Liberal Education and Communication Against the Disciplines

Abstract

Communication Across the Curriculum (CXC) has been gaining theoretical sophistication in recent years, slowly moving beyond an exclusively skills orientation. Proponents of Communication In the Disciplines (CID) focus on teaching students specific disciplinary communication conventions as productive of knowledge and identity. I claim in this essay that the focus of CID on specialized competencies is too narrow. The CXC project should instead emphasize liberal education, which is productive of a multifaceted citizenship. Liberal education can be advanced through strategic use of core styles throughout the curriculum. Core styles of expression, exposition, and persuasion—which are foundational to but transcend disciplinary styles—provide tools for understanding, performing, critiquing, and resisting knowledge and identity production. A dialectic of Communication Against the Disciplines and CID would encourage in students multiple and diverse ways of thinking and doing. Approached this way, CXC can help the student become a model citizen, able to not only argue well for a position but embody a democratic mix of multiple voices, to articulate the world from many positions.

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