While previous research in business communication has surveyed business and professional communication instructors regarding their courses, it has not yet asked instructors about additional factors that affect their ability to teach and their students’ ability to learn. These factors include job satisfaction, institutional and collegial support, academic rank, physical teaching environment, teaching and learning resources, and student issues. This study examines the results of a survey of business and professional communication instructors regarding these factors, discusses implications for the disciplines of business and professional communication, and suggests additional avenues for advocacy and research.

Thematic analysis of interviews with 22 managers highlight their perspectives on exemplary and unacceptable workplace communication skills. Exemplary skills were perceived to be relatability, documentation, and audience awareness/adaptation, while unacceptable skills were verbal aggression, deception, and defensive communication behaviors. The findings contribute to closing-the-gap research by identifying highly notable skills—both positive and negative—on typical lists of business and professional communication skills. This study also enriches anticipatory socialization scholarship by its application to vocational preparation. Business and professional communication instructors can use the findings here when deciding what topics to emphasize in a course.

This article outlines opportunities and challenges of teaching neurologically diverse students in the business communication course, providing basic resources and information for instructors to supplement their knowledge and pedagogical ability to support neurodiverse students. While the business communication course may represent obstacles for neurodiverse students, it also provides the ideal opportunity for them to practice and develop the soft skills that are essential to their success. Included are implications for neurodiversity as competitive advantage as employers look to harness the unique talents of neurodivergent graduates through active recruitment programs and universities increase programming to support these diverse and talented students.

U.S. undergraduate business communication (BCOM) classes teach students workplace communication fundamentals, but may not build the cross-cultural communication (CCC) skills that learners will need in today’s global workplace. This project surveyed BCOM instructors and students about the importance of including cross-cultural material in BCOM classes. While all instructors considered it at least moderately important to include CCC material, most covered the subject briefly. Students showed interest in receiving CCC training in their BCOM courses but received limited information about it in their classes. Incorporating CCC comprehensively and systematically into BCOM classrooms may help students become competent intercultural communicators.

Mentoring of graduate students is essential to the professional development of business and professional communication (BPC) scholars; it also helps advance the field of BPC and its disciplinary identity. In this article, a professor and graduate student use a case-study approach incorporating historical/archival data collection and grounded in critical reflection to describe and characterize their own long-term, cross-institutional mentoring relationship. They analyze artifacts from their mentoring experience; discuss benefits and challenges to mentoring in BPC; offer implications for mentees, mentors, and academic programs in creating formal mentoring plans; and suggest topics for further research.

Employers provide their interpretation of the meaning of communication skills in this qualitative study of 22 managers. Employers understand written communication to be types of documents, a way to write, and a mode of communication. Oral communication skills mean a style of interacting, presenting, and conducting meetings. Visual communication skills were understood to be data visualization or nonverbal communication. Electronic communication was interpreted as email. The findings contribute to closing-the-gap research by highlighting areas where meaning converges for employers and instructors. Faculty members in communication disciplines can incorporate these findings into their course design and learning outcome discussions.

This study describes how reflections allowed students to express their audience awareness as they wrote a multiaudience messages packet. We present an analysis of 27 reflections in which students described their experience when responding to the various audiences. Students’ reflective depth varied, though deeper reflections demonstrate sophistication in considering audience constraints and values. Students reported difficulty with negative and persuasive messages and indicated concern about their credibility. Reflections can help instructors understand how students are considering audiences for business documents, which instructors can use to improve their instruction and assess how well students consider business audiences.

In this article, we present a study focusing on the learning experiences of business students in an organizational and marketing communication course. The pedagogical approaches of a flipped classroom, collaborative inquiry, and communication in the disciplines guided the planning of the course. A mixed-methods approach was used. The key findings include positive student evaluations of the pedagogies utilized. Moreover, a wide variety of learning outcomes was reported, particularly in the fields of crisis communication and workplace communication. The pedagogies utilized enabled a comprehensive model for teaching communication and contributed to relevant learning experiences and skill development for the 21st century.

Effective undergraduate instruction requires accurate knowledge of professional communication practices and employer expectations, but ongoing contradictions between academic and professional expectations reflect historical, rhetorical, and pedagogical causes for inaccurate presumptions. Taking a customer service perspective, one business faculty revised its undergraduate goals in terms of empirically determined employer expectations. Interviewing professionals familiar with expectations of entry-level business graduates, the authors identified 10 communication activities, each comprising three to nine subtasks that constitute entry-level communication competencies. The results suggest a need to reconsider traditional curricular organization and instructional focus across the business curriculum to develop relevant skills across all business majors.

