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Comm 220: Public Speaking
Employers are seeing a successful communicator. This fully online course will position you for professional success, graduate school or volunteer work. This fast-paced and intense course helps you learn to think on your feet, build a convincing argument and find evidence to support your stance. You will learn persuasive strategies to clearly relate your views and consider how humor, passion and logic influence listeners. Take the first step to skillfully creating a perspective and defend it - gather information and climb inside the head of your audience through life-long communication skills – embracing the public speaking process.
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Comm 300: Principles of Communication
Are you curious about Communication?
From Human Communication to Media Industries and everything in between, a study in Communication results in a degree with wide applicability. As such, COMM 300 broadly explores the discipline of Communication, introduces you to key concepts and debates, and develops some of the basic skills necessary to move throughout the major.
Throughout the term you will explore:
- Communication Careers
- Communication Research Traditions
- Communication Subfields and Theories
This course is a prerequisite for the remainder of the Communication core: 311, 316, and 326.
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Comm 311: Research Methods
Whether they are getting a baseline of public opinion or tailoring communication efforts for different audiences, professional communicators depend on their ability to collect and understand social science data. Research Methods in Communication will equip you with the skills you need to ask research-relevant questions, collect data from human participants, and analyze the data you collect. The topics we cover will also help you better understand and interpret research papers you will encounter throughout your college career.
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Comm 312U: Media Literacy
The modern world is filled with people working, day-in and day-out, to get inside your head. Advertisers seeking to influence your purchases, social media companies pushing to capture more of your time, politicians trying to persuade you, even non-profits striving to earn your support: everybody is using mediated communication to get a piece of you. Media Literacy is designed to facilitate a better understanding of the construction of media messages, the effects of these messages upon audiences, and the gratifications that audiences derive from such messages. The course is composed of three primary sections that cover: the relationship between the political economy of the mass media and the messages it produces; the verbal or textual construction of media messages; and, the visual construction of media messages. Altogether, the goal is to help you, the audience member, deconstruct the construction of media designed to appeal to and influence you.
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Comm 316: Communication, Individuals & Discourse
Extends the discussion of empirical approaches to communication introduced in Comm 300. Introduces relevant social science theories of communication including theories based on cognitive and social psychological approaches that depict communication as a process. Comm 316 is a requirement for the major and a recommended prerequisite for 400-level communication courses.
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Comm 318U: Family Communication
In 318U, there will be an opportunity to look at courtship, relational development, changes in the life of families, and family roles while applying theoretical frameworks such as family systems theory, social construction theory and dialectical theory. During the lifetime of a family group, the members create, maintain, and reinforce patterns of communication through daily living, storytelling, and other forms of interaction.
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Comm 337U: Communication & Gender
The study of gender development and gender expression underpinned by a theoretical framework. Examination of communication and gender topics include: the rhetorical shaping of gender; gendered verbal and nonverbal communication; the process of becoming gendered through the influences of family, culture, and society; gendered close relationships; gendered power and violence; and gendered media.
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Comm 345: New Media and Society: Problems and Debates
We live in a world increasingly characterized by changes in media technology. As media and tech evolve, so does the relationship between media, technology and society. From twitter news feeds to smart cities, new media has infiltrated nearly all aspects of life. Through an interrogation of the social, political economic, and cultural landscape through which these new media develop and operate, students will understand the history, productive forces, impacts, and challenges associated with the new mediascape within which we currently live.
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Comm 399: Communication and The Electronic Age
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Comm 410: Advanced Public Speaking
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Comm 415: Problems of Intercultural Communication
Builds upon the theories and issues discussed in the introductory course by including contemporary and classical literature on multicultural and intercultural communication. Identifies and analyzes politically constructed categories of race, age, class, gender in society against the backdrop of debates on multiculturalism in the United States. Examines categorizations of race, class, etc. in their historical, social, and cultural context, and how those have influenced mass-mediated and interpersonal communication. Uses mass media (television, radio, daily print media, music) texts to provide examples of how we understand ?difference? and ?otherness? in our daily lives.
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Comm 437: Urban Communication
Cities are the greatest public creation of civilization: each one, the product of generations of people, working together to build homes and produce shared prosperity. Cities are much more than their physical attributes: they are the embodiment of ongoing cooperation and collaboration. Through communication, separate individuals come together to create a whole much greater than its parts. Urban Communication considers the myriad contributions of communication to the urban environment. The course surveys both physical and mass-mediated communication in cities, utilizing both qualitative and quantitative perspectives as appropriate. How does the physical design of a street shape its utilization? How, in turn, do different types of leisure and commercial activities relate to citizens’ well-being and a city’s economic prospects? Meanwhile, how does the transition from local, analog media to distal, digital media affect citizens’ relationship with their communities and neighbors? Throughout the term, students will explore questions like these in the context of cities in general and Portland in particular.
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Comm 442: Sport, Media and Culture
An in depth examination of the interrelationship between sports and media in contemporary (western) society, and how that interrelationship reinforces social values, sometimes challenges social norms, and draws on the cultural identification of class, race, and gender to identify sports values with cultural values. Drawing on theories of political economy, media studies, and cultural studies, we will examine media’s role in telling the story of sports and, in telling that story, shaping and reinforcing cultural values and developing material impacts on peoples’ lives..
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Comm 445: Risk & Strategic Communication
How should communication professionals connect with public stakeholders before, during, and after a crisis? In this course, students learn about contemporary challenges in crisis and risk communication. We cover the phases of crisis communication and examine how public audiences process risk information. Case studies covered in the class range from public health emergencies (e.g. COVID-19) to natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes) to organizational crises (e.g. corporate scandals). At the end of the course, students will be able to analyze relevant stakeholders, plan ahead, and respond to crises.
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Comm 448: Issues in Science and Environmental Communication
Primarily examines the representations of gender and race, including age, class and sexual orientation in various media (mainstream and alternative), and will examine theoretical and methodological approaches which may be used to interpret these representations. In addition, considers the potential impact that media institutions have on people’s lives, political decisions and social relations. The overall aim is for students to understand how their own cultural identities affect their media consumption and social positioning.
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