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This article was downloaded by: [University of California Santa Cruz] On: 21 November 2014, At: 10:37 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vchn20 Improving Communication is Everyone's Responsibility Fara Warner a a Department of Communication Studies, The University of Michigan's Published online: 07 Aug 2010. To cite this article: Fara Warner (2008) Improving Communication is Everyone's Responsibility, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 40:6, 26-35, DOI: 10.3200/CHNG.40.6.26-35 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/CHNG.40.6.26-35 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Page 1: Improving Communication is Everyone's Responsibility

This article was downloaded by: [University of California Santa Cruz]On: 21 November 2014, At: 10:37Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Change: The Magazine of Higher LearningPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vchn20

Improving Communication is Everyone's ResponsibilityFara Warner aa Department of Communication Studies, The University of Michigan'sPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Fara Warner (2008) Improving Communication is Everyone's Responsibility, Change: The Magazine of HigherLearning, 40:6, 26-35, DOI: 10.3200/CHNG.40.6.26-35

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/CHNG.40.6.26-35

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in thepublications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations orwarranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsedby Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly inconnection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction,redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Improving Communication is Everyone's Responsibility

In 2003, Terrence Martell, a finance professor at the City University of New York’s Baruch College, en-countered a classroom of 80 seniors who could navigate the complex in-

tricacies of the futures markets and com-modities trading. But when he asked them to write a report explaining to a commod-ity pool operator why he or she should

retain the student after two months on the job as commodity trading advisor, many failed to live up to Martell’s requirements.

“They needed to convince me, to write persuasively about what they had learned and put it in the context I had asked for,” remembers Martell, who also serves as the director of the college’s Weissman Center for Interna-tional Business. “They couldn’t.”

Martell notes that the purpose of the class and the final paper wasn’t to show that the students could double their money or even make a profit on the $1 million in imaginary funds they had traded for two months. More im-portant to the students’ learning—and to their grade—was to explain their trading actions and persuade a senior-level executive (Martell in this case) of their expertise, no matter what the outcome of their trades was. While their papers were well-organized and showed strength in basic grammar and

usage, Martell says, the majority of the papers displayed little evidence that the students understood the assignment’s audience or its purpose.

Frustrated, Martell turned to Baruch College’s Bernard L. Schwartz Com-munication Institute, which operates across the college to support faculty and advise them on teaching written, oral, and computer-aided communica-tion. Martell asked the Institute what could be done to help the students un-derstand and complete the assignment with better results. The Institute sent in Mikhail Gershovich, then deputy direc-tor and now director of the Institute, and John Choonoo, director of institu-tional research, to diagnose Martell’s problem.

Their report noted that the “major-ity of the cohort did not recognize the role they were asked to perform nor the purpose their writing was supposed to serve. Their engagement with the

Fara Warner is the 2007-2009 Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan’s Department of Communication Studies and a former Knight-Wallace Fellow in Journalism at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Power of the Purse: How Smart Busi-nesses Are Adapting to the World’s Most Important Consumers—Women. She has written about marketing, advertising, and consumer trends for more than 18 years for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fast Company, Forbes and other national publications.

26 Change ● November/December 2008

COMMU NICATIONis Everyone’s ResponsibilityCOMMU NICATIONis Everyone’s ResponsibilityCOMMU NICATION

ImprovingCOMMU NICATION

ImprovingCOMMU NICATION

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assignment was superficial at best, and their reports resemble the personal, expository essays often assigned in first-year composition courses.” The two major causes for the failure were students’ limited experience with writing in previous business courses and a failure to understand that ef-fective communication is much more than writing down what a student has learned. The students had “a difficult time approaching their writing as though it is meant to do something,” the report stated.

To explore these issues more deeply, the Institute and the institutional re-search group conducted a survey of all the faculty members who had taught courses Martell’s students had taken to date. Faculty members were asked to comment on student writing overall and the status of writing in the business school in particular. The researchers found that students simply didn’t have

much opportunity to write, or receive much instruction in writing, during their college careers. Indeed, three faculty respondents said they required no writing at all, given their large class sizes. And even when they did write, faculty members remarked, students rarely encountered “high-stakes” writ-ing assignments—ones that were cru-cial to their course grades.

