Communication Essays

Introduction

The seven essays selected for this book were written from 1979 to 2010. Each addresses challenges for public communication that endure still, from well before the time in which each essay was written. Strategies and processes to strengthen public discourse in a democracy or an organization’s interaction with the community will always require organized personal communication.

How to develop oral communication in a multicultural society, or to counter propaganda in a democracy, or to encourage trust of an organization, or to advance an organization’s relationship with its community, or to sustain funding growth for an organization through the best or worst economic times are among more substantial communication challenges.

As a digest of insights and ways to strengthen public communication, the book shares thoughts found effective to put communication understandings into practice. The ideas presented here matured in the communication classroom, at public symposia, and through three decades leading start-up or formative external relations and fundraising efforts for educational and community organizations.

Ways to jump-start higher performance communication efforts resulted from the combination of a problem-solving approach with the distillation of insights from high-performing organizations in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Structured studies of high-performing organizations have helped to sustain ongoing learning personally. For example, informing the essays on benchmarking and funding growth are best practices distilled from conversations, interviews, and studies within more than twenty high-performing organizations.

Public communication through individual or collective effort is a stimulating and exciting force in society. I hope you will find the priorities and best practices described here helpful to encourage understanding, relationship, and action.

1: Developing Oral Communication

... to speak out - a root of democracy¹

S.M. Halloran suggested that the rhetor:

...had interiorized all that was best in ...culture and applied this knowledge in public forums, influencing...fellow citizens to act in accord with their common cultural heritage.²

As teachers of communication, we are all rhetors. In a modern pluralistic society, we lack the common cultural heritage that it was claimed rhetors in ancient Greece enjoyed. The task of understanding our own pluralist culture is complex, but this understanding is still needed to communicate.

Lawrence Stenhouse defined culture as a complex of shared understandings that provide the medium for individuals to communicate with one another.³ It is a commonplace to note that these shared understandings are drawn from our individual experiences of society and are consciously and unconsciously expressed in the messages of newspapers, television, radio, advertisement, and other products of the mass society. It is educational myopia to avoid teaching a self-critical awareness of culture; and anyway, language teachers cannot leave this task to others since language and culture are so closely intertwined.

I believe we must concern ourselves with more than just the acquisition of skills and the appropriateness of language use for an audience and context. Nazi speakers performed eloquent, sometimes imaginative orations,⁴ appropriate to audience and context, and successfully convinced a nation that mass murder was appropriate. The inadequacy and danger of adopting so limited a perspective on language use is widely recognized.

Dell Hymes urged that, in teaching language, the failure to deal explicitly with socio-cultural concerns is itself an ideological choice, reflecting the assumption that a person is abstract, isolated individually, almost an unmotivated cognitive mechanism.⁵ Additionally, Andrew Wilkinson has commented that:

An autocratic regime is not concerned to encourage people to talk and express themselves...[and]...the long tradition of authoritarian teaching in education has resulted in grave limitations on the oracy of the students.⁶

This observation might as readily be made about some teaching in Australia and, undoubtedly, describes what occurs in the educational systems of some other Western democracies.

Children from such schooling tend to participate in society or continue to higher education with few critical abilities. Although schools are increasingly encouraging students to develop oracy not in a narrow sense of ability to speak and listen, but to become aware of people’s values,⁷ the leaden weight of adult apathy to politics and social involvement remains substantial. Massive sections of the community appear to regard politics with cynicism, and many assume that the democratic process is a hollow mockery of what it is supposed to be.⁸ Language teachers are rhetors who can teach children how to become more curious, more informed, and more critically involved adults.

Citizens must be politically engaged for a democracy to continue. Political oracy relates not only to the communication abilities of elected politicians but more to the ability of ordinary citizens to understand, to be involved in, and to contribute with effect to discussion that influences how government and other authorities shape parameters for living. David McLellan regrets that so much political study focuses on the way institutions work, the means of acquiring and preserving power, and the impersonal techniques of government. He sees that politics has become:

...a specialized profession in which only the opinions of experts have any weight... [and there is] ...a growing gap...between what most people experience as important to themselves and the increasingly irrelevant and mystifying manoeuvres of the public world.⁹

McLellan suggests that, because techniques are easier to deal with than values, political pundits also focus on techniques and too little develop discussion on values.¹⁰

How much do our students know about their own value systems? What do they understand or care about the effects of their talk with others? If our students acquire more effective techniques of interaction with each other, parents, and neighbors, how might they also consider the consequences of influencing others? What do our students know about the processes and ethics of communication?

