Abstract
In this issue of Business Communication Quarterly, we continue our exploration of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). SoTL, as I noted in my last editorial, has actually been practiced in many ways by our readers for decades. Our lead article proposes that “teacher-scholars in the broad discipline of professional communication create, support, and sustain an ongoing and innovative commitment” to this innovative movement, in which “study and report on teaching and learning in their own classrooms using empirical methods commensurate with traditional knowledge-making research.”
The author goes on to review the Association for Business Communication and what she considers a parallel organization, the Association of the Teachers of Technical Writing, in their historical context, including the problems of disciplinary boundaries and the impact of institutional and departmental organizational structures and how these affect scholars and scholarship. She then addresses how SoTL is different from other types of teacher inquiry, such as anecdotal teacher practice, participatory action research, scholarly teaching, and traditional education research. She argues that SoTL “requires a strong grounding in existing literature, viable research questions, careful attention to empirical research design and human subjects approval, ethical data collection and analysis, and dissemination through peer-reviewed venues.” A hypothetical case study puts all these distinctions into sharp relief, as we learn how a research question would be studied depending on the particular lens through which it is examined. The author concludes with a proposal for creating a research agenda in professional communication based on SoTL, including an analysis of how SoTL can influence our teaching and publishing activities, our theory-building challenges, and our disciplinary identity. I look forward to hearing more about how BCQ can be at the forefront of the SoTL movement.
Also in this issue are four other feature articles and a themed section, and in various ways they also support the goals of SoTL. The first of these advocates for encouraging students’ reflective and reflexive capacities via the process of writing cover letters and resumes. The method she proposes includes timing the assignment to coincide with reflective phases in the learning cycle, incorporating rhetorical context, and promoting abstraction and generalization. The second continues a focus on self-reflection by teachers and students, as the authors recommend that teachers use more active, inductive instruction in the classroom and a student-centered approach, using classroom examples implemented in a required, college-level business communication course. The approach described required students to reflect metacognitively about communication, first in writing and then by visually depicting the process. Our third article reports the results of exercises in which members of a dysfunctional multicultural class were assigned to teams and given a task to perform in an anonymous, virtual-team setting, as well as in a real-team setting, with the result that students contributed in a much more balanced manner. Our final feature article describes research on organizational and supervisory apologies, demonstrating how an offense committed by an organization is perceived to be more egregious than an offense committed by a friend or supervisor.
The themed section in this issue addresses interpersonal communication in the workplace, which is described as a “largely unexplored region”; the articles in this section suggest that organizations have not developed methods for measuring the long-term value of training in interpersonal skills. The section editor concludes that business communication curricula at the baccalaureate and postbacalaureate level would be well served by including an interpersonal skills component.
We are at the end of another volume, and so I would like to take this opportunity to formally recognize all those who have helped contribute to another successful year of BCQ: Section Editors Marilyn Dyrud, Sam DeKay, Joel Whalen, and Rebecca Worley; Editorial Assistant Jim Maciukenas; and Book Review Editor Patty Keefe Durso; ABC headquarters staff and Publications Board; and everyone on the SAGE team. Our reviewers are to be commended for the phenomenal work they have done in providing the superb reviews for which BCQ is well known, thereby helping all our present and future authors. Finally, I want to offer special thanks to our Production Editor Erin Walsh, who has been enormously helpful at every stage of the editorial process, from manuscript to print.