COM 601 - Communication Fluency with Leanne Pupchek, Ph.D.
This introductory course explores students to communication as a discipline and begins the process of improving each student's communication literacy. Communication literacy is the ability to access information, analyze and evaluate messages and texts, create context, reflect on social and ethical considerations, and engage in the community across paradigms or knowledge from a communication perspective as well as essential communication theory. The course demonstrates how to develop original inquiry into a communication topic. Students will identify and articulate a communication problem, strategy, or initiative to be analyzed and evaluated, aggregate and apply credible research, and compose and support arguments using a theoretical framework. In addition, students will begin to create and evaluate content on a digital platform related to a specific communication initiative and audience using an appropriate citation style. Students completing the course will walk away with skills to succeed in the program; how to locate credible research, analyze and evaluate a variety of texts, ask good questions, create content on digital platforms, and generally participate in the conversation with the communication discipline.
COM 610 - The Social Creation of Organizing with Kim Weller, Ph.D.
This course demonstrates the ways social interaction shapes and is shaped by organizing processes. Students will see how communication becomes the means by which we come to make sense of organizational life and develop strategies, structures, and practices, for coordinating action and meeting goals. Students explore how contemporary organizations transform individuals participating in society by examining essential topics such as identity construction, motives, motivation, effectiveness, socialization, leadership, and career. Forms of analysis include organizational values, narratives, artifacts, messages, practices, and structures.
COM 613 - Constructing Messages and Audiences with Carole Isom-Barnes, Ph.D.
This course explores ways by which we construct and disseminate messages to a variety of audiences for a variety of purposes, including to lead, motivate, persuade, inform and advocate. Whether targeting consumers, employees, media professionals, investors, friends, family, or like-minded individuals, students will learn effective tools for creating messages that advance goals, and build and engage community. Students will explore how best to analyze audiences, craft messages, design information, choose among communication media, shape user experience, and evaluate success. The course gives attention to how digital technology impacts effective communication including how to best consume, filter, create, and critically analyze messages. Students also explore the implications of evolving communication channels on society, especially with regard to opportunities for conversation, engagement, advocacy, and experimentation.
COM 616 - Communicating Mindfully with Carole Isom-Barnes, Ph.D.
This course examines communication ethics in individual, organizational, and societal contexts. Students will learn theoretical and practical applications of communicating mindfully in a society where interactions and messages are complex, shifting, and often mediated. This course increases understanding of how critical self-awareness and empirical intelligence contribute to communicating consciously and productively. Dialogue, narrative, reflection, and identification are explored as tools for ethical communication in a rapidly changing world.
COM 629 - Leadership, Empowerment, and the Management of Meaning with Carole Isom-Barnes, Ph.D.
Surveys the essential relationship between leadership and communication. Examining leadership from a communication perspective, this course focuses on leadership as meaning management; namely how to create, frame, and communicate one's own "realities" to others. Moreover, this course examines leadership as encompassing symbolic acts of creation and interpretation by drawing on communication theories (i.e., social construction of reality and coordinated management of meaning) that illustrate the symbolic capacities, limitations, and ethics of meaning making. Finally, the course focuses on practicing the skills of meaning making as it pertains to creating, using, interpreting, and critically evaluating moments of leadership in "everyday" acts of communication.
COM 655 - Mediated Self and Changing Relationships with Zachary White, Ph.D.
This class investigates how specific digital and mediated platforms affect our understanding of essential interpersonal constructs such as relationship development and engagement, image management, the inevitable dialectical tensions of work-life balance, and the challenges and opportunities of creating private and public identities in a mediated landscape. In this class, students will study issues of identity by addressing how we compose our multiple and sometimes conflicting digital and media selves and how the presentation of our “work” self affects conceptions of our “private” self. Additionally, this class seeks to address these essential questions by exploring the creation, development and negotiation of our multiple selves (i.e., identities) across a multitude of digital platforms, including online social support.
COM 662 - Mediated Construction of Life Cycles with Zachary White, Ph.D.
The goal of this course is to help students become better critical "readers" (i.e., consumers) of mediated texts by employing a variety of techniques of critical and cultural analysis. Much of what we know and understand about our work is symbolically represented in mediated tests. This class explores mediated constructions of critical life experiences (e.g., work-related milestones such as hiring, promotion, unemployment, and retirement, health diagnoses, birth, dying and death, relationship milestones) to highlight how and in what ways these mediated life experiences shape our conception of what is good, bad, desirable, and undesirable.
COM 664 - Expanding Communication Boundaries with Carole Isom-Barnes, Ph.D.
This course explores the way organizations today craft and communicate an authentic brand identity. As the marketplace has changed, organizations have had to finds ways to differentiate to remain relevant and competitive. Connecting with stakeholders via a clear and consistent identity that aligns with organizational values and mission can increase profits as well as customer and employee loyalty.
This course highlights the most effective ways to craft brand identity through authentic strategic messages and visual presentation disseminated through traditional and mediated platforms. Students will also investigate how social networks have changed efforts to craft organizational identity and brand, as well as ways employees’ personal identity are ultimately interdependent with organizational identity.
COM 668 - Conflict Management with Janet McPherson, Ph.D.
This course seeks to investigate how conflict happens and how we can most effectively mange the conflict in our relationships, groups, and organizations. The course will provide students with a theoretical overview of the topic, opportunities for personal reflection and discussion, and case study analysis as well as a number of experiential learning opportunities. At the conclusion of the course, students will have acquired the background and practical skills necessary to recognize and assess a conflict. In addition, students will be able to utilize a variety of tools and strategies to manage conflict effectively and efficiently.
COM 668 - Health Literacies in Digital with Zachary White, Ph.D.
This course examines digital and mediated health information, messages, and programming (e.g., social support platforms, patient-provider applications, etc.). Students will explore relevant communication theory and competencies to better understand how people interpret and use digital and mediated health material in the 21st century. Additionally, this course will address health literacy strategies and challenges experienced by health providers, patients, and caregivers.
COM 680 - Expanding Communication Boundaries with Carole Isom-Barnes, Ph.D.
This course kicks off a year-long process during which students reflect and integrate program learning into an articulated specialty area. First, students will reflects on the knowledge and skills gained from the program by creating a digital portfolio that showcases course projects and articulates key learning and personal and professional goals. Then, in a comprehensive exam, students will demonstrate competency and confidence in composing specific arguments related to a communication topic that solves a specific problem or meets a specific need. Finally, students will begin to integrate learning with personal interests and passions by creating a proposal for an original communication inquiry project that expands existing communication boundaries. The project will be completed in COM 681.
COM 681 - Launching Passion into Practice with Carole Isom-Barnes, Ph.D and Zachary White, Ph.D.
In this course, students complete the communication inquiry project proposed and approved in COM 680. Students will continue to harness their curiosity, program learning, and passion to create an original project related to a specific communication topic. Students will aggregate theoretical, research, and digital and media literacies with new ways of thinking to develop an innovative project that showcases their mastery of a particular area of communication.