In the winter term of 2008, I taught a Gender, Communication, and Culture course. A common offering in communication departments, the course broadly addresses the influence of gender and communication on each other. Syllabi for classes on gender and communication note the importance of “understanding various perspectives of communication as they relate to the social construction of gender” (Blewett), refer to coverage of “the range of perspectives available on the relationship between gender and communication” ( Foss, 2009 ), and prioritize increased “aware[ness] of gender hierarchies” (Earnheardt, “Gender Communication Syllabus”). Ideally, in such courses, students will learn to better understand...

On 15 February 2012, I attended the first annual Indigeneity Lecture sponsored by the Centre for Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University in Toronto. Taiaiake Alfred, a professor of Indigenous Governance and Political Science at the University of Victoria, spoke about the construction of Indigeneity in Canada, and he asserted that “who we are in Canada today is still” grounded in colonial frameworks. Alfred focused on ongoing expressions of that colonialism, linking such expressions to the Indian Act, assimilation policies in Canada, and the 1969 White Paper, all government policies and practices that have made it impossible for Indigenous communities to...

In the fall of 2011, I was one of two respondents on a panel entitled “Speaking with the Voices of Marginalized Communities through Communication Activism Education: Exemplars in Experiential Service-Learning to Promote Social Justice” at the National Communication Association’s annual meeting. The organizers of the panel were at the time working on a book on communication activism pedagogy and service learning, for which I was writing a chapter. As in many disciplines, the presence of service-learning panels at the largest meeting of communication educators in North America has increased in the past decade, despite resistance to courses that integrate some...

It is the fall of 2003. I am in my second year as a faculty member at a public university in northeastern Indiana. I am teaching a course on intercultural communication for the second time. About 25 students are enrolled in the course, we meet three times a week, and it is a Friday, the end of the second week of the term. The students come from a variety of departments. Five African Americans are in the course. The rest of the students are white. The topic for this week has been history and intercultural communication. Students have read a...

About three years after the class meeting in which students disagreed about the death of Diallo and four white policemen’s use of 41 bullets, I was attending a conference at my institution which drew faculty members and administrators from across the region. At the time of the conference, as when I taught the course itself, I was an untenured faculty member at a university in northeastern Indiana. As the conference wrapped up, I found myself talking to the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at one of the participating institutions, a woman with whom I had spoken once or twice before...

In the Communication, Gender, and Culture course that I teach, I ask students on the first day of class what their expectations are for the course: “What do you want to know, or know better, in 12 weeks, at the end of the term, that you do not know now? Related to this course, what do you hope might be different for yourself in 12 weeks?” Many students state that they would like to better understand what “usual” behaviours are for men and for women. A woman might communicate that she wants “to be able to succeed in the workplace,...

In the winter of 2010, I taught a 400-level course on persuasion. Early in the semester, I asked the students how they understood the term “public good.” I am interested in students becoming familiar with constructions of and orientations towards a “we” that have connections with understandings of the “public good.” In the persuasion course, students are in many ways acquainted with the course topic and routinely active in processes of persuasion: they take in and adopt social norms, evaluate messages, and act to convince their peers. Particularly in a course on persuasion, an area of study with roots in...