Communication
Division Chair: R. Meadows
Program Chair: B. Wooten
Faculty: K. Brown, V. McDonald, and B. Wooten
The Communication Program offers courses in human communication including strategic communication, cultural identity, and mass media. The Program offers a major and minor in Communication as well as a minor in broadcast journalism.
The Program has two principal responsibilities: advancing the student’s knowledge, analytical abilities, and skills in communication and furthering the student’s insight into the meaning and value of human experience through the study of other art forms and through the student’s own creativity.
Upon graduation, majors proceed into graduate or other professional schools, public relations, marketing, broadcasting, or numerous other occupations.
The purpose of the Communication major is to develop in students the ability to be effective, thoughtful, and critical communicators and consumers of communication. Objectives of the major include developing students’:
- capacities for critical thinking, reasoning, argumentation, and decision making;
- skills in oral communication;
- abilities to construct and present effective arguments, mass mediated messages, interpretations and critical analyses orally and in writing;
- abilities to understand and effectively engage in interpersonal, small-group, organizational, intercultural and public relations communication contexts;
- understanding of various theories of communication and rhetoric from the classical to contemporary age;
- abilities to utilize naturalistic/qualitative research methods to collect and analyze original data and form conclusions
- abilities to be discriminating consumers of messages; and