Deanna L. Fassett and C. Kyle Rudick

23Critical Communication Pedagogy

Abstract: This chapter provides the philosophical and methodological tools to articulate and pursue a critical agenda with respect to communication and learning. To do so, we first trace the history of critical communication pedagogy (CCP) and its evolution as a discipline-specific form of critical pedagogy. Next, we define and clarify the ten commitments of CCP articulated by Fassett and Warren (2007), which lead us to reflect on the ways that research on communication and learning must occur within a framework that is sensitive to the economic, societal, and environmental challenges that are, and will continue to be, endemic to society without sustained analysis and intervention. In exploring the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical components of CCP, we identify ways researchers and teachers have traditionally engaged it in order to highlight the unique contributions the framework engenders. Finally, we offer avenues for future scholarship with a strong emphasis on reflexivity and praxis. We argue that these two concepts not only encourage CCP scholars to continue using performative and automethodological research to reflect upon and intervene into their own culpability in systems of privilege/ oppression, but also to push them to imagine ways that CCP can inform quantitative, qualitative, and rhetorical scholarship.

Keywords: critical communication pedagogy, critical pedagogy, language as constitutive, praxis, reflexivity

Education is … part of a selective tradition, someone’s selection, some group’s vision of legitimate knowledge. It is produced out of the cultural, political, and economic conflicts, tensions, and compromises that organize and disorganize a people. (Apple, 1996, p. 22)

The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. (hooks, 1994, p. 207)

We have spent considerable time exploring what critical communication pedagogy is not: It is not exactly communication education, although a dedication to the communication classroom, as a point of analysis and examination, remains. It is also not exactly instructional communication, but the site of communication within classroom interaction continues. It is also not exactly critical pedagogy, even as we persist in our effort to maintain a critical orientation. Rather, critical communication pedagogy, as both a field of study and a pedagogical practice, is somewhere in the nexus of the overlapping areas of interest. (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 38)

Perhaps the simplest way to understand what critical communication pedagogy is begins with carefully examining each part of its name. Each term is and is not aligned with its etymological roots. Critical, though typically synonymous with negative or important, reflects a responsibility not only to explore how each of us participates in social systems that privilege some and marginalize others, but also to act on that analysis toward social justice. Communication highlights not only the behaviors and messages that people share with one another, but also how those practices give rise to individuals, cultures, and systems of power. Pedagogy refers to teaching (and typically children), but, in this case, refers not only to teaching and learning, more generally, but also to the study of teaching and learning. Collectively, critical communication pedagogy names a growing body of scholarship in the discipline of Communication Studies that utilizes critical and postmodern frameworks (e.g., Butler, 1990a, 1990b; deCerteau, 1984; Foucault, 1977, 1980; Freire, 1970/2003, 1992) in their examination of teaching, learning, and relating in educational contexts.

Critical communication pedagogy (CCP), “as a field of study and a pedagogical practice” (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 38), extends and respecifies the academic fields of communication education and instructional communication by wedding them to critical pedagogy. Communication education (CE) refers to scholarship that takes as its central focus how best to teach communication as a distinct area of study (similar to, for example, mathematics education or science education). Instructional communication (IC), by contrast, refers to how communication functions to support or challenge teaching and learning across a variety of instructional contexts (from the parent-child dyad to the training seminar, though the vast majority of research addresses the university classroom). Taken together, these sub-disciplines form the body of scholarship in Communication Studies that explores communication and learning.

Warren (2009) argued that CCP “serves as a framework that collects and provides coherence for the diverse work that takes a critical lens to issues of communication in pedagogical contexts” (p. 213). This framework is characterized by two equally important contributions: (1) raising “unasked questions” about concepts that have largely been overlooked by mainstream CE and IC scholarship, such as identity, context, and the goals of learning (e.g., Hendrix & Wilson, 2014; Rudick & Golsan, 2014; Sprague 1992, 1993, 1994, 2002); and (2) crafting research that not only incorporates those dynamics, but also traces the way power circulates and systemic inequality is (re)produced through communication about/for teaching and learning (e.g., Cooks & Sun, 2002; Cooks & Warren, 2011; Cummins & Griffin, 2011; Fassett & Warren, 2004, 2005; Warren, 2001a, 2001b). This perspective calls for research and teaching that focus on the ways communication creates shared social realities that reflect and produce the current socio-historical moment – one that is “rife with contradictions and asymmetries of power and privilege” (McLaren, 2002, p. 193).

Since 2007, CCP scholarship has become an increasingly mainstream form of research and pedagogical practice, and it has been featured in communication and interdisciplinary journals, such as Communication Teacher, Western Journal of Communication, Liminalities, Text & Performance Quarterly, and Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies. Despite its heurism, very little CCP-inspired research (and, indeed, very little critical research of any type), has found its way into the pages of Communication Education. Although the dearth of critical scholarship in this discipline’s flagship journal may be a symptom of ongoing disregard or disinterest toward critical and postmodern research by post-positive scholars, we also wish to acknowledge that some of this fault may also lie in CCP scholars’ tendency to rely on performative and autoethnographic methods. It is somewhat hypocritical for CCP scholars to assert that post-positive scholars should explore quantitative methods other than cross-sectional self-report surveys (e.g., naturalistic experiments, longitudinal designs, or content analyses) when critical scholars themselves may similarly over-rely on one type of research practice. If CCP scholars are to make their full disciplinary contribution and change conversations about communication and learning to encompass questions concerning social justice, then it is vitally important that they use all methods at their disposal to create a critical mass within the discipline.

Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to provide new and continuing CCP scholars with the philosophical and methodological tools necessary to articulate and pursue a critical agenda with respect to communication and learning. To do so, we first trace the history of CCP and its evolution as a discipline-specific form of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970/2003). The lineage of CCP is a paradigmatic shift in the Kuhnian (1996) sense; that is, its evolution is characterized more by fits and starts than by a neat, orderly, and linear development. Nevertheless, we will trace the history of CCP from a chronological perspective for purposes of clarity. At the same time, we wish to acknowledge all the little moments at conferences, in classrooms, and at keyboards that have gone into the emergent articulation of CCP – significant conversations that cannot be represented in this chapter (Fassett & Warren, 2007). Next, we will identify and explain the major conceptual components of a CCP framework by defining and clarifying the 10 commitments of CCP articulated by Fassett and Warren (2007). These commitments lead us to reflect on the ways that communication and learning takes a renewed sense of urgency within a framework that is sensitive to the economic, societal, and environmental disasters that are, and will continue to be, endemic to society without sustained analysis and intervention. In exploring the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical components of CCP, we identify ways that researchers and teachers have traditionally utilized CCP to highlight the unique contributions the framework engenders. Finally, we will offer avenues for future scholarship with a strong emphasis on reflexivity and praxis. We argue that these two concepts not only encourage CCP scholars to continue using performative and automethodological research to reflect upon and intervene into their own culpability in systems of privilege/oppression, but also to push them to imagine ways that CCP can inform quantitative, qualitative, and rhetorical scholarship. Overall, our goal in this chapter is to articulate how CCP has the ability to expand conversations about communication and learning while simultaneously providing a specific contribution to an ongoing critical project about power, oppression, and privilege in contemporary society.

Historical Underpinnings

In the last 30 years, critical communication teachers and scholars who investigate the ways that power, identity, and embodiment are negotiated in their classrooms (e.g., Cooks, 1993; Jackson & Heckman, 2002; Johnson & Bhatt, 2003; Pineau, 1994; Warren, 2011a, 2011b) found little in the communication and learning literature that explored these dynamics. The majority of CE and IC research has relied on state/trait-based research (e.g., verbal aggressiveness), decontextualized communicative behaviors (e.g., verbal immediacy), or interpersonal-level understandings of power (Sprague, 1992, 1994). As such, many communication scholars interested in understanding the ways that power, privilege, and oppression are communicatively (re)produced through educational systems had to look outside of the field of communication to read and produce scholarship (Fassett & Warren, 2007). Thus, it is no surprise that CCP owes much to social foundations of education (i.e., philosophy and sociology of education), and critical pedagogy literature in particular, due to their emphasis on these topics (Freire, 1970/2003; Giroux, 2003; Giroux & Penna, 1983; Kincheloe & McLaren, 2008).

Critical pedagogy (CP) developed from the critical scholarship of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1970/2003) but has grown to encompass a worldwide movement of researching and teaching that identifies and challenges unjust power relationships perpetuated through education. Critical pedagogy is an umbrella term referring to many different social justice pedagogies, including feminist, postcolonial, postmodern, poststructural, and neo-Marxist (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2008). Giroux (1994) argues that CP connects the intricate relationships among structures, identities, and pedagogies:

[Critical pedagogy] signals how questions of audience, voice, power, and evaluation actively work to construct particular relations between teachers and students, institutions, and society, and classroom and communities … Pedagogy in the critical sense illuminates the relationship among knowledge, authority, and power. (p. 30)

CP is predicated on the belief that learning, like all social interactions, is an act with political consequences and argues that it is in the “very nature” of pedagogy to be “a political, moral, and critical practice” (Giroux, 2006, p. 31). In other words, CP scholars take education to be an important site of intervention for resisting dehumanization, alienation, and oppression within society.

Perhaps the most well-known instances of CP literature influencing the work of communication scholars are the series of essays written by Sprague (1992, 1994, 2002). In her opening essay, and subsequent rebuttal of Rodriguez and Cai’s (1994) critique, Sprague articulated a series of questions that, while rooted in CP literature, were meant to expand the scope and insightfulness of CE and IC scholarship. Importantly, her criticisms were not a matter of methodology but were rooted in a concern about the epistemological and ontological assumptions of CE and IC scholarship as it was practiced by the majority of scholars at that time. For example, in asking, “Why do schools exist?” Sprague (1992) challenged CE and IC scholars, who presupposed schools and schooling as an inherently positive endeavor (e.g., to gain knowledge or increase economic mobility), to reflect on their emphasis on affective learning and classroom management. She argued that, although schools may have some positive effects on individuals and society, they also have the function of enforcing conformity, deculturating groups (particularly racial minorities), and reproducing a class-caste system. In other words, she contended that CE and IC scholarship, by neglecting those issues, risked becoming culpable in those very systems of oppression. The questions Sprague asked, and the political, social, and economic implications of their answers, provided the primary reason why communication scholars interested in teaching and learning could not (and cannot) simply “agree to disagree” and stay in their respective areas of study. Rather, her work challenged scholars across and within the fields of communication and learning to grapple with tough questions about the nature of schools, teaching, development, knowledge, language, and power.

Precipitated, in part, by Sprague’s essays, communication scholars began publishing CP-related literature in regard to communication and learning, perhaps best exemplified in the publication of a special issue of Communication Education (2003, issue 3–4) dedicated to identity, culture, and power. Hendrix, Jackson, and Warren’s (2003) comprehensive review of the journal showed that the field lacked a “prolonged, systemic investigation of the influence of race or the interplay of multiple cultural identities in academic settings … [instead] we only see periodic sparks of light” (p. 177). The journal issue created a space for a series of articles that spoke directly to that lack, and other critical work emerged near that same time. Nainby and Pea (2003) explored the process by which they, as self-identified working-class White males, had to unlearn childhood lessons in order to acquire and perform the scripts of middle-class academic identity. Nainby, Warren, and Bollinger (2003) theorized how Stewart’s (1995) notion of articulate contact productively challenges the real/ communicative dualism that permeates Freire’s early work, developing an early application of a constitutive approach of language to understanding communication in and about pedagogical spaces. Fassett and Warren (2004) took up Nakayama and Krizek’s (1995) notion of strategic rhetoric to outline the ways that success/ failure is communicated and created in higher education. They drew upon Freire’s (1992) work to argue for “examining and critiquing language as a way to uncover how power is situated and maintained” (p. 25) within classrooms. Similarly, Warren and Hytten (2004) utilized Conquergood’s (1985) moral map to identify the ways that students’ communication reveals different pitfalls that forestall emancipatory thinking, and they drew upon CP literature to posit the aspirational goal of the critical democrat. As critical communication scholars’ work utilizing CP began to appear sparely in communication journals (e.g., Alexander & Warren, 2002; Cooks, 2003; Treinen & Warren, 2001, in addition to the above), it began to appear more frequently in educational and interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Alexander, 2004; Gust & Warren, 2008; Hytten & Warren, 2003; Pensoneau-Conway & Toyosaki, 2008; Pineau, 1994; Toyosaki, Pensoneau-Conway, Wendt, & Leathers, 2009; Warren & Fassett, 2004; Zompetti, 2006).