The arts have not received much attention from business and professional communication (BPC) scholars who are interested in workplace communication. This article begins to fill that gap by explaining a course focused on the BPC that artists produce in their careers. Students learned BPC genres by addressing arts situations: They crafted email pitches to promoters, took promotional photography, created crowdfunding proposals, and more. I argue that teaching artist communication can give a new context to existing BPC assignments, encourage interdisciplinary initiatives, and allow for the incorporation of natively digital communication genres into existing courses.

We investigated the perception and recognition of errors in a population of practitioners and academics in professional and technical communication. Specifically, we measured 303 participants’ botheration levels of 24 usage errors and then correlated those results against their ability to recognize the errors. Results indicated that practitioners were often more bothered by errors than academics and that participants’ overall botheration level might have fluctuated over the past 40 years. Participants’ botheration level also appeared to associate with their ability to identify error. Finally, we found that participants’ gender, job type, and years working in the field influence their error perception.

This article argues that business and professional communication practitioners, instructors, and students, besides becoming better informed about the legal context of website accessibility, should also become more aware of the ethical considerations of creating digital communication products that are inherently accessible for people with disabilities. Through a detailed review of the most important legal cases in the United States and discussion of ethical considerations concerning website accessibility for the disabled, we provide possible entrance points that will help instructors bring ethical considerations into the discussion of website accessibility. We urge instructors to regularly include disability in discussions of accessibility cases.

Using interactive digital maps is now common practice for most universities. Increasingly, more users are introduced to their academic workplaces through online content such as Google Street View and virtual tours. Students with disabilities depend on environmental information to navigate the barriers they face on campus. While most webmasters for postsecondary institutions in the United States know their legal obligations for accommodation in the delivery of web content, legal conformance does not necessarily reflect awareness for social or spatial considerations in the design of campus digital maps. This study discusses an accessibility audit and content analysis of these interactive maps.

Student philanthropy projects empower students to become grant givers. Through learning by giving, students get hands-on practice making decisions with real monetary impact. This article explains the steps in a student philanthropy project in a grant-writing course, illustrating how business and professional communication courses can be a natural partner for this approach. Results of a qualitative survey show how student philanthropy enhances learning by turning the tables, enabling learners to become decision makers with the important responsibility of writing, evaluating, and responding to communication in ways that will have positive effects on nonprofits in their community.

This article explores different types of emotion a student experiences as she interns at a public defender’s office and proposes several emotion rules based on her experience. After a literature review that locates emotions within the identity-construction process, the author analyzes data from reflective questionnaires to identify various emotions this student experienced that serve as a basis for inductively formulating the rules. Following a discussion of the rules, the article concludes with implications of this research for educators and newcomers to workplace communication environments.

An analysis of user interactions, proceedings papers, and Association for Business Communication–sponsored journals reveals an absence of attention to accessibility and disability. While researchers may have demonstrated a passing awareness of the 1990 American with Disabilities Act (ADA) and its implications, so far those implications have not taken center stage. Researchers in fields related to business and professional communication have been publishing work informed by Disability Studies for some time. Thus, a scholarly agenda for accessibility and disability in business and professional communication is long overdue, with a need for studies that address both theory and practice.

This article addresses the importance of teaching transformative usability and accessibility concepts through the lens of disability studies in general business and professional communication courses. It argues that when students learn to analyze audiences, include diverse users, and foresee accessibility before the final draft because they practice user-centered design, their documents become more accessible for all users and situations. It presents a four-unit course plan that integrates disability studies and usability, including legal requirements. The unit plan advocates considering disability and diverse users and uses at the beginning of the design process.

Despite the excellent work by scholars who invite us to consider disability, social justice, and business and professional communication pedagogy, little attention has been given to what a disability- and social-justice-centered business and professional communication course might look like in design and implementation. This case study offers an example of a simulation based within the Harry Potter universe that emphasizes the ways disability advocacy and civic engagement manifest themselves in foundational business writing theories and practices. This simulation enabled students to engage with social justice issues by understanding access as an essential part of business and professional communication.

This article explores pedagogical frameworks closely associated with d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing persons from the perspective of a disabled instructor to increase student awareness of the needs of diverse audiences they will encounter in the workforce. The author argues that students and instructors can use captioning theory to strategize one of the harder business communication genres, the presentation, for d/Deaf audiences to make communication more accessible. By raising critical awareness of the limits of technology, current trends in pedagogy, and disability, this article seeks to further the conversation about providing accessibility for disabled users in the classroom.

