Deanna P. Dannels

Critiquing Critiques A Genre Analysis of Feedback Across Novice to Expert Design Studios

In the discipline of design, the most common presentation genre is the critique, and the most central aspect of this genre is the feedback. Using a qualitative framework, this article identifies a typology of feedback, compares the frequencies of feedback types between different levels of design studios ranging from novice to expert, and explores what the feedback reflects about the social and educational context of these design studios. Results suggest that the feedback socialized students into egalitarian relationships and autonomous decision-making identities that were perhaps more reflective of academic developmental stages or idealized workplace contexts than of actual professional settings—therefore potentially complicating the preprofessional goals of the critique.

Teaching and Learning Design Presentations in Engineering Contradictions between Academic and Workplace Activity Systems

In courses within technical disciplines, students are often asked to give oral presentations that simulate a professional context. Yet learning to speak like a professional in this academic context is a process often laden with complications. Using activity theory and situated learning as theoretical frameworks, this article explores the teaching and learning of one of the most common oral genres in technical fields—the design presentation. A study of the teaching and learning of this oral genre in three sequential engineering design courses reveals critical academic and workplace contradictions regarding audience, identity, and structure. Results of this study show that in the teaching and learning of design presentations, audience and identity contradictions were managed by a primary deference to the academic context whereas structural contradictions were addressed by invoking both workplace and academic activity systems.

Communication Across the Curriculum and in the Disciplines: Speaking in Engineering

This study embraces a communication in the disciplines (CID) theoretical framework and explores meanings associated with speaking competently as an engineer. Using qualitative methodology, I analyze faculty lectures and evaluations, student dress and final presentations, and course materials from a senior design series and describe emerging features of speaking competence in engineering. Results indicate five important features of speaking in engineering: simplicity, persuasiveness, results-oriented, numerically rich and visually sophisticated-all of which invoke the skill of translation. Ultimately, this study makes theoretical contributions that suggest orality as a site for disciplinary knowledge construction, disciplinary socialization, and negotiation of disciplinary tension.

Performing Tribal Rituals: A Genre Analysis of “Crits” in Design Studios

Grounded in a communication in the disciplines (CID) theoretical framework, this study was the first phase of a multiphased project exploring oral genres in the academic discipline of design. The purpose of this study was to provide a baseline understanding of how faculty perceive and assign meaning to the oral genres that students performed in their studios. Through qualitative observation and ethnographic interviewing over a year-long period, I explored the types of oral genres in design education, their distinguishing features, skills faculty ascribe to success for these genres, and the role of oral genres in the social communities and practices of design studios. Results illustrate four distinct oral genres in this context—specifically defined by the prominence of visual and spatial elements and audience feedback—within which specific skills mark success. Results also suggest oral genres function as ritualistic performances—a metaphor that illustrates the social, situated, and rhetorical role of oral genres in this context. Ultimately, this study provides an empirically grounded foundation for communication across the curriculum practitioners and makes important theoretical contributions by suggesting a complex connection between orality and the academic discipline of design.

Communication Across the Curriculum and in the Disciplines: A Call for Scholarly Cross-curricular Advocacy

Communication-across-the-curriculum (CXC) programs provide assistance to other disciplines on the teaching and learning of communication—meeting an increasingly important need for students not only to be content specialists, but also coherent communicators. Research emerging from this initiative details programmatic challenges and emphases, but also provides insight into the unique interdisciplinary issues involved with teaching communication in other disciplinary cultures. Through a systematic thematic analysis, this review provides a synopsis of CXC scholarship over the past 25 years—highlighting three distinct eras of CXC scholarship that illustrate differing approaches to negotiating the mission of interdisciplinary change: cross-curricular proactiveness, cross-curricular skepticism, and cross-curricular curiosity. Over this time period researchers in this scholarly discussion have engaged in work that has produced detailed program descriptions and assessment, transferable instructional resources, and increasingly more discipline-specific empirical results and theoretical contributions. To increase CXCs impact, though, future scholarship could respond to pressing challenges by adopting a stance of cross-curricular advocacy that is proactive in ways characteristic of early research but with a more focused commitment to empirical rigor, theoretical sophistication, and reflective scholarly partnerships.

