What can communicators learn from K-12 teachers?

Facebook memories are often superfluous, but they sometimes let you revisit major moments in your life…

I didn’t know it at the time, but the arrival of these books for officially marked the start of a path that led to the PhD dissertation interviews I’m currently scheduling interviews for at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. I knew I wanted to think past the strategies & tactics focus of my professional strategic communication MA, as I had deeper questions about professional responsibility for communicators. What I didn’t realize was that the books on the left started a class that would completely change how I thought of my responsibility as a communicator.

I entered “Literacy & Race in the Schools,” led by Professor Timothy Lensmire in the UMN College of Education and Human Development thinking I was going to pick up some tips so I could write a how-to for avoiding bias, privilege, and missteps in professional communications. I never would have guessed that taking a class with K-12 teachers would lead me to completely rethink the very basics of my job, including how to balance a responsibility to my organization with the people I am communicating with and about. In telling me their experiences of working with school communicators, they forced me to recognize that I was communicating issues, topics, stories that had real effects on real people—not just things that I could master communicating.

And with that, I officially began my journey to, as Motha (2014) termed it, determine what it would mean for communicators to work:

“in a way that is responsible, ethical, and conscious of the consequences of our practice” (p. xxiii).

Motha (2014). Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching: Creating Responsible and Ethical Anti-Racist Practice