| Description |
This dissertation is a qualitative examination of the pedagogical practices of communication educators teaching college level courses with the goal of social justice. In particular, I focus on the strategies of self-identified social justice educators to understand what they are labeling social justice by examining the documents produced for their courses and interviewing them about their practices. In the analysis, I identify ways that these particular educators define their work as a way of being in the world that goes beyond the base requirements for their job as well as how they describe it as an ongoing process with multiple steps. Additionally, I call attention to the specific manner in which they include social justice pedagogical tools in their communication classrooms and identify commonalities among them. They findings indicate that communication educators working for social justice through their classroom teaching do so by grounding the content material in the framework of a socially constructed reality that has consequences for bodies located at different places in the social hierarchy. This foundation allows them to further explore how the status quo is unequal, leading to injustice, and how communication instruction has the potential to impact students' agency and lead to social justice. I close with a discussion of how these findings add to our theoretical understanding of critical pedagogy, social constructionism, and the development of a discipline specific pedagogy for communication studies. |
