Scholars redux: Catching up with previously-featured research

Summer is a time for catch-up, and I thought that I’d use the July “Scholars and Scholarship” column to catch up with some of the scholars I’ve profiled earlier in these pages. In each case, I contacted the scholar and asked how their scholarly activities have changed since the profile was published in Spectra. Here’s what I found:

Josina Makau was profiled before the column was named “Scholars and Scholarship.”  At the time she had been selected as one of 12 “founding faculty” at California State University, Monterey Bay. Besides wondering how she was coping with the beauty of Monterey, California, I was also interested in her work on cooperative argumentation and invitational rhetoric and how that work would integrate with the new campus’s emphasis on culture, environment, and technology.  I was also excited that communication would have an initial presence at the founding of a new campus of the largest state university system in the country.

Well, things have worked out quite well, it seems.  Makau is currently serving as Interim Dean (“with the emphasis on the interim,” she says) of the Center for Arts, Human Communication and Creative Technologies. This Center houses all of the university’s programs in arts, humanities, and related disciplines. The campus has developed a General Education University Learning Requirement in ethics under her leadership.  But, perhaps most importantly, Makau and her colleagues have rethought the communication major into an academic program designed to deliver a “comprehensive, interdisciplinary Humanities and Liberal Arts education for the 21st century.”  The major combines knowledge from traditional disciplines such as English, literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, rhetoric, speech, journalism, media studies, and communication, but is also informed by Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies.

Monterey Bay has adopted an outcomes-based education model, and the Human Communication major is organized around eight major learning outcomes: critical communication skills; research skills; relational communication skills; philosophical analysis; critical cultural analysis; comparative literary analysis; historical analysis; and creative writing and social action.  A menu of courses supports each of the eight outcomes.  For some outcomes there is but one required course; for most there are several choices.  For all outcomes, students may elect an independent assessment pathway to demonstrate that they have fulfilled the outcome without taking formal coursework. Students must also design with an adviser a depth concentration selected anywhere from between one and three of the outcomes. Students also develop assessment portfolios, publicly present a required Senior Capstone project, and must demonstrate that they have developed satisfactory competence in each of the outcomes before they may graduate.

Faculty members have been trained in several disciplines, but attempt to bring their training to serve the overall vision.  And, yes, cooperative argumentation is one of three required courses and has been adopted by the Faculty Senate and the academic administrative leadership team as their deliberative and communicative model.  The Monterey Bay model might not be for everyone, but it certainly provides a substantive and innovative approach to communication study and pedagogy.

Charles Braithwaite was the first person I profiled when the column was named “Scholars and Scholarship.” He had just finished a year of working at a Navajo tribal college, and he had developed and taught a course on successful transfer for Navajo students. He had also done ethnographic research on Navajo communication practices.

Braithwaite is still in contact with several of his students from that class, and via e-mail they tell him of their successes at colleges in New Mexico, Alaska, and Indiana. He has two articles in print, one in press, and one under review from the project, and though his course on successful transfer was never replicated he says that one of his proudest moments occurred when he shared a bowl of mutton stew with the head of the Navajo Language and Culture program and heard that man tell him that he had a good understanding of both the Navajo people and the culture.

Braithwaite is moving to the University of Montana, Missoula, this fall, and he is looking forward to making contacts at four of the tribal colleges in that state. He has collected tapes of Navajos giving speeches, and he would like to continue that work in an attempt to develop comparative data about the speaking practices of American Indians. Of the Navajo Nation, he says, however, “I will always go back.”

I profiled Mara Adelman and Lawrence Frey about their work with Bonaventure House, a residential facility for people with AIDS in Chicago. Adelman has moved to Seattle and can only be involved in the project from afar, so I caught up with Larry Frey in Chicago to find out how the research is going and how Bonaventure House is faring.

The focus of their research has shifted to analysis of questionnaire data that were acquired as part of their long-term, ethnographic research program. With Loyola University Chicago colleague Jim Query and Ball State University professor Lyle Flint, Frey and Adelman are studying how residents’ perceptions of the communicative practices of Bonaventure House relate both to perceived health outcomes and satisfaction with living in the House. Besides providing research data, Bonaventure House intends to use the results as evidence of success with granting agencies and potential funders. Frey no longer volunteers at the house, for he has been busy promoting their work through speeches to universities and community groups, and he has recently begun to work with House management and trustees as a strategic planning consultant.

And, the house itself has changed, mainly with the advent of “cocktail” therapies for treatment of HIV/AIDS. In the past seven months, not one resident has “passed,” and the house is starting to think of itself as both an assisted living facility and a recovery home (as virtually all of the new residents are in drug rehabilitation). Some of the communicative practices have been creatively modified as well; the “balloon ritual” described in the profile now is used to celebrate a resident returning to independent living, in addition to celebrating the release of someone who has “passed” from the pain of living with AIDS.

While we are a long way from conquering AIDS as a disease, Bonaventure House has become a different place from the one Adelman and Frey first investigated and reported on in their recent text, The Fragile Community: Living Together With AIDS. It has become a long-, rather than short-, term care facility, and the staff and residents are relying on these two communication researchers to help them with that transformation.

Reflecting on just these examples, I am proud of my discipline and its researchers. Many of us are doing important, useful work, and I’m happy to be able to use this column to celebrate that work.