Many of the faculty surveyed felt that teaching writing skills was exclu-sively the role of the English depart-ment and complained that Baruch’s first-year English courses seemed not to prepare students adequately to write effectively in the disciplines. But Martell, Gershovich, and Choonoo did not accept the argument that freshman English courses should be enough to prepare students for their next three years in college or, more importantly, for the world of work that they would encounter when they graduated.

The Communication Institute rec-ommended a number of changes—and not only for Martell’s course. It sug-gested that Baruch’s Zicklin School of Business, which accounts for almost 80 percent of the college’s majors, insti-tute changes, including assigning writ-ing in some form in all undergraduate courses, clearly defining the audience and purpose of assignments, reducing course size, and sponsoring ongoing professional development programs on writing-intensive instruction.

These proposals were rooted in writing-across-the-curriculum, or WAC, approaches that have been emerging since the 1980s. The basic philosophy of WAC is that writing is the responsibil-ity of the entire academic community and that writing instruction must be continuous during all four years of undergraduate education. And a fun-damental WAC principle is that only by practicing the conventions of an

www.changemag.org 27

by Fara Warner

COMMU NICATIONis Everyone’s ResponsibilityCOMMU NICATIONis Everyone’s ResponsibilityCOMMU NICATION

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28 Change ● November/December 2008

academic discipline will students begin to communicate effectively within that discipline. So the Institute proposed giving students the opportunity to write a draft and receive suggestions for revi-sions from one of the Institute’s com-munication fellows.

Five years later, after Martell imple-mented the Institute’s recommenda-tions, his students in FIN 4720 have shown marked improvement, he says. “The assignment hasn’t changed, but I see improvement in my students every year,” he says. “It also shows these 20-something students that communica-tions is important—it’s important to me as a faculty member.”

Martell’s experience is an example of why the Institute is considered one of the most effective programs in teach-ing written, oral, and computer-aided communication in the country. Its strategy for supporting communica-tion-intensive instruction conforms to a bottom-up, research-driven, faculty- and student-focused consultancy model that evolves as the Institute improves students’ abilities to communicate—through, for example, a traditional ex-pository essay, a videotaped speech, or a blog post.

Part think tank and part academic service unit, the Institute operates un-der the simple mandate that “aiding students in becoming better commu-nicators is everyone’s responsibility at Baruch,” says Gershovich, who became the Institute’s director in February 2006 and is currently a co-coordinator of the WAC program.

The InstituteTo understand how the Institute

was created—and has grown into a model for developing and supporting communication-intensive curricu-la—you have to look at the college’s history and its extraordinarily diverse student body.

Baruch’s beginnings stretch back to 1847. Its Newman Vertical Campus is now located at Lexington and 24th Street in Manhattan, one block from the original site of the Free Academy, the country’s first free institution of higher education. In 1919, the City University system created a school of business and civic administra-tion on the site of the Academy. The

next year, it added a master’s degree in business administration. In 1953, the college was renamed in honor of Bernard M. Baruch, the statesman and financier who had been instrumental in the college’s creation. In 1968, Baruch College became a freestand-ing college within the City University of New York. The College currently encompasses the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Pub-lic Affairs, and the Zicklin School of Business—now the largest school of business in the nation.

Even in its early years, the college was known for its diversity, drawing its student body from the immigrant popu-lations that called New York City home. Over the years, those populations have changed from Italian, Jewish, and German to today’s immigrants from countries such as Turkey, Uzbekistan, and China. Approximately one-third of Baruch students were born outside the U.S., and half are the children of im-migrants. About 90 percent of Baruch’s undergraduate students graduated from New York City’s public and parochial high schools, and more than half come from families with an income of less

than $44,000 annually. The college’s nearly 16,000 students speak 110 lan-guages and come from 160 countries—prompting publications such as U.S. News and World Report and Princeton Review to name it “the most diverse university in the U.S.”

“The college always had to operate with the knowledge that for many of its students English wasn’t just their second language but sometimes their third or fourth,” says Professor Paula Berggren, who has worked extensively with the Institute to enhance students’ writing and oral communication skills in Great Works of Literature courses, which all Baruch students are required to take. Moreover, “in the U.S., we don’t know how to communicate even if we’re native English speakers.” By the mid-1990s, the combination of a school devoted to teaching business skills and a diverse and underprepared student body had created a situation in which “Baruch was turning out compe-tent vocationally trained students who lacked an ease with communication,” Berggren says.

