Credit Load
Teaching Philosophy
When I decided to accept the tenure track position at CCSU’s communication department, I was making a declaration of principles: Education is the most important of all human institutions. Education opens horizons for individual development and self-fulfillment and constitutes the only basis for a sound and vigorous society.
I am devoted with heart and soul to the mission of higher education. I believe that the ideal of education is not just the transmission of knowledge. Our social mission is to help form free and responsible citizens, conscious of both their rights and the rights of their fellow citizens and committed to the obligations that mature citizenship implies. This is the mission tradition has entrusted to the public schools of Arts and Sciences. Thus, in addition to the academic contents, students develop in my courses a sense of responsibility and learn how to deal with freedom. Following Immanuel Kant’s logic, I consider these two terms, freedom and responsibility, to be synonymous. According to the author from Königsberg, freedom is nothing but the manifestation of the practical reason. And this concept implies absolute accountability for individual actions.
One of my priorities is always to get the students involved in the course dynamic. To achieve this goal, I always tried to avoid the monologue of the professor and to create a dialogue with the class. Students can express their previous knowledge, ideas and also prejudices about sometimes controversial subjects (public opinion issues, political communication, or mass media contents).
I try to create a balance in the grading assignments to exploit all the students’ potential. They find exams with different formats (multiple choices, essays, take-home exams) and a variety of assignments, such as essays or presentations based on specific research projects, theoretical and practical group projects, or interviews with experts in professional fields related to the subjects of the courses. In this way, I create a positive class dynamic that allows me to maintain high standards in academic expectations.
In addition, I offer the students the possibility to gain extra grading points by doing research and presenting to the class a subject related to the contents of the course. These voluntary assignments help me achieve my main goals: to increase students’ involvement in the class and to develop in them a sense of responsibility.
Courses Taught at CCSU
From the curricular offer of the Communication Department, I taught the following courses during the period of assessment:
COMM 115 Fundamentals of Communication, COMM 234 Introduction to Public Relations, COMM 220 – Introduction to Film History, COMM 230 Introduction to Mass Communication, COMM 319 Filmic Narrative, COMM 410 Public Opinion, COMM 431 Mass Media and Society and COMM 500 – Introduction to Graduate Studies in Communication.
In addition to those existing courses, I have added a series of courses to the department’s curriculum:
COMM 411 Public Opinion Research, COMM 432 Media in Film, COMM 319 Filmic Narrative, and COMM 510, Public Opinion Theory and Research.
Furthermore, I have offered new subjects as Special Topics:
485: Political Communication in the Age of Surveillance, 485: Digital Revolution and the Information Crisis, and 496 Study Abroad Programs in Spain.
The new additions (6 new subjects) bear witness to my constant search for intellectual challenges and the ambition to apply my research in the curricular development of the department.
The six years has been marked by the impact of the COVID pandemic on our teaching endeavors. In a matter of days, we had to convert all our courses into online lectures. This has been the most demanding undertaking in this area of assessment. Fortunately, I was well equipped for the rapid transition since I had been a pioneer in the field of online instruction. I introduced online courses in our department and helped some of my colleagues design and implement their online courses. Still, being forced to rely exclusively on online platforms impelled me to design more sophisticated strategies and tools. Since the pandemic, I have developed Web-sites to deliver the contents of all my courses and produced and published around 100 video lectures.
I have added several courses to the departmental academic offer. COMM 411 Public Opinion Research is the most important of my academic emphases. In this course, I explore with my students the nature and social function of public opinion. To achieve this goal, the contents of the course are based on contemporary public opinion issues. The course has a strong research component. Participants learn the essentials of public opinion research, including sampling methods and data interpretation. Students in this course need to complete a project that encompasses the development of research questions, the design of the questionnaire and the data collection and interpretation. I have also designed a course on the subject of Public Opinion for the graduate program: COMM 510 Public Opinion Theory and Research.
One of the most rewarding experiences at CCSU was the Study Abroad program I designed in cooperation with the Center for International Education. In the Summer of 2018, I took a group of about 15 students to Spain. Visiting the cities of Madrid and Barcelona, we studied how the political conflict between the Spanish state and the Catalan nationalist movement is reflected in the sports arena. To this end, we focused on the sports rivalry between the clubs Real Madrid and Fútbol Club Barcelona.
Finally, I want to mention in this six-year report the tremendous aid I found in the Internet to help me establish effective communication channels with my students – and not only in online courses. I have created sophisticated content platforms where my students can find all the material they need for my courses. Also, my evaluators can find on those platforms all the necessary examples of my syllabi, course contents, assignments, as well as of the students’ work.
Student Evaluations
In my file for the application to professor, I included a detailed statistical analysis of my students’ evaluations. There was a significant positive correlation between the average grade in the course and the score of the students’ satisfaction in the items that affected the instructor’s performance. The higher the average grade was, the more positively the students assessed my performance. This is a serious indicator of the lack of validity of the measuring instrument. Validity refers to the ability of the instrument to actually measure what it is supposed to measure.
For this six-year assessment, I have not repeated the extenuating statistical analysis. Still, I observed that my students’ evaluations follow a different pattern. There is no significant difference in the evaluation of different courses. The reason may be that I have been focusing on upper-level courses (300 and 400 level and graduate courses), where grade fluctuation is imperceptible due to the stronger homogeneity of the groups. The 100 and 200-level courses taught during these six years were always scheduled during Winter or Summer terms. I have also experienced that the students in such special courses are highly motivated and more conscientious than in regular semester courses. This explains the homogeneity of both grades and evaluations.
Students, for the most part, respect and value my pedagogic approach. In the student evaluation questionnaire, 10 questions directly refer to the instructor’s perception. Question 7, which refers to the textbook used in my classes, is the one where the scores are lowest (but never below 3.5). There is a simple reason for this: I do not use textbooks, which may confuse the students when they have to answer that question. Plus, some students may not be used to working with the type of literature used in my regular courses. Most of the courses I am teaching now are at the 400 level. For advanced courses, I ask students to read original literature. This represents a significant amount of work for me since I must publish on the online platforms created for the different courses all the reading material as pdf documents. Students welcome this at the beginning of the term when I discuss the readings because they do not have to spend the money on any of the expensive textbooks they normally have to buy or rent for other courses. Still, reading Marshall McLuhan, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, or Jürgen Habermas is much more difficult than the contents of the usual textbooks. They struggle with the contents. This explains the lower appreciation that sometimes may appear in the teaching evaluations in that particular question. I will keep working with original literature, though, because I firmly believe that students in advanced courses should be able to cope with this type of reading material. It is an indispensable phase in their intellectual development. Furthermore, my advanced courses, such as Media in Film or Public Opinion, have a very well-defined focus, and there is no textbook in the market I could use.
The answer to questions 2, 3 and 6 provides an accurate idea of my teaching style. The questions refer to the command of the subject matter, the use of the class time and the stimulating content of the course. As I already stated in the teaching philosophy section, I strongly encourage class dialogue in my courses. I consider this pedagogic technique the most effective way to gain the attention of students and to enhance comprehension. Students appreciate my effort. The overwhelming majority of the students strongly agreed or agreed with the statements. This constant exchange of ideas in the course dynamic also explains why a high percentage of my students find my classes intellectually stimulating.
Examples of syllabi, assignments, students’ work
Examples of syllabi, assignments, students’ work
As I mentioned before, I have developed Web-sites for all my courses. On those Web-sites, you can find examples of the syllabi I use, the assignments and some samples of the students’ work:
SPECIAL COURSE: