Communication consulting and outreach

Abstract

Consultants operate as translators who cull relevant literature to produce lessons as these pertain to skills, strategies, and ideas that practitioners can apply in professional contexts (Waldeck, 2016). Having said that, our impression is that contributors to Communication Education are well positioned to provide practical advice about communicating with others, though this might not seem apparent at first. As such, we believe that our charge as communication professionals is to reframe how we think about what we know and to convince others that our scholarly focus includes more than just studying the basics of how people talk to each other. Our first charge as communication professionals is to reframe our own understanding of what we do. At its core, the topics published in Communication Education center on processes of human learning, including understanding how people pay attention, organize complex information, and retain knowledge for use (Mayer, 2021). Thus, instead of seeing ourselves as researchers who focus on students’ classroom experiences, we might also envision ourselves as scholars who investigate how best to facilitate human information processing and recall. From this perspective, conclusions generated from our research apply to just about any professional endeavor. Don’t believe us? Try speaking in public without knowing what it takes to capture a person’s attention, try negotiating a business deal without understanding how to be clear when communicating your needs, or try inspiring a workforce without understanding how different types of motivation influence effort. The fundamental idea in each of these examples is studied in the context of instructional communication, and although we typically focus on learning interventions, these notions are valuable beyond the classroom. Our second charge as communication professionals is twofold and includes helping others understand that our scholarly focus includes more than the basics of communicating with others and convincing organizations that they stand to benefit from our work. Regarding the former, we are often surprised that the details of what we research are entirely new to the people we interact with—even for the educators and trainers with whom we collaborate. Most people know little about the nuance in what we study, and so they fail to comprehend how the knowledge we have generated can be helpful in their professional endeavors. For instance, many professional speakers are familiar with the importance of clarity, but they are unaware that the concept is multidimensional and manifests through a core set of specific behaviors (Bolkan, 2017). Relatedly, though most professional educators have thought about what they are going to teach from the