Baruch faculty members weren’t the only ones who noticed the prob-lem. Over the decades, Baruch had gained a reputation for turning out highly capable business majors who got very desirable jobs in accounting and other business sectors. But major employers reported that Baruch gradu-ates sometimes lacked confidence, sophistication, and facility in business communication. The problem wasn’t lost on the college’s alumni either— including Bernard L. Schwartz, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Loral Space & Communica-tion, who had graduated from Baruch with a bachelor’s of science degree in finance. He believed that Baruch needed to do a better job of teaching students real-world communication skills in addition to their core studies. In 1997 he donated the initial funding to create the Institute that now bears his name, with the expressed wish to help Baruch students become more effective communicators.

There are a number of ways to teach and enhance oral and written communi-cation, from required communication-specific courses and formal academic support units to loose, informal

... Baruch

needed to do a

better job of

teaching students

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to their core

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programs driven primarily by individu-al faculty members. Baruch created an organization that operated somewhere between those two extremes. A few core principles and organizing struc-tures were set down that have guided the Institute, but room was left for cre-ativity and evolution stimulated by the changing needs of faculty and students and by technological developments.

The Institute isn’t housed under a specific department—English or communication studies, for instance. In keeping with the idea that com-munication is everyone’s responsibil-ity, it operates under the Office of the Provost and remains independent of any one department’s requirements or direct control. It also receives pri-vate funds (including ongoing support from Schwartz), giving it flexibility in the breadth, depth, and scope of the programs it offers. It invites outsiders, most notably from the business world, to discuss communication issues that are of importance to the employers who hire Baruch students. Each year, the In-stitute hosts an annual symposium that brings together faculty and business executives to explore areas of mutual concern, such as the role of new tech-nologies in shaping criteria for effective communication in academic and busi-ness contexts.

Communication-Intensive Courses

In addition to consulting and sup-porting courses such as Martell’s, another task was to create specific courses to enhance student writing and oral communication capacities after the compulsory instruction they re-ceive in their first year, when they are required to take two intensive writing courses and a speech communications course. As Gershovich says, “Fresh-man English isn’t a magic pill you take to make yourself write well for the rest of your college career. We’re moving away from the idea that written and oral communication are generalizable skills that one can attain in a required course and then apply across all genres and contexts.”

So, with the help of the Institute, Baruch’s three schools created commu-nication-intensive courses, or CICs, fo-cused on oral, written, and (increasingly)

computer-mediated communication. The CICs’ central objective is to improve the students’ written and/or oral communi-cations skills. They do so by including substantial written and/or oral assign-ments as an integral part of the course’s curriculum; having communication learning goals for the course; providing substantial feedback on the students’ work; and giving students opportunities, as appropriate, to revise their work based on that feedback.

CICs are developed around the idea that it is important to provide students

with as many opportunities as possible to practice and receive feedback on their ability to communicate. Teaching communication across the curriculum gives students more opportunities to ex-plore different styles of academic writ-ing and oral communication, not simply the expository writing they are familiar with from their freshman courses. “In CICs, students are put in something of a ‘meta-position’ thinking about how they communicate,” says Diana Rickard, a senior communication fellow at the Institute. “By writing, they also are learning to think critically. Writing is as much about articulating ideas as it is

about putting the grammar in the right place.”

Understanding that such an intense focus on communication in these courses would add significantly to the workload of faculty, the Institute real-ized that one of its major functions was to support the faculty with com-munication fellows such as Rickard. These are doctoral students in a variety of disciplines with expertise in com-munication-across-the-curriculum strategies. They work within their own departments to help develop syllabi and assignments, conduct workshops for students, and plan and run faculty development seminars. In 2007, the In-stitute employed 27 fellows and three full-time staff.

During the past 10 years, the num-ber of CICs has risen dramatically. In 2007, the Institute supported 390 CIC sections with an enrollment of more than 14,000, five times the number of sections offered in 1997 (see Figure 1). The number of faculty members teach-ing CICs has also increased from under 60 to almost 150 (Figure 2) in 18 disci-plines (Figure 3).