It was in reaction to CE and IC scholars’ continued neglect of the questions raised by Sprague (1992, 1994, 2002), as well as the desire to find a home more securely located within the Communication Studies discipline, that Fassett and Warren articulated critical communication pedagogy in their 2007 text of the same name. Although Fassett and Warren took care to note that they were not the first to describe or define critical communication pedagogy, their work did signal a significant turning point in terms of the coherence and vitality of the field of CCP for three reasons. First, the text was the first book-length work in communication and learning to take seriously the notion of communication as constitutive (Stewart, 1995). The dominant frameworks for other scholars (particularly IC scholars) have been action, interaction, and transactional models of communication (Mottet & Beebe, 2006), which are rooted in a social-psychological model of communication and rely on an individual level of analysis (e.g., teacher-to-student or student-to-student). Subsequently, research utilizing those models has been concerned primarily with the effectiveness of messages, compliance-gaining, and relationshipbuilding without necessarily theorizing the sociological dimensions of communication (see Deetz, 1992). Conversely, Fassett and Warren (2007) exhort researchers and teachers to recognize how communication, and the production of meaning, is never simply a self-contained, isolable, and dyadic event, but rather draws upon and (re)produces the norms, rules, and identities that make meaning possible. Second, their work created a space where new and continuing scholars could find each other’s work, legitimizing communication scholarship that focuses on the study of teaching and learning from a critical frame. Before their text, a researcher or teacher would have to be familiar with educational foundations terminology (or have access to education journals) to find most critical communication research about education; however, Fassett and Warren’s articulation of CCP provided an umbrella term that critical communication scholars could use to identify and build upon each other’s work. Finally, citing the influence of Pineau (1994) and Pelias (2000), Fassett and Warren not only wrote about resisting hegemonic norms of researching and teaching about communication and learning, they also wrote their resistance in the form of the book’s text – evocative, vulnerable, and personable. This departure from traditional social scientific writing not only showed CCP’s potential as a liberatory framework, it also set the stage for its primary mode of research for the next eight years: performative and automethodological writing. Overall, Fassett and Warren’s text heightened awareness of Sprague’s initial arguments while also placing them within a framework that ensured that critical conversations about communication and learning would become less sparse and more focused.

Current CCP scholarship has taken up Fassett and Warren’s arguments (in both content and form) to explore areas that fall outside the purview of traditional CE and IC scholarship. The framework has been utilized in research concerning racism and racial stereotypes (Cummins & Griffin, 2012), institutional/performative logics of disability and ableism (Fassett & Morella, 2008), neoliberalism and educational practices (Jones & Calafell, 2012; Kahl, 2015), whiteness and critical race theory (Endres & Gould, 2009; Simpson, 2010; Warren, 2003, 2005), silence and intercultural communication (Hao, 2011, 2012), student-teacher relationships (Rudick & Golsan, 2014), dialogue and multiculturalism (De La Mare, 2014a, 2014b) and difference (Warren & Toyosaki, 2012). Additionally, it has been used as a pedagogical framework for teaching organizational communication and difference (Allen, 2011; Ashcraft & Allen, 2009), autoethnography (Kahl, 2010, 2011, 2013), masculinity movements and feminism (Kahl, 2015), queer identity, kinship and heterosexism (Gust & Warren, 2008; Jones & Calafell, 2012; McConnell, 2012); performance (Huber & McRae, 2014), and listening (McRae, 2015). Collectively, the quantity, quality, and breadth of these studies demonstrates that CCP continues to have a great deal of influence within critical communication scholarship, despite being relatively young as a framework. In the next section, we outline Fassett and Warren’s 10 Commitments of CCP to explain its primary tenets and terminology to those researchers and teachers interested in taking up and continuing the CCP tradition.

Theory, Method, and Pedagogy: 10 Commitments of Critical Communication Pedagogy

Fassett and Warren (2010) situated CCP within the overlapping fields of CE, IC, and CP scholarship. As such, its study is not “a subdiscipline, on par with communication education or instructional communication, but rather an extension or respecification” (p. X). In other words, CCP denotes a critical paradigmatic approach for the study of communication and instruction – one that focuses on analysis of culture and power in the service of social justice. CCP also signals a critical paradigmatic approach to classroom practice – one that is fundamentally student-centered, dialogic, and attentive to power and privilege. CCP scholarship focuses on how to foster social justice both within the teaching of communication and within research about communication across a variety of disciplinary and social contexts.

In articulating CCP, Fassett and Warren (2007) offered 10 Commitments to guide new and continuing critical communication scholars in their research and teaching. Each of the commitments is predicated upon a critical ethic (i.e., challenging systemic inequality) and a constitutive philosophy of communication (i.e., that language creates social realities). In doing so, their commitments address the limitations of mainstream CE, IC, and CP literature by articulating a communication-specific understanding of power, privilege, and oppression within educational spaces. We identify and discuss these commitments below.

Commitment 1: Identity is constituted in communication (Fassett and Warren, 2007, p. 39).

