Teaching and courses
Since 1978, at the University of Washington I have taught 15 different courses. The courses I teach now, in the Department of Communication, are listed below.
- Communication in small groups
- Communication, conflict, and cooperation
- Cultural codes in communication
I have taught the large-lecture introductory course in communication, Introduction to Communication II, 27 times, and continue to teach the online version of this course, which I developed. I also teach Cultural Codes in Communication online. These are offered through UW Online Learning as, respectively, Communication 202 and Communication 484.
For graduate students interested in my course on the ethnography of speaking, Ways of Speaking, Communication 584, please contact me by email, gphil@uw.edu I am available for independent reading versions of this course and will probably offer it again in its regular classroom version. This course is cross-listed as Anthropology 584.
The photo is of a course in the art of group discussion. This was taken in the summer of 1973 in my class at the University of California at Santa Barbara. You see here a group of students who have listened to a tape recording of a discussion they conducted earlier and now they are talking about what they heard and what they might learn from their listening. Their teacher is facilitating the inquiry. Note his healthy head of hair.
Note also the tape recorder. It is a $30 Panasonic (by today’s prices). Over thirty years later, and with several waves of new recorders, these simple Panasonics are still as good as anything for this sort of field recording and playback. Now I usually use a much more expensive field recorder as well as a very well reviewed state of the art digital recorder, but the digital recorders have poor sound quality and the expensive field recorder is not as reliable as the Panasonic, and so I still keep a few of them at hand. So this is a scene that you could see today in my contemporary discussion classroom, except the teacher looks a little older now.
When people sit and listen to a tape recording of their own interaction, it can be a great moment of self-learning that then fuels theoretical understanding. Listening to the tapes is important, a form of technology-assisted learning that is so much more useful than, say, a power point presentation, that I feel unkind for making the comparison. But I did. You can learn so much more that will help you become a better communicator by listening to a tape recording of yourself interacting with others than you can by watching a hundred power point presentations.
All of my courses combine theory and practice, each in a different way. I try to give the students some ideas to work with, to get them engaged in the learning process, and then to encourage them to express their ideas about the subject we are studying. This is a slow and difficult process of learning, but real learning is never easy, and this slow and difficult process produces good results, for me and my students, as it has done for others for thousands of years. I hope that you have had the experience of partaking of such a course.