Update from the Teaching & Learning Council 

The January 2025 Leadership Retreat was quite productive for the Teaching and Learning Council. The retreat resulted in four areas of focus to guide our work during the year. The TLC will continue to support our k-12 community. While we no longer have a division or interest group focused on k-12, TLC has a k-12 representative who keeps us connected to efforts to keep communication curriculum alive in k-12 schools. This year, we will specifically focus on dual enrollment, recruiting a new k-12 representative to the Council, and helping NCA members as a whole understand the importance of working with local representatives to keep communication focused curriculum in the k-12 setting.  

In addition to our k-12 efforts, TLC will also work on advocacy materials that are able to be adopted by members of our association. NCA members continue to ask for advocacy materials to support vulnerable universities, schools, departments, and faculty. Our efforts have already produced case studies that are available for member use on NCA’s website.  

Another area of our work will focus on NCA’s Learning Outcomes. NCA produced a set of Learning Outcomes for communication programs in 2014. During 2025, TLC will focus on determining the usefulness of the learning outcomes to our programs, including how often the outcomes are used by communication programs to determine whether we will move forward with applying for funding to support updating the outcomes. What we currently know is that the learning outcomes page of NCA’s website was not visited often over the last few years, but it is possible that the outcomes were used more often than “website hits” indicate if programs and individuals were using downloaded copies.  

Another important effort being undertaken by the TLC is creating website resources for our members. One area of focus is mental health and well-being resources for faculty and students as our members continue to face challenges.  Our hope is to help our members practice the results or our own research and scholarship.  

The TLC would enjoy hearing from members who have other ideas about how the council can serve our organization.  

Katherine S. Thweatt earned her B.A. in Journalism from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, her M.A in Communication Studies and EdD in Instructional Communication from West Virginia University. In addition to her academic positions, she has more than a decade of professional experience helping companies utilize big data to achieve organizational goals. She worked as a Research Scientist at the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center, 2001–2007, implementing projects ($1.75 million in funding) at 14 sites enrolling over 1,000 veterans between two projects. She also on-boarded cardiology clinical trials while writing grants to seek additional funding.

She was Senior Manager of Clinical Quality at MemberHealth from 2007–2009, a Medicare Part D sponsor. Her work led to two national awards for programs that increased the use of ACE inhibitors in diabetic beneficiaries and medication adherence in HIV-positive beneficiaries. In 2009, she returned to the VA to assess the VA National Quality Improvement Initiative. In 2016, she was elected to plan the 2019 Eastern Communication Association (ECA) Conference. Since serving as ECA President, she returned to ECA as Director of Sponsorships in 2023 and will serve in this role again in 2025.

In 2016, she was hired as the Graduate Director of Strategic Communication at SUNY Oswego where she successfully oversaw the development and implementation of this newly approved program. She added an online-only program that is now the cornerstone of the program. Dr. Thweatt is a proven leader who identifies and grows strengths in those she manages and those around her. Dr. Thweatt has expertise in program development, psychometrics/survey development, organizational assessment, and big data.