Mainstream CE and IC scholarship, when they have taken identity into consideration at all, often treat it as the amalgam of demographic information (e.g., academic major or class year) and traits (e.g., race/ethnicity, biological sex, or age). This type of analysis serves to posit identity a priori and thus runs the risk of “freezing” students into particular identity categories (e.g., Millennial students talk like …, First-generation students relate like …, or LGBTQ students learn like …). Fassett & Warren (2007) note that although these approaches have yielded helpful information about communication attitudes, behaviors, and skills, if emphasized to the exclusion of other paradigmatic perspectives and research methodologies, they do not fully address or acknowledge the relationship between identity and communication. For example, they argue identifying students as “at-risk” mobilizes a host of programs and actions that serve to address the very real and unique needs of this type of student. However, they also caution that this ethic, when taken too far, can harm students by creating institutional and discursive boxes that disempower students through top-down regulatory regimes (see also Fassett & Warren, 2004; Rudick & Golsan, 2014). Traditional CE and IC scholarship, by not interrogating their assumptions in ascribing identities to populations, serve to reify what are, in actuality, historically-informed and socially-constructed categories.

CCP scholars seek to better understand the centrality of communication within teaching and learning by exploring how even the most mundane speech acts create identities. In doing so, they draw upon constitutive and performative frameworks that resist demarcating identity into a set of boxes to be checked (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980/2003; Stewart, 1995). For example, Butler’s (1990a, 1990b) notion of performativity pushes CCP scholars to identify the ways that cultural, institutional, and relational communicative codes, within a particular context, make identity material. Butler’s (1990a) oft-quoted description of gender is particularly illuminating: “Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts precede; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (p. 270, emphasis hers). From this perspective, individuals do not simply communicate their gender but rather create it through their words, gestures, rituals, and habits. Repetition of these behaviors gives this aspect of identity, gender, the appearance of stability, but its materiality is a performative accomplishment rather than an a priori given. CCP scholars, by utilizing frameworks that stress the importance of communication in the creation of identity, challenge communication and learning scholarship to not take identity for granted, but rather to understand its emergent and dynamic nature.

Commitment 2: Power is fluid and complex (Fassett and Warren, 2007, p. 41).

With rare exceptions (e.g., Wood & Fassett, 2003), researchers in communication and learning have relied on an interpersonal, intentional, and strategic understanding of power to the exclusion of other conceptualizations. Specifically, research concerning power often reflects the philosophical biases of post-positive scholars, who dismiss the importance of engaging in a broader understanding of the nature of power. For example, the Power in the Classroom series (Kearney, Plax, Richmond, & McCroskey, 1984, 1985; McCroskey & Richmond, 1983; McCroskey, Richmond, Plax, & Kearney, 1985; Plax, Kearney, McCroskey, & Richmond, 1986; Richmond & McCroskey, 1984; Richmond, McCroskey, Kearney, & Plax, 1987) relied primarily on French and Raven’s (1959) understanding of power to generate Behavioral Alteration Techniques (BATs) and Behavioral Alteration Messages (BAMs) that teachers use to encourage positive classroom behaviors (e.g., time on task) and manage negative classroom behaviors (e.g., disruptive talking). Overall, these studies conceptualize power as a tool teachers should learn to deploy consistently and effectively to achieve desirable classroom outcomes

Sprague (1992, 1994), drawing upon CP scholarship, critiqued mainstream communication and learning research concerning power on a number of fronts (e.g., conceptual fit, validity, and consistency). Perhaps most important to a CCP agenda was her assertion that CE and IC scholars have based their scholarship concerning power on a series of assumptions that produce a simplistic view of its nature and function. Drawing upon Lukes (1974), she argued that power in the classroom research relies on a one-dimensional conceptualization of power; that is, how an individual (e.g., a teacher) intentionally and explicitly attempts to get other individuals (e.g., students) to do something they would not have normally done. Although certainly this type of power is exercised in the classroom, she argued that it does not account for the indirect ways that an individual can get another individual to do something (i.e., a two-dimensional view) or the ways that institutional, cultural, and relational logics shape and constrain individuals’ abilities to know and pursue interests (i.e., a three-dimensional view). In arguing for an increased attention to the latter two understandings of power, Sprague did not seek abandonment of the first type. Rather, she clearly articulated that scholars across paradigmatic loyalties needed to take seriously each other’s contributions and good-faith questions in order to produce a multidimensional and communicationspecific view of power. Mainstream IC scholars have largely dismissed her claims while continuing to produce research that relies on a one-dimensional view of power (e.g., Goodboy & Bolkan, 2011; Turman & Schrodt, 2006).

CCP scholars’ understanding of power attends to and extends Sprague’s (1992, 1994) calls. Drawing upon critical and postmodern perspectives, CCP scholarship has focused primarily upon how communicative interactions in pedagogical contexts draw upon and reproduce a host of disciplinary regimes in ways that encapsulate, yet move beyond, viewing power as simply a matter of compliance gaining. As Cooks and Warren (2011) stated, “Schools and schooling … are sites for training bodies to behave in socially sanctioned ways. As such, they are primary spaces for the production of discourses and performances of citizenship, sociability, and competency, as well as evaluatory agencies for (dis)conforming bodies” (p. 211). Important in their assertion is the recognition that education is not inherently positive, but is comprised of complementary and contradictory goals that serve to produce students and teachers who are (less) likely to perceive and intervene into social injustices. This realization prompts CCP scholars to focus attention on the ways that (for example) a White teacher attempting to elicit compliance from a Black student moves beyond simple conversations about the effectiveness of such strategies to engender questions about racism, social justice, and cultural capital (e.g., how such discipline has evolved, in some sense, from a long history of education as a means of cultural genocide for African Americans, among others; see Cobham & Parker, 2007). This multi-dimensional view challenges researchers to be attentive to the ways that power in educational contexts circulates within and beyond the classroom to produce and (de)value identities. Simultaneously, it prompts teachers to consider how the exercise of power serves particular ideological perspectives that benefit from compliance and complacency and calls them to be more reflexive about their communication in the classroom.

Commitment 3: Culture is central, not additive (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 42).

