University Education in a Postmodern Era: Building a Narrative Ethic of Civil Communication in the Classroom

This project responds to the question: How can educators quell communicative classroom incivilities (CI) that are currently harming teaching and learning? Sources of CI in a postmodern United States university classroom involve: student entitlement, lack of institutional support for a growing contingent faculty, and incongruent values about appropriate classroom communication. Unlike preceding historical time periods that maintained a shared communicative ethic stemming from antiquity to modernity, postmodernity presents an unprecedented challenge to teaching and learning where there can be no assumed shared ethic of appropriate communicative classroom communication. Postmodernity as an age of coexisting and contentious narratives, this project argues for professors to proactively and appropriately establish an ethic of communicative civility within their classroom.</p><p> &lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;/and Martin Buber's central works are relevant to communicative civility. Buber's I-Thou construct permits new ways for professors to realize that postmodernity presents an unprecedented opportunity to employ their skills of invention, and is theirs for the giving. Freire's ethics provide hope to professors who find themselves oppressed by incivilities. Freire and Buber's commitment to teach despite experiencing their own incivilities liberates educators to respond to the communicative incivilities in their classroom without relinquishing the quality of their teaching. Educators must continue to educate in creative and engaging ways that meet the pedagogical needs of their students if pedagogy is to survive. Professors have a complicated responsibility to uphold communicative civility in an increasingly diverse population in their classrooms where no shared classroom narrative can be assumed among the students. Despite the complexities of communicative incivility (CI) that the lack of classroom narrative creates, the dissertation argues that CI is symptomatic of a greater malady, which is the groundless classroom. Perceived this way, the lack of narrative consensus in a postmodern age presents a great opportunity for professors to create a classroom narrative grounded by a communicative ethic that uphold civility. By grounding the ethics that guide appropriate classroom communication, establishing a narrative ethic of civility in the classroom can create a learning environment that not only honors the classroom participants, but more importantly, honors the gift of teaching and learning.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Immediate Access

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communication and Rhetorical Studies

Year dc:date.available

2014

Author dc:creator

• Leontiadis, Jill Dishart

Contributors dc:contributor

• Pat Arneson
• Janie M. Harden Fritz
• Erik Garrett

• civility
• culture
• ethics
• intercultural
• narrative
• postmodern

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/819

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dsc.duq.edu:etd-1835