The university classroom is an invaluable site for social activism. In this study, I focus on the university classroom in order to consider how university instructors care for students. More specifically, I consider what I call critical care--that is, care underscored by critical and critical communication pedagogy. I start by defining care, critical pedagogy, and critical communication pedagogy. Then, I focus on my own experiences autoethnographically to understand some of the ways I have come to understand care. After conducting interviews with teachers and those teachers' former students, I conducted dyad interviews between the teacher and the teacher's former student. I use the transcripts of these interviews as the data for an analysis of how these teachers and students understand care in their relationship. Because the teachers selected must have some background with critical and/or critical communication pedagogy, I also use the transcripts to build a case for critical care. I argue that critical care is the best way to build more humane and equitable classrooms.

One way critical educators can understand and orient to Paulo Freire's work and the tradition he inspired is by turning their attention to the alienation and affirmation of what he describes as the "ontological vocation of being human." In this dissertation, I read across Freire's work in order to synthesize what I argue are three central commitments of his ontological vocation: 1) that the self/world are sociohistoric and 2) unfinished, and 3) that the human presence is historic. Next, I read Paulo Freire's more famous "banking" and "problem-posing" models of education through the lens of these commitments in order to demonstrate each as metonyms that stand in for his larger interests in alienating and humanizing cultural action. Finally, I argue that Deanna Fassett and John T. Warren's critical communication pedagogy can be a generative framework through which teachers and researchers can recognize and arrest the alienation of the ontological vocation.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF Aubrey A. Huber, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Speech Communication, presented on March 29, 2013 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: HELP AS COMMUNICATIVE PRACTICE: A CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A TEACHER EDUCATION CLASSROOM MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Nathan P. Stucky As a scholar studying critical communication pedagogy, I am interested in the ways help is produced in communication by future educators. I take Stewart's (1995) claim seriously that words are not merely representational, but instead produce reality. Working from this paradigm, I examined help-producing communication and its implications to theorize help and generate strategies to improve help practices, specifically between teachers and students. To collect data for this project I conducted an ethnography of the teacher education course, "Schooling in a Diverse Society," EDUC311. I was interested in future teacher discourse because teaching often is articulated as a helping profession. For example, a common argument from my research was that to teach is to help students learn content, skills, and particular worldviews. Schein (2009) argues that help is a process that cannot be easily explained. He asserts, "Helping is a common yet complex process. It is an attitude, a set of behaviors, a skill and an essential component of social life" (p. 144). However, very little work has been done to theorize or analyze the implications of help, particularly in terms of communication and educational contexts. In this dissertation, I examined how future teachers articulate and produce help in and through communication. In my experience as a former teacher education student, I found that the help articulated in teacher education classes, that focus on democracy and social justice was remarkably different than the help articulated in everyday experience. Hunt (1998) resolves, "A focus on teaching for social justice reminds us that our children need not only a firm grounding in academics but also practice in how to use those academics to promote a democratic society in which all get to participate fully" (p. xiii). Social justice educators recognize students have the ability to enact change. They recognize inequity and actively work with their students to understand their subject positions in order to work against systems of oppression. In social justice education, help is a process "with" students instead of "help for" students. EDUC311 explores the relationship between social justice and democracy. As a required course for all teacher education students at Southern Illinois University, this course provided me with an ideal population of future educators. By studying the communication of future educators in a course that emphasizes social justice, I analyzed the ways they produced notions of help, generated a definition of social justice-oriented help, and provided strategies that current and future educators could use to better help their students.