As Rudick and Golsan (2014) noted, the way that culture has been treated in mainstream CE and IC scholarship reflects a disengagement from substantial conversations about the relationship between communication and culture (see also Hendrix et al., 2003; Hendrix & Wilson, 2014). On one hand, culture is simply not present in the research design, with IC researchers favoring the identity of “student” and “teacher” writ large. For example, many scholars do not report the racial demographics of their samples (e.g., Sollitto, Johnson, & Myers, 2013; Thweatt & McCroskey, 1998). Other IC scholars act as if their findings are generalizable “student” behaviors or traits, even though their samples are predominantly comprised of White students (e.g., Banfield, Richmond & McCroskey, 2006; Vallade & Myers, 2014). These oversights can have the unfortunate side effect of conflating dominant norms (e.g., masculine, whiteness, or bourgeoisie) with the prescriptions for or descriptions of the ways that students and teachers communicate (see Lorde, 1984). On the other hand, culture is viewed as added to the research design as a variable of analysis. Studies within this vein often take a cross-cultural approach, taking a construct created in a U.S. context to make comparisons about different cultures (e.g., East vs. West or High vs. Low Context; e.g., Barraclough, Christophel, & McCroskey, 1988; McCroskey, Richmond, Sallinen, Fayer, & Barraclough, 1995). Such a view implies that constructs (e.g., immediacy) can be imposed upon another culture rather than creating a culturally-specific instrument. In other words, it does not recognize the cultural situatedness of (in this case) U.S. scholars in their creation of measures and (through that elision) implicitly assumes their understanding as normal with other countries’ culture “added.”

In contrast to these two tendencies, CCP scholars assume that culture is central to the process of communication, rather than simply added (or, even worse, erased). Fassett and Warren (2007) argued that research must be attentive to the ways that cultures are “created, sustained, and altered in communication” (p. 43). Minimally, this notion prompts CE and IC researchers to recognize the situatedness of their findings, particularly when so much of their scholarship relies on crosssectional self-report surveys conducted with predominantly White samples. Pushing beyond this (low) bar, CCP scholars draw primarily on ethnomethodological and qualitative research designs to understand how students and teachers “perform” or “do” culture. For example, Fassett and Morella (2008), through autoethnographic writing, traced the ways that dis/ ability is embedded in the institutional logics that students with disabilities communicatively navigate in higher education. Through their work, they located the micro-moments that constitute the culture of ableism that permeates higher education. They demonstrated the ways that this culture shapes teachers’, administrators’, and staff members’ understanding of dis/abled students, constraining the ways those students can imagine and pursue resistance, subversion, and success within the educational system. Thus, rather than erasing disability or acting as if its analysis is simply a matter of adding it to characteristics of so-called normal students, CCP argues for an emic analysis to fashion particular, situated, and nuanced depictions of communication/ culture.

Commitment 4: CCP focuses on concrete, mundane communication practices as constitutive of larger structural systems (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 43).

As noted above, CP scholarship has had an enormous influence on CCP. However, Fassett and Warren (2007) were careful to acknowledge the critiques of CP and attempted to address them within their framework. Perhaps the most damning critiques against CP were those leveled by feminist scholars who argued that it exhibits tendencies to be elitist, unwieldy, and totalizing as a discourse about society and education. In one of the most well-known instances, hooks (1994) confronted Freire over his masculinist writing style, asserting that it ignored the gendered dynamics of oppression. Ellsworth (1992) argued that critical pedagogy assumed a modernist rationality, and its notions of “‘empowerment,’ ‘student voice,’ ‘dialogue,’ and even ‘critical’ – are repressive myths that perpetuate relations of domination” (p. 91). Finally, Gore (1992) contended that much of the critical pedagogy literature was too far removed from actual classroom practice and was thus better understood as critical theory about pedagogy than a critical pedagogy. Some CP scholars have responded in ways that have kept conversations open and illuminating (e.g., Freire, 1998), whereas others’ rebuttals have been little more than attempted character assassination (Giroux, 1988; McLaren, 1988). Regardless of the response, the fact remains that critiques of CP have seriously challenged many of its core tenets.

These conversations prompted Fassett and Warren (2007) to articulate a vision for CCP that incorporated these critiques from the very founding of its framework. Specifically, they argued that much of this criticism has, at its root, the common understanding of CP as too structural due to its neo-Marxist assumptions. They noted that, although (at its best) CP scholars trace the micro practices of classroom interactions and curriculum development (McLaren, 2002; Shor, 1996), too much of the work has had a strong top-down approach to theorizing social relations. As a result, traditional CP scholarship tended to overlook the very subjects of domination in its quest to theorize the causes and solutions to their plight. To avoid a similar fate, they argued that CCP scholars should analyze the everyday, concrete, and mundane communicative interactions within educational spaces as their primary site of intervention. For example, rituals within the classroom (e.g., desk arrangement, turn-taking, or honorifics) provide sites for CCP scholars to apprehend the ebb and flow of power within the classroom. Who speaks, who is heard, or who is rewarded/ punished all take on a larger significance than simple classroom management concerns within a CCP analysis because these dynamics reflect the ways that identity, culture, and power are mobilized through seemingly innocuous interactions. By taking this focus, CCP scholars eschew creating scholarship that addresses only a small discourse community of like-minded academics; rather, they provide pragmatic advice to teachers and students by helping them identify the ways that seemingly innocuous communicative acts within classroom (re)produce systemic inequality.

Commitment 5: Social, structural critique contextualizes concrete, mundane communication practices (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 45).

Although Fassett and Warren (2007) exhorted CCP scholars and teachers to focus on the mundane aspects of communication, they asserted that this emphasis does not preclude structural critique. Rather, they argued that researchers must connect social analysis to the everyday social realities experienced by students and teachers. They embraced the co-constitutive role of the mundane with the social through the use of a performative philosophy of communication. For example, Butler (1990b) stated that gender is comprised of “a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (p. 33). In other words, gender is made real or material through the mannerisms, jokes, and rituals that constitute (fe)male-ness, while at the same time, those actions only have pragmatic force (in the sociolinguistics sense of the term) because of the social structure that precedes and is constituted by those acts. In this analysis, the cultural and institutional logics that guide students’ and teachers’ communication (i.e., regulatory frames) are not the subject of abstract critique, but are made meaningful through ways that researchers identify how those norms can be sites of intervention into domination (i.e.,disrupting the repetition of hegemonic acts). Overall, the fifth commitment, when added to the fourth, requires CCP scholars to focus on the recursive relationship between individuals and structures to provide accounts that respect the agency, voice, and experiences of those who live within that dynamic.