A hallmark of business and professional communication is an emphasis on pragmatic but theoretically grounded work. Thus, business and professional communication scholars are ideally suited to turn the theories found in disability studies into practice. In this article, I do just that by creating a theory—orienting access—that draws on concepts from disability studies. Orienting access calls for business and professional communication faculty to consider alternate pedagogies to ensure that our classrooms are truly accessible to all students. It also models the behaviors to teach how to design and create information that is accessible for all audiences.

This article investigates how normative attitudes about work construct barriers to workers who are blind and visually impaired. The researcher collected narratives about rhetorical experiences from blind and visually impaired participants in the United States and analyzed accounts of these workplace interactions to identify rhetorical commonplaces that drive arguments about work. These commonplaces reveal the ableist assumptions that construct access barriers and constrain rhetorical possibilities for disabled workers’ self-advocacy. The author proposes that business and professional communication students and practitioners should engage in collaborative approaches to flexible thinking and leadership necessary for reimagining work in ways that promote accessibility.

Incorporating universal design (UD) both as a topic of discussion and as a pedagogical approach allows business and professional communication instructors to foreground accessibility in ways that acknowledge the rhetorical situatedness of accessibility. This article offers UD strategies that reimagine accessibility not just as a requirement that accommodates users but as an opportunity to create a rich rhetorical user experience for diverse populations. To illustrate how accessibility can be foregrounded in professional communication curricula, this article details the development of an information design course focused on usability and accessibility.

This article, the first of a two-part series, presents 13 teaching innovations debuted at the 2016 Association for Business Communication’s annual conference. The second edition of My Favorite Assignment will be published in the fall 2017 Business and Professional Communication Quarterly. Assignments include international collaborative projects, students’ professional development, fast skill-building exercises, data interpretation, event planning, and more. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on these websites: http://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and http://salesleadershipcenter.com/research .

Phatic refers to the rhetorical function of creating effective communication channels, keeping them open, and establishing ongoing and fruitful relationships, all of which are vital in the age of digital rhetoric, social media, and global intercultural exchange. In this realm, the professional communicator functions less as an originator of new information and more as a space designer, a facilitator of others’ online interactions, a curator of user-generated content, and a communication leader. The phatic function—especially relevant to online interactions such as virtual teamwork, intercultural communication, and user help forums—deserves significant attention as a primary purpose for professional communication.

Interest in gamification in higher education has been growing steadily in the past decade. Using games and game elements has been shown to increase student engagement, motivation, and autonomy. This article draws parallels between game elements, instructional design, and the teaching of business and professional communication. It suggests ways that teachers can incorporate game elements into their courses (or perhaps identifies ways in which readers are already doing so without realizing it). The article concludes with an example of how game elements are used in the design of an introductory business communication course.

Distinctions between traditional service learning and critical service learning with a social justice focus are important when structuring professional writing courses and defining course outcomes. This article presents a hybrid pedagogical approach for designing a critical service-learning course that integrates a social justice curriculum while focusing specifically on reflection, context, and positionality. Detailing the course design and sharing reflections from students and the instructor, the author argues that the modified immersive situated service-learning approach provides professional communication students the opportunity to become agents of change.

This article reports on the current status of client projects (CPs) in business communication courses, provides a scaffolded model for implementing CP, and assesses student learning in CPs. Using a longitudinal mixed method research design, survey data and qualitative materials from six semesters are presented. The instructor survey indicated need for a model for CPs, assistance identifying community partners, and advice on tailoring CPs to course objectives, all of which are provided here. Results from assessing the model’s application indicate that students expressed higher levels of confidence as communicators and felt better prepared to engage in workplace communication.

Two business communication faculty share the story of teaching a 780-person business writing class. The article discusses the challenges of teaching such a large writing class. Challenges ranged from adopting a hybrid course model to hiring adjunct faculty for help with the task of grading. The article offers lessons learned, and recommends that one proceed with caution when considering a superlarge format for writing instruction. Both theory and experience are used to support this position.

In the redesign of a professional communication course for real estate students, a workplace simulation was implemented, spanning the entire 12-week duration of the course. The simulation was achieved through the creation of an online company presence, the infusion of communication typically encountered in the workplace, and an intensive and integrated approach to task design. An analysis of students’ and tutors’ perceptions of the changes shows higher student engagement, with the redesigned course resulting in learning that is both relevant and meaningful to workplace communication, which has implications for the teaching and learning of professional communication skills in higher education.

