Teaching

COMM 1100: Human Communication: This course is an overview of the communication discipline that identifies and explores the various components, situations, and channels involved in the communication process. The main objective is for students to critically assess and improve their personal and professional communication skills with others.

COMM 6690 (Topics): Health Comm: This graduate course examines the principles, concepts, challenges, and opportunities of health communication in the 21st Century. It analyzes the complexity of health from interpersonal, organizational, and media perspectives. The course examines effective communication practices for different shareholders both within and external to the healthcare system.

The major aims of this course are to make students more effective professional communicators, analytical thinkers, and critical listeners. Throughout the session students study the theories and principles of effective communication, practice applying these principles in a variety of assignments, and critique the performances of other speakers. By the end of the semester, students are able to plan and prepare professional presentations.

This course is designed to give students an overview of contemporary scholarship on phenomena within the scope of interpersonal health communication. Ideally, students will learn how communication among friends, family members, and professionals influences people’s well-being, and how, in turn, health and illness shape communication and relationship dynamics.

This class focuses on the role communication plays in health behavior change programs. You will develop an awareness for the components that go into developing effective health campaigns. Additionally, students will develop a foundational skill set to create health campaigns to combat the health issues that plague our society.

In this course, students learn about fundamental communicative and psychological processes that are involved in social influence. Students study prominent social scientific perspectives on persuasion that inform our understanding of what makes persuasive efforts compelling. This is not a course designed specifically to teach persuasive speaking skills; rather, it is meant to sharpen the understanding of how persuasion occurs

Students will learn to manage communication in a variety of professional and organizational contexts and will be introduced to the research basis of recommended principles. Emphasis is on clarity and persuasiveness in communicating with clients, associates, and other decision makers.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to interviewing theory, prepare them for their roles as interviewers and interviewees, including in the mass communication setting, to instruct students in methods of interview preparation, and to provide students with practice in various types of interviews. 

This course will teach students about the processes by which people attempt to deceive others and/or themselves. Students will learn about communicative processes involved in specific deception phenomena such as doublespeak, equivocation, false advertising, forgery, political spin, and white lies among others. Students will also learn how to think independently, systematically, and skeptically about both research and the world around them. 

Along with effective communication skills, and a general good working knowledge of business principles, understanding research methods is one of the most important skills in the communication field. Social science research methods across the various contexts within the communication studies discipline. This course covers formalizing research questions, operational definitions, hypotheses and research question testing, measurement, sampling, research design, computer analysis, and scale development. 

This course looks at the current trends in families, the communication that creates and shapes families, theories to help understand families, and current research. This course critically evaluates and assess the current trends in families throughout the world and family communication research. 

This class is aimed at getting students acquainted with some of the interpersonal theories as they currently stand in the field. This course will provide an intensive examination of the theories, methods of investigation, and current developments in interpersonal communication scholarship. As part of this class, students acquire knowledge of interpersonal communication scholarship, learn to constructively critique interpersonal communication research, learn to plan interpersonal communication research, and be able to explain communication from a variety of communication theoretical perspectives.

This class is designed to provide an overview of nonverbal communication in interpersonal relationships. Theories and major research areas related to nonverbal communication will be covered. Specifically, the course will address topics such as channels of nonverbal behavior, methods used in nonverbal research, and the role of nonverbal behaviors in communication goals. Students will critique nonverbal research articles, give presentations on foundational texts, engage in example coding projects, and propose a study related to nonverbal communication.

This class is aimed at getting students acquainted with some of the basic issues, analytic techniques, and ways of thinking associated with communication research. Students examine various research paradigms, writing methods, common methods of data collection, and statistical techniques used to test empirical questions. The goal of this course is to provide students with an introduction to research methods.