Baruch’s Zicklin School of Busi-ness requires its students to take four CICs, one in each year of their stud-ies. “We realized that everyone, even those of us in business, needed to lift the boat,” says Phyllis Zadra, associate dean of the business school. And lift the boat they did. From 1997 to 2007, the Institute collected samples of student writing in CICs from across the disci-plines to assess the effectiveness of the courses in improving students’ writing. At the beginning and end of each semester, students also wrote about their expectations for the class they were taking. The samples were scored by the Institute’s fellows according to criteria that focused on both writing quality and the development of student expectations for the course.

The Institute’s research shows that there was, on average, significant improvement over the course of one semester in a CIC. Figure 4 shows the average change in performance in writ-ing during the past 10 years among stu-dents who scored in the low to middle range on writing performance in the Institute’s longitudinal study of student writing in CICs. Students’

www.changemag.org 29

Teaching

communication

across the

curriculum gives

students more

opportunities to

explore different

styles of academic

writing and oral

communication ...

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30 Change ● November/December 2008

attitudes toward the course moved from neutral at the beginning of the class to largely positive by the end. T-tests were conducted that showed that the amount of change in the quality of students’ writing and the expectations they had for CIC curricula were statistically sig-nificant (See Figure 5).

Explaining SuccessAs educators know, even a great

philosophy and a solid real-world strat-egy for implementing a vision doesn’t always lead to success. But during its first decade, the Institute has been able to fulfill to a great extent the mission it was given in 1997. The challenges were outlined by Baruch’s then-president Matthew Goldstein, now chancellor of the City University of New York, when he called on the Institute to operate in the context of “shrinking budgets, larg-er classes, a sense that communication is the province of the speech (now com-munication studies) and English depart-ments, and above all, a preponderance of first-generation college students, a majority of whom are not native Eng-lish speakers”—challenges well-recog-nized by the college’s current president, Kathleen Waldron, who actively sup-ports the Institute’s efforts.

Both faculty and those working at the Institute say that partnerships and flexibility are the primary reasons for the Institute’s effectiveness and its long-term success in meeting the challenges Goldstein elaborated. Instead of estab-lishing a formal, rigid structure for how faculty will work with the Institute and the fellows, the Institute leaves the spe-cific details up to each faculty member.

“We have learned that we can’t say, ‘This is our program and you have to follow it,’” says Diana Rickard, the Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the City University of New York’s Gradu-ate Center who works with the sociolo-gy and anthropology departments. “We are here to meet the specific needs of the department.” The Institute serves so many different CICs and other pro-grams that the fellows operate very differently from one another based on the specific needs of each course or faculty member they support—help-ing out with oral presentations in one course and written work in another. Despite the variety of tasks, “What we

do know is that strong faculty develop-ment leads us to reach more students than if we were solely reaching out to students through seminars or work-shops,” Rickard says.

Consider, for example, the capstone business policy course, BPL 5100. More than 2,000 students will take BPL 5100 in their last year of college. The course is taught in 35-37 sections, with class sizes of about 25 students. A significant portion of the grade is based on a group presentation. “We stress oral communica-tion in this course because in addition to teaching students about companies and industries, we also are teaching them con-fidence and competence,” says Professor Al Booke, who coordinates the course for the Zicklin School of Business.

But if the professors teaching the course were to spend their time prepar-ing students for their group oral presen-tations, they would not be able to focus on the course content. So the students meet several times with the Institute’s fellows as they prepare for the presen-tations and accompanying writing as-signments. In addition to coaching the students, the fellows videotape presenta-tion rehearsals and review the videos with students.

For many students, Booke says, the taping and subsequent review provide an opportunity to work on things like accents and making eye contact even if they come from a culture that considers that rude. “It is learning that it is not only what you say but how you say it that will make a difference,” he says. “These stu-dents will leave us in about six months, so they must learn to communicate with-out fear.” Booke says there is no way he could have both taught the course mate-rial and readied students for the work world in this way without Institute’s help. He notes that what makes it work so well is that the Institute serves as a resource, not as an outsider that tells him what to do. “It’s not an invasion of my turf,” he says. “It’s not adversarial, it’s not a subordinate with a supervisor—it’s a true partnership.”

Rickard agrees that the system works well when everyone under-stands that “we aren’t teaching as-sistants or student tutors.” Rather, she sees her role as providing the faculty with tools that can help improve stu-dent writing or public speaking regard-less of the course they are teaching. Those range from offering faculty in-sight into strategies such as low-stakes

Figure 1. Number of Communication-Itensive Courses Offered (1997-2007)

Source: Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY.