In response to these and many other questions, humanities faculty at Queensland Institute of Technology seek to develop students’ curiosity about their society and thereby build robust abilities in communication. Two subjects, Australian Studies and Business and Society, are especially concerned with development of cultural and philosophical awareness. In Australian Studies, we identify repeated patterns, themes, and values in social documents such as speeches, newspaper articles, advertisements, and TV or radio programs to outline any special preoccupations of Australians. Students discuss and evaluate the nature of Australian social identity and how the expression of this identity has shaped and been shaped by the action of individuals. For example, in outlining the beginnings of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, we are interested not only in the details of the Commission’s foundation but also in how it differed from or was like the British Broadcasting Commission. This tells us not only about the social context but also how part of this context is sensitive to ideas, ideologies, and mythologies from the newer culture of Australia.

This approach is enlarged upon in the later subject Business and Society, where students examine the philosophical concepts underlying the free enterprise system to develop an understanding of the role of business and especially the communication industry in the history and evolution of capitalism. Discussions in both subjects are critical/evaluative and stimulate students to identify practical ways of getting others to think critically and constructively about the improvement of their society. Students soon recognize that people communicating can assist one another to experience different values and value systems more fully.

Yet, while these subjects examining culture provide important groundwork, the real learning of cultural awareness and the responsibility of students to each other, to their family, and to the community occurs in practice.

For example, in a speech writing subject at QIT, students analyze different speech styles and outline the stylistic characteristics in the language of Sir Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., Krishna Menon, John Curtin, Sir Robert Menzies, or close to home, local business and political figures. Students write speeches in the styles of these people and eventually a speech for delivery by a local speaker to a community audience. This confronts students with ethical problems they will face in much communication work that is paid for in the community. Advertisers, public relations practitioners, and journalists are especially faced with ethical considerations about whether and in what way they should sell their expertise as communicators.

Only if students develop a close understanding of the values of their society and the consequences of how and what they communicate can they see their own values more clearly and act ethically to improve society. A teacher must give students a good deal of individual attention to help them develop the sophistication required to manage conflicting pressures and needs of a client, society, and the student. A teacher must be open in this, stating personal values and encouraging informed criticism of these as much as of anyone else’s stance. Already this integrated teaching of language in its cultural context has some success.

Notable features of the program are:

National culture is seen as a subject worthy of study.

Students are introduced to additional characteristics of their community by discussing concepts and actively performing projects in the community, such as through communication internships or a project like speech writing.

A natural integration of cultural and communication competence is sustained.

Students gain in confidence, because they are guided in their entry to the application of communication abilities in the community and they become familiar with a diversity of community audiences, with whom they might later be working.

Students demonstrate a lively interest in developing their language ability during and after involvement in the program.

David Ingram has used similar means in foreign language teaching to achieve some similar benefits in teaching younger age groups.¹¹ But he recommends also the establishment of residential colleges where learners can be immersed in a foreign language for weeks or months at a time and, secondly, he recommends using activities that provide meaningful and motivating communication, such as excursions, French dinners, and so on.¹² A real value of such an approach is that it focuses on communication and its success, rather than on errors.¹³ Students observe and assess their own performance, and the success of coming to terms with language and culture motivates these students further.

In the QIT program, we still need to extend the approach to enhance linkages to cultural observations in more subjects that are concerned with teaching communication in practical and professional areas, such as public relations and advertising especially. But the first step is made, and with 1984 almost upon us we need to seriously consider the philosophical bases of communication study and teaching.¹⁴ It is no longer adequate to assume students will apply their communication abilities responsibly. They must, I believe, be encouraged to develop guidelines for deciding between potentially conflicting interests, including those of society and themselves.

Otherwise, the rationalizations of an ocker culture¹⁵ may reassure our students either that all is well, or more likely encourage them to think, as Hobbes might have, that they must rip off others or be ripped off, and that they must accept this as the fate of living in society. Marcus Clarke wittily showed his concern with this problem in 1877, writing that:

[by 1977] The Australians will be freed from the highest burden of intellectual development... the average Australian will be a tall, coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship... In five hundred years, unless recruited from foreign nations, the breed will be wholly extinct; but in that five hundred years it will have changed the face of Nature, and swallowed up all our contemporary civilization.¹⁶

Clarke’s overstatement severely warns of the need to develop in students a responsive awareness of the culture, the real needs and not just the wants of society.

He also anticipates mass migration of other races to Australia, which of course has since occurred, especially after the Second World War. Australia must now consider itself to be a pluralist society in which 21.9% of Australian born children have at least one parent born in a non-English speaking country.¹⁷ The multicultural character of Australia causes special challenges in the large