Teaching
TEACHING
Undergraduate Courses
CMN 396: Communication for Caregiving
Empathy is key to effective communication and connecting with others. This class will explore this axiom with a focus on the skills central to the healing arts. We will tackle questions like:
How can I apply the skills of helping others to have better conversations at home, at work, and in the public sphere?
How do I become a better listener?
How do I ask more effective questions?
How can I deploy technology to augment my capacity for empathy and caregiving?
Is it possible to future proof a career?
How do I learn the improvisational skills needed to put evidence-based recommendations for communication into practice?
Note: The hybrid portion of the course is asynchronous, meaning that you will complete activities and reflection assignments between face-to-face meetings, but the timing will be at your discretion. In other words, the class does not meet online at a set time on Fridays. Instead, the hybrid portion of the course is self-directed and self-paced with milestones throughout the semester.
CMN 396: Crowds, Clouds, and Community
This course explores the use of social network theory and analysis to understand the connectivity and complexity of teams, families, organizations, and communities. We will study the formation of systems of interaction broadly conceived. We will consider examples of network analytic approaches to theorize, visualize, analyze, and understand, for example, criminal networks, professional service firms, government contracting, social media platforms, virtual worlds, interorganizational dynamics, post disaster recovery, and ad hoc organizational forms. We will practice making data-based arguments drawing on analyses completed using R (e.g., the igraph and sna packages).
Note: The hybrid portion of the course is asynchronous, meaning that you will watch screencasts and complete assignments between face-to-face meetings, but the timing will be at your discretion. In other words, the class does not meet online at a set time on Fridays. Instead, the hybrid portion of the course is self-directed and self-paced with milestones throughout the semester.
Graduate Courses
Engaged Communication Scholarship
This course will explore the theories and methods helpful for engaged research. Topics include (a) practical theory such as action research, communication design, grounded practical theory; (b) organizational change including work on organization communication management, social justice, and technology implementation; and (c) research methods common to consulting, program evaluation, and engaged scholarship such as ethnographic interviewing, survey design, organizational shadowing, natural experiments, and case studies. The course will focus in particular on the practical problems and ethical dilemmas associated with doing research with collaborators including negotiating access, co-designing research projects, co-producing research findings, and designing findings workshops. We will explore these topics with an eye toward orthodox academic careers as well as the paths of aspiring consultants, market and organizational development researchers, technology change managers, data scientists, government and think tank researchers, and pracademics of all sorts.
MacroMorphic Communication
The course will explore theory and research related to macro-level organizational communication phenomena and the expression of macro-level forces in organizational microprocesses (i.e., macromorphic). Topics include organizational rhetoric, interorganizational relationships, diffusion of organizational innovations, and institutional theory of organizational communication (e.g., institutional messages, institutional work, institutional entrepreneurship). The course will consist of three subsections: interorganizational communication, macromorphic organizational communication, and the organization as the producer of communication.