500

375

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125

0

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writing assignments that aren’t a major part of the grade to operating seminars for students if a faculty member wants them to understand a specific task, such as writing an ethnography. She also helps faculty stage assignments and offers them advice. “I de-empha-

size the mechanics of writing. I don’t want them to get bogged down in line-editing students’ work,” she says. “I suggest they edit a paragraph to show what the errors are. There are other resources in the school that can help students with the mechanics.”

Rickard determines what the fac-ulty need by being in the middle of the action. “I have a cubicle that’s in the center of the department,” she says. “It can be hard to get faculty members to sit down for 20 minutes, but if they see me sitting there, they’ll throw out a question, we start talking, and soon we’ve had that 20-minute conversa-tion. We’re part of the department, and that helps inform our program. We’re also intellectual colleagues, so we don’t need to be taught the content of the courses.”

Two recent initiatives in blogging and assessment show how the Insti-tute works to vet new communication tools—particularly in technology—and incorporate them into the curriculum.

A few years ago, the Institute be-gan its own blog, cac.ophony.org, as a way to explore that new writing ven-ue—or, as Gershovich calls it, “online personal publishing platform.” The Institute’s blog is an online space where fellows can reflect on their work and contribute to broader, ongo-ing conversations on teaching com-munication across the curriculum. It also helps Institute staff to better un-derstand the medium as they help fac-ulty integrate blogs in their teaching through the Institute’s Blogs@Baruch project (http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu), a venture, fully supported by the Baruch Computing and Technology Center, that enables faculty to easily create weblogs for instructional or personal use.

“Our feeling is that any opportu-nity students have to write is going to improve their writing,” Gershovich says. “Blogging, as written reflection, helps students engage course content. Writing is a way of thinking and, in this instance, a means for exploring the various dimensions of what stu-dents are studying, both collectively and more informally than in individu-al high-stakes writing assignments.”

In keeping with the flexible nature of the Institute, it uses WordPress, highly customizable open-source blogging software, which Gershovich says allows students to engage in a conversation on course material with their classmates and the professor and gives professors the freedom to ex-periment with the medium.

www.changemag.org 31

Figure 3. Distribution of Communication-Intensive Courses by Discipline (2000-2007)

Source: Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY.

Accounting

AnthropologyArt

Black & Hispanic StudiesBuisiness Policy & Administration

Computer Information SystemsEconomics

EnglishFinance

GeographyHistory

Literature in TranslationManagement

MarketingMusic

PhilosophyPublic Affairs

SociologyTheatre

0 3 6 9 12

Figure 2. Number of Faculty Teaching Communication-Intensive Courses (1997-2007)

Source: Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY.

150

120

90

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Rickard says one professor broke her class into five student teams and had each team use the course blog to reflect on the readings and presentations. “That made it easy to keep track of student posts and manage the project,” she says. Rickard says she thinks blogs will be a great way for students to create drafts of formal essays, explore different voices, and “relieve the teacher from grading hundreds of papers that all say the same thing at the end of the term.”

Gershovich is also focusing more atten-tion on oral communication. The Institute, in its role as a think tank as well as con-sultancy, is making use of the Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool (VO-CAT), a web application developed for Ba-ruch, to help improve and assess students’ oral communication skills. VOCAT came out of a theater course in which presenta-tions were videotaped and scored online. But Gershovich saw a broader application for the software. “When you show students videos of themselves speaking, they real-

ize they are doing things they aren’t aware of,” he says. “Playing the videos back to them helps to develop a sense of critical self-awareness that is essential for good public speaking.”

The Institute is now starting to incorporate VOCAT in Baruch’s fresh-man seminar, in which students are videotaped so they can continue to im-prove their oral communication skills throughout college. “In the end they will have a portfolio of oral communi-cation, just as they might have a col-lection of writing,” Gershovich says.

