary Resource assignment in the sample syllabus is a good
example of this).
Both types of assignments fulfill learning outcome #5 on the syllabus, which is
consistent with both American Diversity core curriculum learning
outcomes.Further, both types of assignments will yield artifacts for ongoing learning
outcomes assessment as part of the core curriculum designation.
E-mail from Aaron Sachs re COMM 003
Aaron Sachs <ads3@stmarys-ca.edu>
To: Edith Songster <ees4@stmarys-ca.edu>
Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 2:37 PM
ElenaI understand why the committee might want some additional clarity and assurance and appreciate the
opportunity to assure the committee that Comm 3 does meet the requirements for American Diversity
Core Curriculum designation.
Though the designation is fulfilled in the reading and coursework and each faculty member can
customize the readings and coursework for their section, standardized course structures limit the
variability of the course and ensure that all sections meet the designation requirement. More
specifically, the norming that the department has done for the course--which I believe is in the syllabus
but may not be clear or have been lost in my probably overly long application--includes three
standardizing structural elements of the course that require instruction on issues of American
Diversity:
1) The fifth learning outcome for the course (on the syllabus) specifically locates the study of diversity
(articulated as the intersection of power, communication, and identity on the syllabus) within the U.S.
context. This is a standard learning outcome across sections, so all instructors are bound to structuring
their readings to help students meet this and all other learning outcomes for the course.
2) The four units of Interpretation, Rhetoric, Identity, and Culture are mandatory across all sections
3) The key terms that must be covered during the semester have also been normed. These help to
determine the subjects that readings must cover.
In other words, instructors have bounded and structured freedom to customize their course; different
instructors may chose different readings and discussion questions, but they must do so within a
standard framework of concepts, topics, and outcomes (including the American Diversity specific
learning outcome #5). These structures thus ensure that the readings will cover diversity and do so
within the American context across all sections of the course. Beyond that expectation, the department
chair will verify that the individual instructors for each section continue to teach to the learning
objectives of the class.
It's also worth adding that Communication is a U.S. centric field, and thus the vast majority of the
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work is already, by default, located within the American context or takes an American perspective.
Even if left to chance, and as I said above, it is not, the examination of diversity within
Communication would still be within the American context.
To that end, up to this point most of us teaching Comm 3 have been implicitly teaching this course in
ways that include American Diversity content, we have not made it an explicit requirement for all
instructors teaching the course. To be frank, there was no reason because the course has not been
designated as American Diversity yet! But if it is designated, then this will become an explicit
requirement, as reflected in these structural changes and the resulting requirements, and instructors will
be held accountable for meeting these requirements.
I hope this answers your questions sufficiently. Please let me know if it doesn't.
Cheers
-Aaron
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