My husband, Mike, and I have two children, Leigh Anne, a college junior, and James, a college freshman. Interacting with these two adults is one of my greatest pleasures. Next to my family I love traveling. I have traveled extensively in Asia and taught in Hong Kong. I started a graduate program in Bangkok and have traveled there multiple times. Learning how interpersonal skills are developed in a culture completely different from your own is a fascinating study. In Asia, interpersonal relationships come before business discussions. Trust and respect are more important than the business deal itself. I have greatly enjoyed learning how to adapt my communication style to these different cultures.
Melissa, Matt and I have team taught a class of 450 students. The class is an introduction of Human Communication. This has been one of my most favorite teaching experiences. Melissa, Matt and I carried out some rather outrageous "performances" in this class to hold the attention of this large group of students. We always had a great deal of fun teaching together. The idea for this book came from that teaching experience. While there were some good books on the market there were not any that fit our goals exactly. We wanted a broader coverage of the field of communication because we wanted students to know about the entire field before specializing in one aspect of it. That's why we have included chapters on legal communication, mass communication, organizational communication, cross cultural communication, and technology. These chapters were included along with the more traditional chapters on listening, verbal and nonverbal communication, interpersonal communication and group communication.
One of the things I like best about the book is the fact that we collected hundreds of stories from our students about their communication experiences and we have used them liberally throughout the book. I think students have experienced most of the misunderstandings and difficulties we try to help people overcome. These stories are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always poignant. I hope you will read them.
I am interested in how people manage relationships in all kinds of settings. For example, I am currently writing a book with Dan Modaff, a faculty member at Ohio University, on misunderstandings in organizations. That's what most of my consulting business has focused on. I also want to write a book on managing personal relationships at work: friendships, romantic relationships, and work relationships. It's very difficult to work on all those kinds of relationships at once.
I wish you success in using this book and would enjoy hearing from you at my e-mail address, with suggestions and questions about teaching the basic course.
While my interest in pedagogy was heightened in my undergraduate program, my love for pedagogy was born in my graduate work. Working as a Teaching Associate at OU gave me the opportunity to be the sole instructor for a class. To this day, I still marvel at that! At first I relied on what I had been given by my family - my father's work ethic and my mother's wit and ability to relate to others. Later, I was able to work with people like Sue DeWine and Matt Smith and molded and shaped my own teaching style after theirs.
It was those years with Sue and Matt that was the spark for this book. My best teaching experience to date was co-teaching a large lecture survey course (400+ students) for multiple semesters with Sue and Matt. However, after teaching the course several times, we realized that books on the market at the time didn't fit our "style" of teaching. Our combination of teaching styles made for a wild and wacky class and there wasn't a textbook out there that represented that.
For example, we would spend a significant portion of class time getting feedback and having students write personal application stories on the topic to share in class. Hearing these students' stories was an important and enlightening part of our class and we decided that any book we used (or wrote) needed to be as application-oriented and student-focused as our classroom.
That was the beginning of our book. Now, Matt and I have moved on to other universities, while Sue still teaches at Ohio University. We often reminisce about our large lecture teaching experience together, and look for similar opportunities with others at our current universities. In the end, however, we realize that the synergy we felt teaching together was special and that the best momento of our teaching experience is this text book.
I hope if you adopt this text that this book will be
a "fit" for your teaching style and that you will enjoy the student-centered
focus that was created from the stories of hundreds of our former students
and from the insights and experiences of three authors who are the best
of colleagues and the best of friends. We wish you luck in all your future
teaching endeavors!
The road that led me to communication studies was a winding
one. As the first member of my family to attend college, I had only the vaguest
idea of what one was supposed to do in the pursuit of higher education. That
probably explains why I changed majors a few times, beginning in education,
switching to English literature, and later focusing on English composition.
Throughout the changes in programs, though, I knew that I wanted to teach, to help others understand the world even as I'd come to understand it, as my vocation in life. It was while working on my master's degree in English that the road before me forked, and I, to quote the great Robert Frost, "took the road less traveled" into communication studies. Frankly, I felt that there was more about human interaction than just what one could commit to paper. I wanted to educate myself and others about the importance of communication across many media, not only the written medium.
I believe that is why forms of computer-mediated communication intrigue me so. Creating and exchanging messages using distance-transcending technologies embodies elements of both written and face-to-face interaction. I'm particularly interested in encouraging others to critically examine how they behave in different communication contexts, and the experience of communicating across cyberspace is just new enough (and to some, just alien enough) to underscore how the medium influences one's message. When Sue DeWine asked me to assist her with the writing of Exploring Human Communication, I specifically asked that we include materials on computer-mediated communication in order to get students thinking about such issues early on in their studies.
Working with Sue and Melissa on this project and in the survey course we taught together has been the highlight of my professional career. Co-authoring and team teaching with these two accomplished scholar/teachers has inspired me to do even better work, and I believe that our collective efforts show in the quality of this textbook.