Admittedly, there has been very little scholarship (and none by CCP scholars to date) that has taken up this type of analysis. Perhaps the best example would be McMillan and Cheney’s (1996) rhetorical analysis of the student as consumer metaphor. In their essay, they examined the ways that this type of languaging does not simply describe the existing relationships between students and teachers, but instead prescribes certain understandings of those dynamics and mobilizes some actions while inhibiting others. For example, they argued that conceptualizing students as customers highlights certain prerogatives that they have, such as filling out customer satisfaction cards (i.e., course evaluations). Simultaneously, the metaphor also serves to devalue knowledge by equating choosing coursework with selecting one’s favorite food from a buffet. They offered new ways of languaging student-teacher relationships that serve to resist the imposition of marketplace logics on the academy to imagine critically-informed ways of relating. Thus, their work moved beyond simply identifying language in the abstract by pointing to the ways that students and teachers can begin articulating relationships that are not predicated upon the naked cost/benefit analysis that characterizes a neoliberal capitalist ethic. In doing so, they connected their structural critique to the everyday and (in our opinion) write through a CCP ethic.

Commitment 6: Language (and analysis of language) is central to CCP (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 48).

The notion that language is central to communication scholarship would seem, at first blush, to be a truism. If communication scholars do not study language, then who does? Yet, much traditional CE and IC scholarship does not examine actual sequences of talk, instead relying on (at best) self-reports of past communicative acts and (at worst) decontextualized psycho-communicative traits. As Sprague (1994) clearly articulated:

I question whether a “communication based” theory can ever be generated from a methodology that relies on responses to hypothetical scenarios and on retrospective reports of static descriptors … I question the operationalization of messages as composite abstractions that have never been uttered by any specific teacher in any specific classroom … I wonder if research strategies like this are leading toward or away from a communication-based theory of teacher influence. (pp. 277–278)

At the heart of Sprague’s concern was the realization that mainstream CE and IC research has over-relied (and continues to over-rely) on simplistic methodologies (e.g., self-report, cross-sectional surveys) that cannot capture communicative behavior in situ. Although certainly the statistical methods used to analyze these surveys have grown increasingly sophisticated, they have not and cannot address the fundamental limitation of their design – that they do not examine actual communication.

Fassett and Warren (2007), in recognizing the centrality of language, provided a foundation from which CCP scholars can fulfill their disciplinary mission to theorize communication as it emerges in educational contexts. To generate a communication-specific understanding of education and pedagogy, they argued that the methods of gathering data must be able to capture the complexity of communication in action. This realization pushes communication and learning scholars to utilize methodological tools that are sensitive to the ways that meaning is created within educational spaces. Automethodological and performance scholarship has the potential to fulfill this task through their focus on embodiment, tracing the ways that meaning (and power) circulate within micro-practices (see, for example, Calafell, 2007, 2010; Warren, 2011a, 2011b). Additionally, many empirical-qualitative research methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups, and ethnography of communication) are well suited to crafting a communication-specific understanding on communication and learning due to their emphasis on understanding participants’ meaning-making. Furthermore, critical-qualitative research methods (e.g., critical discourse analysis, participant action research, or indigenous methods) provide ways for CCP researchers to develop communication-based insights into privilege/ oppression. Moreover, rhetorical scholarship (e.g., critical-materialist, feminist, or ideographic rhetoric) has the ability to provide insights into the institutional, cultural, and mediated texts that function pedagogically to “teach” individuals to (de)value certain people, norms, and rules. Finally, quantitative methods (e.g., naturalistic experiments and content analyses) can capture and analyze actual sequences of talk between and among students and teachers within the classroom. In fact, although many might view quantitative methodologies and a critical paradigm as incommensurable, Fassett and Warren (2007) argued that such work is not only possible, but necessary for the vitality of communication and instruction research. Overall, a CCP perspective challenges scholars of all methodological stripes to ensure that their scholarship focuses on language use as its analytical point of entry.

Commitment 7: Reflexivity is an essential condition for CCP (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 50).

As Sprague (1992, 1994) noted, mainstream IC scholars have often relied upon a language of discovery when reporting their findings. The language of discovery assumes that research and researchers should remain (or, at least, pretend to be) neutral, objective, and dispassionate to produce research that is reliable and valid. She argues that using phrases such as “the researchers found …” downplay the interpretive role of the investigators and make it appear as if their results are a matter of uncovering an apprehendable, material fact. This ethic is common within post-positive social science due to the way that it tries to mirror the aims and language of natural science. Within this framework, finding the ways that humans interact is (or, at least, should be treated as) no different than finding the number of protons in an atom. Despite Sprague’s calls, mainstream IC scholars continue to use the language of discovery. For example, Sollitto et al. (2013) state in their discussion section, “The purpose of the study was to investigate how the different types of relationships students form with their classmates affect perceptions of classroom connectedness and classroom assimilation. Four major findings emerged” (p. 325, emphasis ours). Such assertions make it appear as if findings emerge like Athena from Zeus’ head – fully formed and perfect.

CCP scholars, in building from Sprague’s (1992, 1994) insights, adopt a language of conversation/ argument to recognize the role of the researcher in generating, producing, interpreting, or creating their findings. A language of conversation/ argument prompts CCP scholars to adopt a reflexive stance within their research projects, to realize that all research (like all communication) reflects and produces the norms, values, and prejudices of a given historical moment. As Fassett and Warren (2007) argued:

Reflexivity is the critical communication educator’s ethical relationship to or with the phenomena and participants of our scholarship, whereby we situate knowledge, locating it in temporal, personal, and sociopolitical contexts that extend, enrich, and seek out multiple readings of our work. (p. 50)

This ethic not only recognizes the role of researchers in the research design process (e.g., the questions asked, the method chosen, or the explanations given), but also pushes researchers to situate their identity in relation to those dynamics. Of course, not all research must adopt performative or automethodological writing styles; however, researchers must recognize their role in the research process and meaningfully show how their own experiences shape and constrain its design and execution.

