Critical Communication Pedagogy

Historical Origins

When the National Communication Association (then called the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking) began the formal study of communication, the focus of the organization was dedicated to the teaching of public speaking. These early teachers studied and wrote on how best to teach speech. Since then, the study of pedagogy has always been the center of the formal study of communication, even as it traces its roots to the rhetors of ancient Greece. As a subdiscipline of communication studies, communication education continues to investigate how best to teach the principles of communication, including the best instructional practices for the teaching of such topics as nonverbal communication, persuasive speaking, rhetorical theory, interpersonal communication, and communication theory, to name but a few content areas. The teaching of speech, as a research area, centers on pedagogical practices, [Page 214]claiming that the teaching of communication is unique and requires a discipline-specific pedagogy to meet the needs of communication classrooms.

Often credited with beginning in the 1970s, instructional communication shifts the focus from the teaching of speech to the study of communication in classroom settings, regardless of the discipline. With the careful application of communication theory, scholars investigated a variety of communication phenomena in the context of classrooms, including teacher-student immediacy, student-teacher facework management, communication apprehension, and communication competence. Today, researchers seek to provide useful ways of understanding misbehaviors and miscommunication in the classroom in order to counter them, building more effective classrooms where learning can be enhanced.

The field of education, also in the early 1970s, was beginning to witness the influx of critical theory, the most significant of which was Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in English in 1970. From the workings of Marxist, feminist, and other schools of critical thought, critical pedagogy was taking root as a major force within education. Critical pedagogy examines the institution of education (and the practices that sustain it), arguing that education is deeply rooted in power and serves to reproduce the ideologies of the dominant class. Today, hundreds of books have been written on the topic of critical pedagogy; however, the communication scholar, with his or her attention to the workings of discourse and embodied communication, still struggled to find a place within this conversation. In the early 1990s, Jo Sprague began, in earnest, to introduce critical pedagogy to the field of communication, arguing that communication scholars could offer the research much in terms of focus and analytical precision.

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