This study investigates the meaning of communication skills from employers’ perspectives. Students enrolled in a business communication course were asked to contact potential employers in their fields of interest, requesting information about important communication skills in those fields. Using content analysis, two coders familiar with business communication analyzed 52 of the resulting open-ended responses. The analysis of 165 skills suggests employers recall oral communication more frequently than written, visual, or electronic communication skills. Of oral communication subskills, interpersonal communication was mentioned more than other workplace communication skills.

Students raised with pervasive technology are believed to have developed skills and ways of thinking that require new approaches to education. Often, social media is lauded as the answer, but a large gap remains in understanding student preferences regarding social media in courses. We uncover those preferences with data obtained from an anonymous survey of 368 students in large lecture classes. Our research focuses on social media preferences as well as differences in major, gender, and experience with social media for coursework. We discuss three lessons that can be applied immediately and suggestions for future research.

This study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of a soft skills employee training program. We examined willingness to learn and delivery methods (face-to-face vs. online) and their associations with the training outcomes in terms of learning and behavioral change. Results showed that neither participants’ willingness to learn nor delivery methods affected comprehension. However, both variables had significant effects on the reported behavioral change. This training is effective in teaching employees how to “flex” their personal styles and to improve their relationships with each other. Implications for business and professional communication training and directions for future research are discussed in detail.

This article presents a case-based exploration of the complex interactions between learning, research, and practice in the field of business and professional communication. It focuses on a student research project in the area of corporate social responsibility in the biopharmaceutical industry. Adopting an autoethnographic approach, we aim to document the students’ development from researchers to insiders or even consultants. The findings reveal that while the students feel confident in their roles as researchers, they fail to live up to some of the commissioning practitioners’ expectations. The study concludes by providing guidelines to strengthen interaction between students and practitioners.

Popularity is growing for flipped classroom instruction, which replaces lectures with out-of-class delivery of streaming video, reading materials, online chats, and other modalities. Face-to-face class time is spent on instructor-student and student-student interaction, including small group problem solving and discussion. Classroom flipping has its advocates and critics. Because of the theoretical and applied aspects of business and professional communication instruction, courses in the discipline seem ideally suited to flipped instruction. This research reports on perceptions from instructors who have employed the instructional model, summarizes the insights gained, identifies best practices, and makes recommendations for future research and application.

This article describes the use of problem forums in undergraduate professional writing courses as a technique for facilitating and sustaining learning from increasingly complex, messy, and wicked problems that are characteristic of 21st-century work. Problem forums are designed to scaffold project team discussions of rhetorical, technical, or collaborative difficulties that have unexpectedly slowed or halted their work. Problem forums are thus intended to facilitate and sustain continual learning on project teams.

Business communication evolves and adapts to suit the times, and today’s workplace documents are increasingly multimodal. Therefore, business and professional communication specialists need to adapt to a new media workplace ecology—one that requires proficiencies with technologies such as video production, digital animation, and sound. Business and professional writing teachers, in turn, need to adopt teaching methods that include working with evolving technologies and be willing to teach multimodal skills to students. In this article I offer a case study of a flipped learning pedagogy to teach multimodal skills in the professional writing classroom.

Business and professional communicators increasingly rely on visual thinking and design strategies to create effective messages. The workplace need for such thinking, however, is not readily accommodated in current pedagogy. A long-running study abroad short course for American students taught in London provides a model for meeting this need. Addressed to students in art and design and framed through principles of discovery learning, the course approach and assignments can be productively adapted to enhance the visual competence of students of professional communication.

Although digital environments already play a vital role in the flipped classroom model, this research project shows that in university writing classrooms, innovative content design and delivery systems can extend the walls of the classroom to areas beyond, in which students transfer and connect course content with the professional world. In this article, we describe the incorporation of video learning modules into three professional communication classrooms for just such a purpose.

Flipping originated in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, where didactic transmission of conceptual knowledge has been the standard pedagogy. Flipping has resulted in additional focus on procedural knowledge within class meetings. This article argues that business and professional writing pedagogy, which already focuses largely on procedural knowledge within class meetings, would benefit from flipping because it could create an additional focus on conceptual knowledge outside of the classroom. The article explains why we need to teach conceptual foundations, why video is a good choice for that teaching, and what challenges we face in creating those instructional videos.

This article argues for a flipped learning approach to business and professional communication composing processes. Flipped learning sequences can scaffold more robust engagement with prewriting activities and support opportunities for in-class collaborative and facilitated drafting exercises. These types of learning experiences offer numerous pedagogical benefits, including more conscious control of messaging strategies and the development of more creative, rhetorically informed communication products. The effectiveness of this approach is explored through a case study of a flipped learning sequence and collaborative drafting workshop designed for an employment communication and résumé-writing assignment.