This dissertation argues for a relational ethic of listening that emphasizes the pedagogical role of the listener as a student in dialogically hearing, producing, and responding to the other. This ethic of listening works to hear possibilities amongst differences, and to ethically account for and learn from the cultural, historical, and embodied differences of the other as they are produced relationally amongst macro-structures and micro-practices. In order to develop this ethic of listening, I pay specific attention to my solo autobiographical performance, Miles away from "The Cool," in which I present my autobiographical and musical reading of the autobiography of trumpet player Miles Davis, Miles. This performance and my research regarding the music, life story, and cultural significance of Davis functions as an example for my development of a listening centered approach to pedagogy. Listening to jazz and the music of Davis provides an approach to hearing possibilities as they are enabled and constrained by larger macro-structures and specific micro-practices. I argue this approach to listening can be extended to research regarding autobiography and geographic location. Listening to autobiography and location can enable a critical and ethical understanding of the ways history, context, and power play on bodies in jazz, autobiography, location and autobiographical performance. After explaining this relational ethic of listening in terms of autobiography and jazz, I make the case for listening as a performative act in which as listeners we are always students to the other. Performative listening is a critical communicative act that works to ethically and pedagogically hear and learn from the other. Performative listening emerges from a relational ethic of listening, and it is a productive pleasure that works to hear possibilities in and amongst differences.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF DAVID W. WHITFIELD, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in COMMUNICATION STUDIES, presented on APRIL 2, 2018, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: CONDITIONS FOR SOCIAL CHANGE: THEORIZING CRITICAL COMMUNICATION PEDAGOGY WITH/IN THE CLASSROOM USING A LENS OF RELATIONAL SAFETY MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Sandra Pensoneau-Conway Using the ten commitments of Critical Communication Pedagogy (CCP) as a grounding perspective, this research project investigates the teacher-student relational dynamic with an inquiry into the degree of safety students and teachers perceive in their shared relationship. Relational safety is a new term being introduced into the literature on reflexive and critical teaching practices. It is foregrounded in the belief that the classroom is a microcosm of the larger world and therefore can be a site of inquiry and interruption of mundane communication practices that may be oppressive and which might otherwise go unquestioned (Fassett & Warren, 2007). A combination of three methods were utilized. Classroom observations were conducted in all four face-to-face summer sections of the introductory public speaking course from the university's core curriculum. These observations were used to inform the questions used to interview participants. The data collected were from three (student) focus groups, four graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) interviews, and 23 individual student interviews. Findings revealed five major themes that are salient for the emergence and development of a teaching practice which nurtures feelings of safety in the teacher-student relationship: 1) affirmation; 2) dialogic worldview; 3) attention to bodies in space; 4) a balanced approach to humor, self-disclosure, and feedback; 5) the class evolves into a community of care. The dissertation concludes with a reminder that while social change is the ultimate goal of a critical, reflexive teaching practice that is future-oriented, teachers must always remain grounded in hope. Relational safety can emerge when critical educators embrace a belief that when teachers model reflexive communicative practices to/for their students, in turn they create a space for incremental shifts in language choices, critical discourse, and reflexive thinking that will evoke a desire in others to advocate for social change, communicate across cultural differences, and celebrate diversity

As a committed social justice educator, I share in this dissertation a theoretically informed instructional autoethnography of my time teaching and researching as a Language Arts and Speech teacher across two different public high schools and two different school years. My story of learning to embody the values and practices of progressive teaching arises from the central research questions: "How can I, a self-identified progressive Language Arts educator committed to social justice, learn to implement critical, democratic, responsive, and holistic pedagogy as a public high school teacher in this particular region at this time in U.S. public education? And, within these particular schooling cultures, what aspects of these schooling environments support or inhibit my ability to perform as a progressive educator?" Responding to critiques of public schooling policy and practices, my work is grounded in theoretical commitments of progressive education articulated by the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and those North American educators who have brought his libratory praxis forward into what I call connected, social justice pedagogy.

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This dissertation examines how institutions generate, teach, and authorize normative performances through texts and/as pedagogical practices. Through an analysis of the University of South Florida’s mandatory reporting policy, training, and Title IX Incident Report Form, this project examines how institutions construct and privilege certain values, performances, and individuals as means of generating the legal compliance of the institution independent. These practices are valued independent of how such compliance enables and limits the relationship between students and teachers. I argue the University’s texts and pedagogical practices serve to substantiate, authorize, and perform the materialization of certain privileges and the normative standards for the performances of mandatory reporters – those specifically designated “responsible employees,” which includes graduate, teaching, and research assistants supervising or teaching possible victims. I further rely on critical communication pedagogy as a means of analyzing USF’s practices and calling for an altered pedagogy that better accounts for the subjectivity of individuals not previously recognized by/through current institutional practices. While USF’s mandatory reporting policy is merely one institutional mandate, the practices expressed and outlined in this research are indicative or the practices of institutions more broadly. Understanding those practices is essential to recognizing the ways institutional and individual actors relate and interact.