The Communication Studies Department is offering several brand new courses next fall! These courses will appear in the catalog beginning in June, and they can count for major/minor credit as specified below. Please note, currently, these are still listed X895 courses in Classfinder. They will be updated to show the new numbers soon!
COM 3360 Emotion in the Workplace
Emotion in the Workplace has been offered as a pilot before, but it will now be a permanent offering for Communication Studies and Corporate Communication major and minor elective credit.
Catalog Description: This course provides a theoretical understanding of how emotions are managed and strategically communicated in the workplace. By focusing on both theory and application, this course cultivates a deeper appreciation for how the expression and suppression of emotions are central to job design and performance, as well as to the achievement of individual and organizational goals.
Course Purpose and Goals: The first purpose or goal of this class is to provide students with a theoretical understanding of the role that emotions play in organizations today. What is emotion? Why should we care about emotion in organizational life? The course will then examine how emotion is connected to human communication. In what ways are emotions negotiated, constructed, and ultimately communicated in the workplace? What role does emotive communication play in shaping organizational culture, employee attitudes and beliefs, members’ organizational identification, and, ultimately, work design and performance? What are contexts in which managing our communication of emotion is central to achieving performance goals and developing positive co-worker relationships? Conversely, what are the various factors that can undermine these emotive efforts? Students will explore theoretical questions and also have the opportunity to put ideas into practice and assess how the communication of emotions “plays out” in real organizational contexts.
Learning Outcomes:
- Develop a deeper understanding and appreciation for how emotion and communication are interrelated, and the role that emotive communication plays in organizational life.
- Identify major perspectives and theories related to the expression of emotions in organizations today.
- Apply theories and principles discussed in class to experiences in the organization.
- Research and analyze the impact of emotive communication within a specific industry.
- Provide recommendations to practitioners on how to improve and manage emotive communication within their respective organizations/industries.
- Reflect upon and analyze the impact of emotive communication within your own team experience.
*if you took a previous version of this course as a pilot, you can’t repeat it with this new number.
COM 3200 Messages in Society
Messages in Society will be required for all Communication Studies majors and minors who start in the Fall of 2022 going forward. We recommend that those majors and minors who are in the pipeline (in other words, those who started at Belmont prior to Fall of 2022) take COM 3200 as a step-up course to COM 4200. COM 4200 is now the permanent replacement for COM 3920 in the core requirements for all Communication Studies majors. COM 3920 will no longer be offered.
Catalog Description: This course enhances student ability to contextualize, understand deeply, and explain complex public messages.
Course Purpose and Goals: What do we read these days? Text messages, Tweets, Instagram and Snapchat posts are all short, compact messages that do not often need deep thought. So, what happens when we encounter longer, more complex writings? How do we read, contextualize and unpack those messages? This course will not only help you develop an approach for reading material that is longer than a Tweet, text and post; but it will also help you organize your thoughts so you can make sense of what you’ve read.
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will improve their ability to identify and interpret the meanings of complex messages.
- Students will demonstrate understanding of messages in their historical, social, and cultural contexts.
- Students will be able to identify perspectives of key communicators.
- Students will demonstrate their ability to take into account all relevant audiences and their perspectives in a rhetorical analysis.
- Students will improve their ability to identify nuances of meaning for communicators and audiences in written texts.
- Students will identify ways power may be exercised through messages.
- Students will be able to locate and use information including summaries and annotations organized into a usable system.
COM 2040 Public Advocacy
Public advocacy is the cornerstone course in our new Public Advocacy major and minor. Communication Studies majors should consider it for lower-level elective credit.
Catalog Description: As an introduction to the practices of Public Advocacy this course improves understanding of the connections between public audiences and message content. As an ethical public communicator you will improve your appreciation of the responsibilities inherent in attempts to impact public perception and understanding.
Course Purpose and Goals:
Students will better understand:
- Message framing related to improvement of the public good.
- How U.S. audiences understand and respond to public messages
- Deep cultural patterns of thinking and communicating with support or undermine the public good.
- Their own roles and responsibilities as advocates for the public good.
Learning Outcomes:
- As a result of learning in this course students will be able to:
- Invent well-framed messages (note: “Invention” is one of Aristotle’s canons of rhetoric)
- Explain how those messages are intended to impact relevant audiences.
- Articulate their own understanding of their role and responsibilities as public advocates
COM 1040 Yesterday’s Times
Public Advocacy majors will need to be up-to-date on current events. In this one-credit course, students will read the news and come to class and discuss it. By taking this one-credit course three times, students will have spend at least three semesters of college actively engaged in what is happening in the world.
Catalog Description: This course deepens understanding of the political and cultural contexts of contemporary public communication by identifying, researching, and cataloging, current issues of public importance. Public Advocacy majors must take this course three times in different semesters.
In addition to these new courses, the department is also offering several other options that you can read about in the catalog:
- COM 1940 Communication Tools
- COM 1930 Interpersonal Communication
- COM 2020 Argumentation & Debate
- COM 2140 Family Communication
- COM 2200 Persuasion
- COM 2340 Business & Professional Communication
- COM 3220 Environmental Communication
- COM 3340 Organization Communication
- COM 4140 Crisis Communication
- COM 4340 Corporate Training and Development