Representing a new direction in the Institute’s work not just in teaching but in formative and summative assessment, VOCAT has piqued the interest of a num-ber of interested parties at the college, including alumni for whom the goals of the VOCAT initiative resonate on a personal level. Walter Barandiaran, a co-founder and managing partner of a private equity firm (the Argentum Group) and the principal donor to the VOCAT project,

struggled to gain proficiency in public speaking while he was an undergraduate at Baruch, at a time when efforts to im-prove student oral communication were largely outside the curriculum. “Given the ethnic and cultural diversity of Baruch students, we need to address the absolute necessity of speaking well throughout the curriculum, in order to leverage Baruch’s outstanding education and ensure a suc-cessful future beyond Baruch,” Barandi-aran says.

Communicating About Cultures

The Institute was born out of Ba-ruch’s diversity and the acknowledge-ment that the college’s focus on teaching strong technical skills was insufficient to ensure its graduates’ success in the work world. Today, Baruch faculty say that that same diversity—coupled with students’ stronger communications skills—is giving their students a leg up in a world that will increasingly depend

32 Change ● November/December 2008

Figure 4. Average Change in the Quality of Students’ Writing During One Semester (1997-2007)

Source:

Source: Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY. Note: These graphs illustrate the average amount of change in five aspects of the quality of students’ writing samples. Fellows scored the students’ writing samples on each of the five dimensions at the beginning and end of each semester.

Beginning End Beginning End

Scor

e

3.4

3.1

2.8

2.5

3.4

3.1

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2.5

Ideas & DevelopmentOrganization & CoherenceSpelling & VocabularySyntax & PunctuationGrammar & Usage

Weissman School of Arts and Sciences Zicklin School of Business

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on the capacities of people with diverse languages, cultures, and customs to communicate with each other.

“This isn’t just an issue for us—it’s a national issue,” says Paula Berggren, the English professor who coordinates the col-lege’s Great Works program. As the nation becomes more diverse, she points out, we all need to understand the philosophies and literatures of other parts of the world—the parts that many of Baruch’s students come from. In the 1990s, the faculty began to realize that they were dealing with an in-ternational student body but were teaching only Western works in the Great Works course. So they recast it to include Confu-cius, haikus from Japan, and stories from Southeast Asia. “We wanted to be interna-tionally responsible,” Berggren says.

When the Institute was formed, she saw an opportunity to do even more. “I had students who weren’t native English speakers, and I had students who could answer questions perfectly but couldn’t articulate a point of view.” So she worked to have the Great Works course become

a CIC. She wanted to put communica-tion tools in students’ hands so they could bring their knowledge of other cultures into the classroom. Berggren ultimately succeeded in adding a fourth hour to the course for working on writing and oral communication skills, even though stu-dents still receive only three credit hours for the course. “The students understood that this was important,” she says. “It has been transformative.”

As with many of the courses that the Institute works with, the changes are sometimes subtle. “We work with faculty on determining the best kinds of assign-ments. We let them know that they can’t give an assignment that says, ‘Word-sworth says this: Discuss,’ and expect to get what they want,” remarks Berggren. She adds that revisions and rewriting have been built into the course and that there is more “free writing,” simply putting down thoughts about what they have read.

Students are then asked to read out loud and present works from their own cultures in class. “The high-water

mark for me was when a Chinese stu-dent picked a Chinese poet to discuss, and we worked through the poem, deconstructing it as a class,” she says. “This validates to students that their cultures is as rich as the cultures of the West. It gives the students authority.”

It also gives them a view into cultures, races, and ethnicities that they will en-counter as they go out into the world. “We already have the multicultural diversity, and that makes us extraordinary,” Martell says. The Great Works course, as a CIC, gives students the capacity to communi-cate effectively with each other about their cultural identities. “They are learning to deal with more than one culture, even if they are from cultures that aren’t getting along outside these walls, such as Pal-estinians and Israelis. I see diamonds in the rough here, and we are here to polish them. We have done something good for these students, for the city, and eventually for the country.”

The Institute won the 2008 TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award.

C

Figure 5. Average Change in Students’ Expectations During One Semester (1997-2007)

Source:

Source: Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY. Note: These graphs illustrate the average amount of change in three aspects of students’ responses (ac-cording to assessment-specific criteria for the CIC in which they were enrolled). Fellows scored the students’ writing samples on each of the three dimensions at the beginning and of each semester.

Beginning End Beginning End

Scor

e

3.7

3.5

3.3

3.1

2.9

2.7

3.7

3.5

3.3

3.1

2.9

2.7

DevelopmentRangeTenor

Weissman School of Arts and Sciences Zicklin School of Business

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