Queer Communication Pedagogy

The emerging subfield of queer communication pedagogy (QCP) marks an educative praxis that centers the liberation of queer and trans subjects and, specifically, those who are most violently impacted by racist cisheterosexism in the form of carceral logics and policing. Intersectional articulations of sex, gender, and sexual difference are disciplined and literally policed both in and out of the communication classroom. Course design, for instance, provides a disciplinary means for justifying the violent repression of sex, gender, and sexual difference in the classroom through activities that insist on a compulsory framing of gender in binary terms. Or, policing can emerge in the racist cisheterosexist pedagogue’s gaze that communicatively constitutes “incivility” out of racialized sex, gender, and sexual difference; this is evidenced in the violent policing of queer and trans students of color beginning with the school-to-prison pipeline and on into higher education settings where educators are empowered to call on campus police forces to remedy what they perceive as “unruly”—queer—students. QCP reflects histories comprising both critical communication pedagogy (CCP) and queer pedagogy. CCP, itself informed by critical pedagogy, is committed to liberatory educative ends driven by praxiological means derived of lived experience in historical context. That is, critical pedagogy takes as a point of departure lived experience as a means of resisting intersectional oppression and, in turn, enacting progressive social change. CCP strives toward these liberatory goals through communicative means, specifically dialogic encounters between/with/as students-and/as-teachers. Conversely, queer pedagogy refers to a destabilization of pedagogical presumption implicating the racist cisheteronormative foundation informing carceral-centered knowledge production and educative engagement. In turn, queer pedagogy labors toward the abolition of carcerality including the prison industrial complex and police state. Taken together, QCP marks an activist-oriented educative praxis that labors toward liberation of queer and trans subjects through the abolition of racist cisheterosexist carcerality.

“Your English is Accented!”: Surviving With Otherness While Approaching Positive Becoming

Taking a critical intercultural approach, this paper explores the discrepancies between the critical communication pedagogy (CCP) ideals and pedagogical struggles of international graduate teaching assistants (IGTAs) rendered by their linguistic difference due to border crossing. I theorized IGTAs’ linguistic Otherness as racialization of their accent. I further suggested undoing the negative becoming with positive becoming by intervening in the dualistic ways of knowing and hearing in order to shatter the mentality that dehumanizes and dominates the Other.

And So It Goes: An Introduction to Volume 2 of the Journal of Communication Pedagogy

As part of the larger instructional communication education umbrella and similar to, yet distinct enough from, its related subdisciplines such as basic course scholarship, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and critical communication pedagogy, the articles published in this volume of JCP demonstrate the three forms through which communication pedagogy can emerge. That is, whether communication pedagogy centers on the systematic study (i.e., Original Research Studies), reflection (i.e., Reflection Essays), or identification of teaching practices (i.e., Best Practices) across communication curricula, the end result is that communication pedagogy acts as a vehicle through which teaching effectiveness can be improved, strengthened, or even realized, with the goal of enriching—in some way—the educational lives of instructors and students and assisting instructors, students, and classmates in the development and maintenance of productive and satisfying communication relationships with and among each other.

Critical Communication Pedagogy: Toward “Hope in Action”

Critical communication pedagogy (CCP) emerged from an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationships between communication and instruction that draws from and extends critical theory. This critical turn has influenced how the communication studies discipline defines and practices communication education (i.e., learning in communication or how best to teach communication) and instructional communication (i.e., communication in learning, or how communication functions to diminish or support learning across a broad array of contexts), from the one-on-one tutoring session to training and development, and beyond. This critical turn in communication and instruction is characterized by 10 commitments of critical communication pedagogy refigured here along three themes: (1) communication is constitutive, (2) social justice is a process, and (3) the classroom is a site of activism and interpersonal justice. Critical communication pedagogy is defined by three primary criticisms: (1) CCP focuses on postmodern and constitutive philosophies of communication to the detriment of critical theory, (2) CCP focuses too much on in-class communication to the detriment of activist learning, and (3) CCP is over-reliant on autoethnographic and performative methodologies. An expanded, reinvigorated, and radicalized critical communication pedagogy for communication studies scholars entails greater attention to and extension of critical theory; sustained engagement in and with activism (both within and beyond the classroom); and a more robust engagement of diverse methods of data collection and analysis. Critical communication pedagogy scholarship as militant hope is more relevant than ever in the post-Trump era, signaling a way for communication scholars to cultivate ethics of equity and justice at all levels of education.