Teaching Communication Activism: Communication Education for Social Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Teaching Communication Activism: Communication Education for Social Justice, Frey, Palmer, and the volume's contributing authors work together to introduce and illustrate communication activism pedagogy (CAP) in theory and application.CAP, as Frey and Palmer (2014) describe, "teaches students studying communication how to use their communication knowledge and capabilities to promote social justice" and this volume provides "exemplars of how communication educators have accomplished that goal in practice" (p.2).Organized around four categories, the chapters cover theoretical explorations of CAP, CAP courses, social justice activism service-learning, and CAP as extended to other populations and sites beyond the traditional college classroom.The book begins with a foreword by Peter McLaren, one of the leading scholars in critical pedagogy and, more broadly, social justice education (e.g., see McLaren, 1998; McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007).McLaren ends his foreword by noting that CAP illustrates how critical pedagogy involves all disciplines.Indeed, this co-edited text demonstrates critical pedagogy in communication teaching and learning, but it also pushes critical pedagogy in an important way.CAP urges educators to move beyond raising students' awareness about injustice and toward teaching them how to intervene and take action.The first three chapters weave the underpinnings of CAP and support a critical reading of the text's subsequent articles.Providing historical, theoretical, philosophical, and ethical considerations, these chapters frame CAP as a pedagogical commitment to cultivating students' communication skills through facilitated learning that explores, questions, and intervenes in local and global contexts to promote social justice.CAP disrupts dominant discourses and common practices in communication education that prepare students to be market ready for the corporate world by teaching students to use communication theories, methods, and practices to intervene in unjust situations and work toward social change.Frey and Palmer's contributors discuss issues such as gender and violence (Chapter 6), activist performance (Chapters 7, 14, 15), and environmental advocacy (Chapter 8).To tackle these and other important issues, the authors work with diverse communities, ranging from migrant workers (Chapter 10), to middle and high school students (Chapters 11, 13), prisoners (Chapter 14), and indigenous communities in Guatemala (Chapter 15).These descriptions are not exhaustive.All authors employ simple yet powerful prose.Many chapters include quotations from students and community partners to illustrate each teaching example.The chapters on CAP courses provide sample syllabi, including reading lists and evaluation procedures.Each contributor provides insight on course design and inspiration, and openly discusses challenges and ways to improve such teaching.The work is accessible not only in terms of its con-Reviews • Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 41 (2)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".