Commitment 8: CCP educators embrace pedagogy and research as praxis (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 50).

Throughout U.S. history, and intensifying sharply in the post-Reagan political landscape, education and those who work within it have always endured a certain level of scorn and distrust (well-documented by Berliner & Biddle, 1995 and reaffirmed by Berliner & Glass, 2014). Popular sayings such as, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach,” or “There are lies, damned lies. And, then there are statistics,” highlight the anti-intellectualism that permeates the U.S. political landscape. Worse than the attacks on education from the outside are those internecine wars between those who identify primarily as either teachers or researchers. All too often, teachers blame researchers for being too abstract and disconnected from the lives of the students who inhabit their classes. Conversely, researchers often attack teachers for being anti-theoretical and disconnected from developments in research that should inform teaching methods and content. Complicating this matter is the increased pressure on instructors to publish research or pursue grants, even at universities that have not traditionally demanded these activities as a part of an instructor’s application or tenure file.

Fassett and Warren (2007), in embracing both pedagogy and research as praxis, recognized the importance of both in creating public intellectuals who are able to advocate alongside marginalized people (see Giroux, 2010). Drawing upon Freire (1970/2003), they defined praxis as both theoretically-informed action and actioninformed theory. In other words, teaching and researching share a mutually informing role, creating pedagogical and research practices that resist a priori answers to craft specific, contextual, and nuanced solutions. Pedagogy as praxis encourages teachers and students to work together to “locate and name the taken-for-granted in pedagogical contexts, to decenter normative readings of a given phenomenon, experience or idea” (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 51). Research as praxis entails reflexively “working with others … [and being] explicitly reform oriented; researchers in this vein aim to change our world for the better” (Fassett & Warren, 2007, pp. 51–52). Kahl’s (2011, 2013) scholarship advocating for autoethnography as a form of praxical writing within service learning is an exemplar of this type of ethic. He argued that engaging in this mode of teaching/ researching, students and teachers are able to create a space for both modes of activism, respecting their unique yet overlapping roles within movements for social justice. Overall, understanding research and pedagogy as praxis gives an incentive for both teachers and researchers to combine their efforts, respect each other’s contributions, and marshal their critical energies toward transforming the university and community landscape through their service as public intellectuals.

Commitment 9: CCP educators embrace a nuanced understanding of subjectivity and agency (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 52).

The role of subjectivity and agency remains a hotly contested issue within critical and postmodern theories. On the one hand, some critical scholars theorize social relations in such a heavy, top-down manner that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to see how individuals can change their circumstances. On the other hand, some postmodern scholars give little attention to the ways that agency assumes structure and over-emphasize the ability of individuals to resist, subvert, or defer hegemonic discourses (see Best & Kellner, 1991; Giroux, 1983; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). These debates, while showing no signs of ending, prompt CCP scholars to resist the morally and methodologically dubious propositions of viewing research participants as either mindless, programmable dupes living under false consciousness or as fragmented, ephemeral beings whose creative capacities transcend their material realities. CCP scholars, in navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of critical/postmodern thought, focus on participants’ communicative behaviors to generate a dialectical portrait of subjectivity and agency.

By engaging in a dialectical understanding of the relationship between structure and agency, CCP scholars respect the ways that “students and teachers take up, resist, defer, and subvert communicative expectations through their creative communicative improvisations” (Rudick & Golsan, 2014, p. 262). CCP scholarship is predicated upon the belief that communicative acts necessarily draw upon the cultural, institutional, and relational codes that make meaning possible. Simultaneously, agency is possible precisely because ideologies, in their overlapping, contradictory, and complementary dance, do not constitute a deterministic force. This dynamic gives students and teachers the ability to understand how communication, particularly mundane communication, is a site for intervention in oppressive ideologies by exploring “the possibility of a variation [within] repetition” (Butler, 1990b, p. 145). In other words, understanding the ways that structure shapes and constrains mundane signifying practices provides individuals with the means by which to identify and produce tactical responses to hegemony (see deCerteau, 1984). Furthermore, CCP researchers and teachers, by embracing a dialectical framework, seek to decenter themselves as the ones who (through their scholarship or training) inhabit a God’s-eye view of oppression, privilege, or power. This ethic challenges CCP scholars to recognize their limited and limiting ways of understanding social relations and embrace a reflexive stance within their research and teaching.

Commitment 10: Dialogue is metaphor and method for our relationships with others (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 54).

Although scholars’ conceptualizations of dialogue vary greatly, CCP relies primarily upon a CP understanding of dialogue. Freire (1970/2003) defined dialogue as an “encounter between men [and women], mediated by the world, in order to name the world,” (Freire, 1970/2003, p. 88). Dialogue is not simply a good or nice conversation; it is an intentional communicative ethic that challenges students and teachers to name the oppressive systems that constrain their ability to live freely in the world. Freire asserted that dialogue is comprised of five parts: (1) love for life and for people, (2) humility to realize one’s situatedness, (3) faith that all people can work toward social justice, (4) hope that a socially-just world can be realized, and (5) critical thinking processes that view society and culture as historical, contextual, and changeable. By engaging in dialogic contact, individuals work to undo the hegemonic belief that the world is given or immutable (e.g., “it is what it is”) and see it as a complex web of practices that they make and remake through intervention.

Fassett and Warren (2007), in drawing from this ideal, posited dialogue as both a metaphor and method, highlighting how it helps individuals strive toward ethics of humanization and freedom while generating knowledge that is counter to dominant, oppressive ideologies. As metaphor, dialogue sets an aspirational goal of opening up new possibilities for seeing and being in the world. Within research, this ethic means that researchers do not view participants as a means to an end or data to be analyzed. Rather, participants are (minimally) empowered to make decisions about the research process (e.g., member-checking transcriptions) or (ideally) a part of the research project’s design and execution (e.g., critical ethnography or participant action research). Within teaching, dialogue is “characterized by open acknowledgement of each person’s naming of the world, though that acknowledgment need not imply acceptance” (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 54). Students and teachers strive to understand each other as beings-in-process; that is, they respect the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that make meaning, identity, and culture possible while holding themselves and each other accountable.

