Current Grad Classes - Fall 2013

Course Number: COMM 7/8012
Title: Seminar in Health Communication: Palliative Care: A Narrative Approach to Understanding and Application
Instructor: Joy Goldsmith
Days/Time: W 6:00-9:00 pm

Course Description:

Our readings and discussions will emphasize literature and texts that portray palliative care from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of health contexts. We will concentrate on theoretical, but especially applied issues revealed in empirical research, emphasizing the impact and potential of narrative education in nursing, medicine, and allied health. The goals of the course are to acquaint you with the broad scope of palliative care, to explore narrative research in palliative care health communication, as well as to examine in-depth the lived experiences of patients, families, and clinicians. A secondary focus of the course will be to learn and utilize narrative methods. Although this course deals primarily with the interpersonal, relational aspects of health communication, you will also gain exposure to mediated and organizational contexts for palliative care communication.

Proposed Texts:

Narrative and Stories in Health Care: Illness, Dying, and Bereavement--Gunaratnam, Y., & Oliviere, D. (Eds.)

Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy

Exit Strategy—David Oliver

The Mercy Papers – Robin Romm

Dying with Comfort: Family Narratives and Early Palliative Care—Elaine Wittenberg-Lyles, Joy Goldsmith, Sandra Ragan, Sandra Sanchez-Reilly

And a wide selection of articles will be provided to students as well.

Particulars: Seminar course expectations include a 1) research paper/proposal and oral presentation, 2) a brief paper, 3) shaping and guiding discussion per one topic, and 4) and invested seminar participation.

Course Number: COMM 7332/8332
Title: Seminar in Comm Research: Discourse Studies
Instructor: Craig Stewart
Days/Time: R 5:30-8:30

Course Description: As Teun van Dijk argues, "discourse analysis is no more than the general academic activity of studying discourse. And such a study can be carried by a large number of different methods."1 Various methods of discourse analysis are united "by paying close and systematic attention to particular situations and particular utterances or sets of utterances" in order to investigate "research questions...in and across disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences and beyond" (Johnstone, 2008, pp. xiii-xiv). This seminar then will provide a site for graduate students across the department's research areas to learn discourse theories and methods for investigating the linguistic, rhetorical, cultural, and/or social cognitive form and function of text and talk in a variety of contexts, including public and political communication, health communication, and mediated communication. Special attention will be paid to issues of social interaction and identities, intentions and interpretations in discourse, and language, ideology and power.
1http://www.discourses.org/resources/teachyourself/Unlearn%20misconceptions.html

Proposed Text:

Required Texts

Johnstone, B. (2008). Discourse analysis, 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Van Dijk, T. A. (2011). Discourse studies: A multidisciplinary introduction, 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage.

Other articles available on eCourseware.

Recommended Text

Jaworski, A., & Coupland, N. (Eds.). (2006). The discourse reader, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

Course Number: COMM 7350/8350
Title: Rhetorical Theory
Instructor: Sandra Sarkela
Days/Time: M 5:30-8:30

Course Description:  In this engaging course, we will try to cover a wide range of rhetorical texts (from Alcidamas' On Those Who Write Written Speeches, written somewhere around 400 B.C.E., to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric (first published in 1958) from a wide range of historical periods and cultural contexts. Because of the amount of material to cover, our focus will be on reading as widely as possible and on grasping the wide variety of conceptions of rhetoric by the respective writers, and how and why any of these conceptions have come to influence contemporary rhetorical theory and practice.

Particulars:  Weekly, one-page (single-spaced) summaries and reflections on the required readings (35 %), An end-of-semester 15-20 page research paper with annotated bibliography (35%), Lead one class discussion of the assigned reading for that week (15%), and, depending upon how many students register for the course, an oral presentation of your research project (15%)

Course Number: COMM 7820/8820
Title: Rhetorical Pedagogy
Instructor: Antonio de Velasco
Days/Time: M 1-4

Course Description: What have been the dominant means and ends of rhetorical instruction?  How does foregrounding the practice of pedagogy alter perspectives on the history and future of rhetoric study in the U.S.? This course addresses such questions by surveying topics and thinkers central to the history of how rhetoric has been taught.  Our particular focus will be on how leading figures in rhetoric define and make teachable three central practices: controversy, judgment, and performance. The primary goal of the course is to equip students with the historical and conceptual background necessary to define the scope of rhetoric and to motivate their work in the communication classroom.

Proposed Text:

Texts include: A History of Education in Antiquity, Henri Irénée Marrou; Rhetoric in the European Tradition, Thomas W. Conley;  On the Contrary, Thomas O. Sloane; Democracy as Discussion, William Keith; The Ethics of Speech, Pat J. Gehrke; Liberating Language, Shirley Wilson Logan.