Gonzaga University- Communication Teaching and Pedagogy Portfolio COML 510 and 518 Spring 2022

What is Education and why bother? To think of education as knowing facts is to miss the point, education is the transformation of one’s life. Education, according to Dewey is a continual reconstruction of prior experiences as one gains additional context to those experiences. Education is not being certain of what one knows, but a continual process of inquiry; a willingness to examine one’s own beliefs and see the world from a new point of view. In her Ted Talk, Adichie speaks of the risks of a single story creating a reality that is at the heart of so much human suffering. Education is transformational because it reveals the world as multidimensional as each human being and beautiful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

         Education is an opportunity to acquire cultural capital for those who need it. I witnessed this occurrence in a classroom at Spokane Community College taught by Linda Seppa-Salisbury to people from all walks of life, first generation college students. The day I visited Seppa-Salisbury’s class the fire alarm went off and we evacuated the building. As we gathered in the HUB I spoke with a number of students that told me why they were taking her class on Interpersonal Communication. One young person told me that her father and mother had divorced. Her father was adamant that he never marry again. What she was learning about interpersonal communication was having an impact on how she viewed her upbringing and was crucial in her relationship with her boyfriend. They identified ways their communication styles challenged their relationship and how to best work together in their relationship to be understanding of one another. It speaks volumes that education is life changing in more than gaining knowledge.

         I believe that being a teacher is to be a dream-maker, an encourager, a believer. Teaching is sacred work and touches the heart, soul, and mind of students. Being a teacher requires courage and endurance. One of the reasons I want to be a teacher is that I love people. In my professional life I have been a teacher to many. As a network connectivity salesperson, it was teaching network professionals how and why of concurrent networking, as a mortgage loan originator teaching first-time home buyers how to be able to qualify, the reasons a mortgage is different than a car loan or credit card, and as a Realtor how to present themselves to sellers and buyers. The main thing I did was to connect, understand, and value each person.

         The best teachers see the soul of each student and recognize each student has their own story and know the danger of a single story. Every student faces their own circumstances unique to them, and as a teacher my goal is to connect with them where they are at, make the environment one where they feel accepted, and can believe where they can focus on learning because we have created a safe space for them.

Goals for Learning

Goals for student learning

Socrates said, let no day pass without discussing goodness, examining the self and others.  Life without this sort of examination is not worth living.

The goal of education is to examine life and all things in it. Socrates discusses with Diatoma in Symposium why people seek goodness and love, to which Socrates responds, “for happiness.” Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, the start of being educated in body, mind, and spirit.

                        The ultimate goal is happiness, and as Socrates finds out, happiness comes from pursuing goodness. Helping students examine themselves and ask, why do I want to communicate; how does communication help me pursue happiness?  Answering these questions begins with idea of the whole person and the dignity of each person, followed closely by serving others of the community, and as part of that community, to recognize the incredible diversity and cultural differences, and then to honor the diversity in thought and speech. In agreement and disagreement, to be respectful.

                        Dewey’s idea that education isn’t preparation for life, it is the goal and the process of life as experience is constantly reconstructed, being life itself resonates deeply with me. I hope to continue my own education alongside the students I teach. I love how Tara Westover says education is not so much a state of certainty, but a process of inquiry.

The goal of Interpersonal/Intercultural Communication is for students to recognize culture is a set of values, attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, and social rules governing the behavior of a group of people. It can be challenging when these differ from person to person. The starting point is to clearly understand oneself, how one processes what they learn about another person, develops relationships, and handles the stress of interacting with people with a different world view.

Enactment of goals

Teaching methods

            Foremost in my mind is education is to improve the student’s life and I am collaborating with them to fulfill this goal. I have always believed that a happy brain is a smart brain, it’s a matter of neuroscience that we learn when we are processing through the prefrontal cortex. When humans are stressed the logical part of the brain is hijacked by the amygdala which hinders the ability to think clearly, reflect, analyze, evaluate and create, the higher order of learning in Bloom’s Taxonomy.

                        A teacher led presentation to develop a conceptual understanding of communication, what influences the process of communicating with people from a different group. How one’s own reaction, such as anxiety, distraction, difficulty in understanding, effects the process of communication.

Using personality assessments, such as principlesyou.com to better understand themselves and to see how they differ from others. Exercises to communicate something without words, talk about an experience that most people never have, talk about a family tradition, etc.

Students begin to see that everyone has had experiences that are not shared by most people, and those experiences form the knowledge and prejudice. We just don’t see that people are the way they are because of their experience in life, we are quick to assume they are bad or stupid, when they are acting just as they should based on their own life experience, and how that is multiplied many times with people who are from different continents and speak different languages and have different norms in their home communities.

TEACHING