Challenges in Learning Communication Skills in Chemical Engineering.

Communication across the curriculum initiatives face multiple curricular and pedagogical challenges that are especially appropriate for investigation within a scholarship of teaching and learning framework. Using qualitative methodologies, this study examined technical classes that emphasize speaking and writing. Four learning issues emerged in student reflection logs: integrating multidisciplinary information, managing varied audiences and feedback, aligning content and communication tasks, and addressing interpersonal team issues. Data indicated that students were resistant toward the incursion of communication in their engineering classes. Through reflective practice, teachers and cross-curricular consultants came to understand and address that resistance.

Features of Success in Engineering Design Presentations A Call for Relational Genre Knowledge

This study explores design presentations that were graded by engineering faculty in order to assess the distinguishing features of those that were successful. Using a thematic analysis of 17 videotaped, final presentations from a capstone chemical engineering (CHE) course, it explores the rhetorical strategies, oral styles, and organizational structures that differentiate successful and unsuccessful team presentations. The results suggest that successful presenters used rhetorical strategies, oral styles, and organizational structures that illustrated students’ ability to negotiate the real and simulated relational and identity nuances of the design presentation genre—in short, they illustrated students’ relational genre knowledge.

Students' Talk about the Climate of Feedback Interventions in the Critique

Similar to many courses in communication, oral communication is central to the learning goals in the discipline of design. Design critiques, the primary communication activity in design classrooms, occur in every studio course multiple times. One key feature of the critique, as an oral genre, is the amount of time and emphasis placed on feedback. The feedback intervention process within the critique plays a large role in determining the overall communicative climate of the teaching and learning event. The purpose of this study was to explore how students talk about the communication climate of the critique and the feedback within it. Drawing on feedback intervention theory and using an ethnographic interviewing framework, we conducted in-depth interviews of students in design studios. Results of this study identified four ways students characterized the critique climate and six kinds of feedback students suggested contribute to a climate for learning. Discussion suggests that feedback intervention spaces (specifically those focused on oral genres) are dialectical and relational spaces—necessitating attention not only to the cognitive processes of feedback (as feedback intervention theory suggests), but also to the emergent relational tensions that demand communicative energy within the feedback intervention process.

Students’ Perceptions of Oral Screencast Responses to Their Writing Exploring Digitally Mediated Identities

This study explores the intersections between facework, feedback interventions, and digitally mediated modes of response to student writing. Specifically, the study explores one particular mode of feedback intervention—screencast response to written work—through students’ perceptions of its affordances and through dimensions of its role in the mediation of face and construction of identities. Students found screencast technologies to be helpful to their learning and their interpretation of positive affect from their teachers by facilitating personal connections, creating transparency about the teacher’s evaluative process and identity, revealing the teacher’s feelings, providing visual affirmation, and establishing a conversational tone. The screencast technologies seemed to create an evaluative space in which teachers and students could perform digitally mediated pedagogical identities that were relational, affective, and distinct, allowing students to perceive an individualized instructional process enabled by the response mode. These results suggest that exploring the concept of digitally mediated pedagogical identity, especially through alternative modes of response, can be a useful lens for theoretical and empirical exploration.

Inception: Beginning a New Conversation about Communication Pedagogy and Scholarship

Drawing on past pedagogical and scholarly lines of inquiry, this article advances—in a dialogic form—several questions for future research and practice in areas of communication, teaching, and learning. The dialogic form of this article offers a metamessage, inviting colleagues to consider creative approaches to inquiry and collaboration in the 21st century. The ideas and questions presented in this essay serve to push the field beyond disciplinary silos, advance research and pedagogy about teaching and learning, and offer thought-provoking insight into what scholars and practitioners who explore communication, teaching, and learning can contribute to those inside and outside of our discipline.