APPENDIX
Notes on Teaching

There are at least three approaches to teaching communication theory. Perhaps the most common is to organize a course around different subfields or traditions. Robert Craig and Heidi Muller provide the best model of this approach in Theorizing Communication, a book I have often used, but with certain reservations. The subfield-based approach is paradoxical: what starts out as a descriptive model of theory ends up becoming a prescriptive model for theory, to borrow a distinction from James Carey.¹ Less abstractly, Craig and Muller begin by describing communication theory as its practitioners have developed it. They argue that the subfields they identify are those that theorists themselves have created. But by dividing communication into subfields, they simultaneously create a set of templates for how to do theoretical inquiry, which professors reproduce when they organize a class along subfield lines. Professors run the risk of taking their object of study—theory—for granted, when instead they should be asking students to approach it critically. For that reason I tell my students, if you’re going to take a subfield-oriented approach, their book is the best you’ll find, but you need to examine their premise with a healthy skepticism.

A second approach is historical, exemplified by John Durham Peters’s Speaking into the Air or Armand Mattelart’s L’invention de la communication. It consists in reading what people have had to say about communication, starting perhaps with Plato’s Gorgias or Phaedrus, followed by Aristotle’s Rhetoric, then working through the present day. The problem with this approach, however, is that it requires a familiarity with communication theory from the outset, something third-year undergraduates enrolled in a survey course typically don’t have. I have taken this approach at the graduate level, however.

Finally, the third approach is the one I adopt here. It consists in asking what we mean by the word theory and the competing ideas it evokes. My goal is to equip students to read the types of arguments they would encounter in a class that adopted either of the other two approaches. I want them to see that theorists respond to and argue with each other about the nature of the phenomena they set themselves the task of describing.

I structure the course as a reconstructed conversation about a series of questions, some abstract, some more concrete, that communication theorists have asked. Each chapter of The Art of Communication in a Polarized World makes use of ideas others have developed, and I give students essays by those people first. In that way, the book chapter is a turn taken in this conversation, and the questions I ask prompt students to take their turn, too.

Engaging Students in the Conversation About Theory

I have adopted two strategies for engaging students in the conversation about theory. First, at the end of each lesson, I ask open-ended questions to provoke discussion. The questions change depending on the students’ interests and proclivity for talking, but they usually focus attention on a concrete object.² Their purpose is twofold. For one thing, they ground students’ reading in the here-and-now, not in some abstract world where academic ideas often seem to live. For another, they bridge the gap between chapters by priming students to think about the themes in the chapter that follows. In this way, if I’m successful, the questions draw students into the conversation I’ve manufactured and give them a way of jumping into the practice of theory.

The second strategy has been to incorporate creative works, such as novels, television, and poetry. These works serve three purposes. First, they demonstrate different ways to ask questions about communication (and translation). I want to claim a place for the humanities in conversations about communication theory, which has its roots in philosophy, as the references to Plato and Aristotle make clear. I emphasize communication’s long history in humanistic thought, not to the exclusion of the social sciences, but instead as their conceptual foundation.³ Second, creative works invite students to explore the world from other perspectives. As Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, “Conversations across boundaries of identity—whether national, religious, or something else—begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own.”⁴ Finally, they’re fun. They engage students. A cynic might accuse me of pandering, but I’m not. We need to take students seriously. Consequently, we need to recognize the importance of speaking to them about things that matter to them. Not every creative work will appeal to every student, to be sure, but I try to incorporate a wide enough variety that students will find something that speaks to them. Theory, I insist, is meaningful only if it explains things that matter.

Syllabus

I am including below the essentials of the syllabus I have followed when using The Art of Communication in a Polarized World to teach my third-year undergraduate course. The syllabus evolves each semester and will no doubt change the next time I teach the course.

ADVANCED THEORIES IN COMMUNICATION

Rationale and Objectives

Communication theory is nothing more than an attempt to explain what communication is. Sometimes we ask broadly about exchange, transmission, and ritual. Sometimes we ask narrowly about how what we share in specific situations affects the people we share it with. But in all cases, that explanation is our goal.

In this course, we will explore communication theory by reading answers people have given to a series of questions that start broadly: What is theory? What is communication? How does speech shape thought? Then the questions narrow down: How do we change people’s minds? How can we be confident in what we read? The readings recreate a conversation of sorts, as people respond to each other and develop their ideas. This conversation leads to our final question, namely, What does it mean to do theory? How do we participate in this conversation?

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

• identify and explain conflicting ways people have answered questions about communication;
• find and use evidence to answer questions about communication; and
• investigate communication in new ways by generating new questions.

Required Reading

The Art of Communication in a Polarized World

Individual articles as listed in the reading schedule⁵

Reading Schedule

1 James Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” 25.

2 To discuss solipsism, for instance, the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero” has prompted rather heated discussions about the nature of reality and our ability to know it through our senses.

3 Although social scientists might not recognize the humanistic roots of their work, without the humanities, it could not exist. Methods textbooks, for instance, are built on a foundation of epistemology and rhetoric, manifest (among other places) in their discussions of what claims can be made and supported or how they might be most persuasively presented.

4 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, 85.

5 Full citations for the readings are in the bibliography.