Communication Matters


Book Description

Communication Matters helps students move beyond an intuitive appreciation of communication to explore core principles of the discipline. By helping students take personal responsibility for their communication behaviors, by encouraging critical reflection, and by actively applying the key concepts to diverse contemporary challenges, the program fosters an understanding of the many important ways communication matters in daily life.




Why School Communication Matters


Book Description

Why School Communication Matters is an easy-to-use reference for the communication dilemmas that superintendents, principals, and other school leaders face today as they lead faculty and staff, parents and students, neighbors and community leaders. This newly revised edition incorporates the monumental technological changes, including social media that are reframing the way we think and work. The book deals with real life challenges and offers practicable solutions. Demonstrates how school leaders can design effective two-way communication strategies with their own communities—because one size no longer fits all. Draws from some of the best research in school communication and business leadership. Offers a framework of ideas on which school leaders can hang their strategic plans. Examines real challenges—from battles with angry parents to the effective use of data to the management of a major crisis—and links these challenges to larger leadership issues. Includes up to the minute information and fresh statistics on today’s social media and community outreach. Is a boots-on-the-ground field guide of proven strategies to meet the needs of practitioners who work on the front lines Is a reference book for both new and seasoned school leaders Is a textbook for those aspiring to school leadership positions




Communication Matters


Book Description

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real. Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader "materiality turn" emerging in the humanities and social sciences. This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric. The book includes images of the digital media installations of Francesca Talenti, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.




Why Communication Matters


Book Description

Why Communication Matters is a compilation of entries from the blog of the same name. Taken together these clear, concise essays make the case for the relevance of real, meaningful, effective communication in both professional and personal life. The essays are organized by theme into eleven chapters. These themes include relationships, communication in the classroom and on the job, communication for self-improvement, and leadership. The book also touches on communication theories and concepts, shares the author's reflections, and looks ahead to what the future of interpersonal communication may hold. Each of the entries is followed by discussion questions for use in class or as prompts for self-reflection or writing. The organization of the text allows professors and students to move effortlessly between topics, making the connections that seem most appropriate for the organization of diverse communication courses. Designed to lead to meaningful interactions among those who aim to advance the act of communicating in their personal and professional lives, Why Communication Matters can be used in communication courses and by professionals whose careers require excellent communication skills.




What We Say Matters


Book Description

Drawing from Buddhist and yogic precepts, this practical guide offers tools for becoming a better, more compassionate communicator at home, at work, and in the world Have you ever tried to tell someone what you want only to feel misunderstood and frustrated? Or hesitated to ask for what you needed because you didn't want to burden the other person? Or been stuck in blame or anger that wouldn't go away? Judith and Ike Lasater, long-term students of yoga and Buddhism, experienced dilemmas like these, too. Even though they had studied the yoga principle of satya (truth) and the Buddhist precept of right speech, it was not until they began practicing Marshall Rosenberg's techniques of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) that they understood how to live satya and right speech. In What We Say Matters, Judith and Ike describe their journey through NVC and how speech becomes a spiritual practice based on giving and receiving with compassion—everywhere, all the time—whether at home, at work, or in the world. Their writing is deeply personal, punctuated by their recounts of trial and error, success and failure, laughter and challenge—even in writing this book! They guide you through an introduction to NVC with clear explanations, poignant examples, suggested exercises, and helpful resources. With practice, you'll learn new ways to: • Extend empathy to yourself and others • Distinguish between feelings and needs • Make requests rather than demands • Choose connection over conflict • Create mutually satisfying outcomes




Noise Matters


Book Description

Noise, as we usually think of it, is background sound that interferes with our ability to hear more interesting sounds. In general terms, though, it is anything that interferes with the reception of signals of any sort. It includes extraneous energy in the environment, degradation of signals in transit, and spontaneous random activity in receivers and signalers. Whatever the cause, the consequence of noise is error by receivers, and these errors are the key to understanding how noise shapes the evolution of communication. Noise Matters breaks new ground in the scientific understanding of how communication evolves in the presence of noise. Combining insights of signal detection theory with evidence from decades of his own original research, Haven Wiley explains the profound effects of noise on the evolution of communication. The coevolution of signalers and receivers does not result in ideal, noise-free communication, Wiley finds. Instead, signalers and receivers evolve to a joint equilibrium in which communication is effective but never error-free. Noise is inescapable in the evolution of communication. Wiley’s comprehensive approach considers communication on many different levels of biological organization, from cells to individual organisms, including humans. Social interactions, such as honesty, mate choice, and cooperation, are reassessed in the light of noisy communication. The final sections demonstrate that noise even affects how we think about human language, science, subjectivity, and freedom. Noise Matters thus contributes to understanding the behavior of animals, including ourselves.




Communicating Science Effectively


Book Description

Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, people face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions about medical care, the safety of foods, what to do about climate change, and many other issues. Communicating science effectively, however, is a complex task and an acquired skill. Moreover, the approaches to communicating science that will be most effective for specific audiences and circumstances are not obvious. Fortunately, there is an expanding science base from diverse disciplines that can support science communicators in making these determinations. Communicating Science Effectively offers a research agenda for science communicators and researchers seeking to apply this research and fill gaps in knowledge about how to communicate effectively about science, focusing in particular on issues that are contentious in the public sphere. To inform this research agenda, this publication identifies important influences â€" psychological, economic, political, social, cultural, and media-related â€" on how science related to such issues is understood, perceived, and used.




Friendship Matters


Book Description

In this volume, Dr. Rawlins traces and investigates the varieties, tensions, and functions of friendship for males and females throughout the life course. Using both conceptual and illustrative chapters, the book portrays the degrees of involvement, choice, risk, ambivalence, and ambiguity within friendships, and explores the emotional texture of interactions among friends. A concluding section examines the prospects for friendship in the course of our post-modern blurring of public and private domains and discursive sites.




College Success


Book Description




Communication, Meaning, and Identity:


Book Description

"Leadership effectiveness, gratifying interpersonal relationships, and richer self-fulfillment are all a result of communicating effectively, understanding ourselves and others, and affirming our values in a manner than conveys who we are and what matters most to us. Although communication is considered a relatively simple and straight-forward process, the reality is that it is fraught with confusion, lack of clarity, and unintended deception. The failures associated with communicating include a recurring inability to know oneself and to be unsuccessful in defining our real values and priorities. As we search for more effective ways of communicating who we are, what we are seeking, and what we mean, we often fail to recognize the barriers that exist and how we can recognize what matters most to ourselves and to others. Meanings are both hidden and difficult to fathom - even the meanings that are so important about ourselves and our own identities. The processes of communicating, self-learning, and self-discovery open the door to new meanings and a clearer sense of our own identities. By overcoming the barriers of self-deception and the distortion of meaning, we refine our ability to see ourselves and others more clearly. In so doing we also discover at a higher level who we are, who we can become, and what we can achieve by fulfilling our highest potential. Incorporating insights from self-actualization, identity theory, and interpersonal development, this book enables individuals to achieve a clearer understanding of themselves and others in the process of self-discovery and self-improvement in the quest to create more effective leaders, better organizations, and more satisfying lives"--