As method, dialogue is an epistemic tool for naming oppressive social relations in order to challenge and change them. Fassett and Warren (2007) offered that dialogue constitutes a ‘‘process of sensitive and thorough inquiry, inquiry we undertake together to (de)construct ideologies, identities, and cultures’’ (p. 55). In this sense, dialogue is an intentional communicative process by which individuals learn to name and transform oppression. Fassett and Warren, in drawing upon feminist scholars, recognized that individuals are not autonomous, rational beings who will arrive at self-evident truths about social justice through the process of dialogue (Ellsworth, 1992; Lather, 1991). They cautioned that identities are constituted by overlapping, contradictory, and complementary discourses, and therefore even liberatory thinking is embedded within the dominant ideologies that individuals seek to change. However, they argued that rather than being a point of despair, recognizing the limitations of dialogue provides impetus for individuals to come together and commit to the hard work of changing themselves, each other, and society through articulating avenues for social-justice activism.

Conclusion and Next Steps

In 2015, Communication Education editor Jonathan Hess, forums section editor Joseph Mazer, and guest co-editor Katherine Hendrix issued this call for brief position statements:

Despite a few articles and even a 2003 special issue of Communication Education focused on racial, cultural, and gendered identities, the bulk of our scholarship originates from dominant male and Eurocentric perspectives. Looking at instructional communication mainly from one perspective excludes valuable insights to be found from other standpoints. It seems likely that our scholarship is missing out on significant development by a somewhat narrow perspective dominating the research. We might benefit from a vision of what scholarship that broadens our perspective would look like, and a path for how to produce strong scholarship which fits that vision. Thus, we ask: How can diverse perspectives (i.e., gender, age, race, nationality, able-bodiedness) enrich instructional communication research? How can our discipline foster the development of such scholarship? (Hess, 2015)

This is an important call for discussion, one that opens possibility and hope for a transformed, or, rather, transforming approach to the study of communication and instruction. As evidenced in the preceding pages, in the few years since the publication of Critical Communication Pedagogy, critical approaches to the teaching and research of communication have grown in number and prominence. Such work stands as a response to, but is curiously unacknowledged within, the editors’ call.

In response to the journal’s forum call, Fassett and Nainby (2016) articulated what CCP scholars would find to be the central challenge associated with such questions regarding diversity in the study of communication and instruction:

Our fear is that the forum questions, as phrased, merely invite (only) instructional communication scholars to consider how we might better design instruments that encompass a broad array of ethnicities, gendered identities, or other coalesced groupings in our established research programs – in instructor immediacy, clarity or humor, for example. In this way, the idea is to draw from others to add to or expand instructional communication research; however, the real challenge is to invite others into the disciplinary conversations about communication and instruction in such a way as to change the discipline itself.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the forum call would exceed the inclusion of other perspectives, transforming scholarship on communication and instruction into something that only occasionally or remotely resembles what we have heretofore witnessed. Additionally, Rudick and Golsan (2016) responded to the call by arguing that scholars must “move conversations away from a language of diversity to a language of difference …” as “the concept of difference focuses attention on its communicative construction.” While diversity implies a kind of pluralism and neutrality, difference challenges researchers and teachers to reflexivity and praxis. This responsibility transforms and strengthens the study of communication and instruction by attending to Sprague’s (1992) initial challenge to create communication-specific understandings of instructional communication’s domain of study: teaching, power, relationships, and learning.

Critical communication pedagogy, as a paradigmatic perspective in scholarship and teaching practice, does not seek to simply supplement or supplant traditional communication education and instructional communication scholarship; rather it posits a hopeful future of intersectional, multi-method, collaborative, and issueoriented exploration, one that makes possible sustained dialogue within the academy, but, more importantly, between the academy and the communities that sustain it and to which it is accountable (see, for example, Frey & Palmer’s (2014) collection on communication activist pedagogy as a powerful exploration of critical communication pedagogy in situ.). Where critical communication pedagogy research has “stopped at the classroom door” (Frey & Palmer, 2014, p. 8), it is a reflection of the Communication Studies discipline in general and instructional communication in particular (though there is increasing interest in conversations in published communication scholarship that acknowledge the global reach and relevance of critical communication pedagogy – e.g., Gajjala, Rybas, & Zhang, 2010). As critical communication pedagogy continues to grow in breadth and depth, it will continue to grow in global reach and significance.

Thus, future directions for critical communication pedagogy scholarship may well evolve into additional commitments that guide and shape our understanding of communication and learning. For example, although CCP theorizes and pursues social justice as both process and goal, social justice is not yet well-defined in the literature. Fassett and Warren (2007), in developing CCP as a response to disciplinary exigencies, focused more on what CCP is not than on what it is or what it is for. By engaging praxis as reflection and action for transformation (Freire, 1970/ 2003), teachers, students, and researchers are involved in what we might call social justice-ing, rather than social justice as an end goal. Articulating what social justice looks and feels like, as well as what it achieves and for whom, both in and beyond the classroom, is an essential next step.

Here we return to the epigraphs that open this chapter. Critical communication pedagogy, as a field of study and pedagogical practice, is fundamentally shaped – through exclusion and inclusion – by the Communication Studies discipline’s vision of what is legitimate and meaningful scholarship. Discipline is yet another word that does and does not readily align with its etymological roots. To discipline entails a certain degree of structure and order, often accompanied by punishment for deviance. However, a discipline is not a stable or static entity, or an overarching law; comprised of scholars with shared interests, a discipline is also a home, a space for dialogue (however thorny and difficult) and growth. In this sense, it is not at all coincidental that a discipline is also a field of study, possessed of the potential to be, as hooks (1994) observes, “a field of possibility” (p. 207). Critical communication pedagogy, as a hopeful and analytical approach, has been and continues to be essential to nuanced and meaningful understandings of communication and instruction.

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