1
Uniting the Twain of Theory and Research:
A Case Study Across Two Courses
Who said, “Packaging is everything”? Perhaps it was someone with rare insight
into our contemporary, post modern, e-accelerated, surface-only, atemporal, digitized,
consumer-centered culture. Perhaps, as guardians of education and—in some
respects—the gatekeepers of civilization, resisting such applications in the practice of
pedagogy in higher education causes us to miss one root cause of the dissociative
experience of baccalaureate education today. Such resistance may be grounded in
necessarily dividing a curriculum into discrete courses (rather than into units of
meaningful experience) too often taken in a random sequence by our undergraduate
students. It seems that in creating discrete units based on “credit hours” per unit—
serving conveniently as a means for charging “customers” for their degrees—in
combination with a general and perhaps pervasive tendency to dichotomize the world
and our thinking, we have tended as faculty (creators and validators of the
curriculum) to artificially break apart understanding and experiences which are
perhaps best understood and appreciated as integral to each other.
Thus, in our department, we teach public speaking, but no course in rhetoric;
four courses in public relations but none in organizational communication; one called
communication criticism distinct from another called media criticism. We teach two
group discussion courses, distinguished only by identifying one for majors and the
other for non-majors (both at the 100 course level). At the upper division are courses
in which students pursuing each of the three tracks within the department come
together to take criticism, a course in research, and a course in theory. This
arrangement seems to communicate to our students that no theory is taught in Media
Page 1 of 22 
Convention