Communication Studies
Department Mission Statement
The mission of the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University is to educate people in competent and ethical communication for meaningful participation in local and global communities.
Department Goals
The Department of Communication Studies engages students in the study and practice of competent and ethical communication in individual, interpersonal, organizational, cultural, mediated, and public contexts.
Student Learning Objectives
1. Ethical participation and competent communication
- Ethics: Demonstrate understanding of ethical responsibilities in communicating with others.
- Social Responsibility: Understand the dimensions of social responsibility and community engagement as obligations of democratic citizens.
- Basic Skills: Demonstrate basic skills in oral and written communication, and critical thinking.
- Argumentation: Demonstrate competence in understanding and applying argumentation principles, conventions, strategies, and tactics using an adversarial model.
- Criticism: Develop and apply analytical skills for evaluating different forms of communication (oral, textual, visual, performative).
- Rhetorical Foundations: Understand the foundations of rhetoric and the rhetorical role of the citizen in public life.
- Performance: Demonstrate performance as embodied practice and understand how performance is a site for critical communication within social, political, and cultural life.
2. Cultural awareness and global contexts
- Cultural Literacy: Demonstrate basic skills in cultural literacy.
- Cultural Comparison: Appreciate how diverse communication practices arise in response to recurrent and changing problem situations encountered and defined by different cultures.
- Cultural Influence: Identify and discuss the ways in which traditions from a variety of cultures have influenced patterns of communication over time.
- Cultural Sensitivity: Demonstrate sensitivity to the communication practices of cultural groups (defined by concepts of race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc.)
- Globalization: Identify and analyze the relationships among globalization, worldviews, development and change of cultural patterns, and discursive practices.
- Cultural Studies: Identify and discuss the global, socio-historical, economic, and political formations of culture.
- Power: Discuss the role of different forms of power as embedded in communication practices.
3. Information literacy and scholarly practice
- Information Literacy: Demonstrate competence in traditional and emerging forms of communication technology as relevant to this discipline.
- Communication Theories: Identify epistemological and ontological assumptions underlying communication research, including the conceptual, historical and practical dimensions of major theories and methods.
- Research Methods: Demonstrate an understanding of the procedures involved in the more common critical, interpretative, performative and social scientific research methods used to study communication.
- Research Argument: Conduct research systematically and present it persuasively, organizing issues, claims and evidence in a logical form.
(Revised 8-26-05 )
Assessment Schedule (doc)
Assessment Reports: fall 2007 (doc) spring 2007 (doc)
this page last updated 2/18/08
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