What's Your Script?

How we revise our narratives.

by Jeanne Christie, EdD, PhD

The Lost Art of Listening

The reason my students take my communication class is to learn how to communicate better, and they are never without their technology. They are frequently looking down and it is clear what they are doing. They are busy communicating elsewhere. Read More

What They See Is What They Get

In each decade there are both overt and subtle changes in young adults. The Internet facilitates the immediate and constant bombardment of the youth by the global economies, advertisers, and marketers. Consider the way a similar product such as milk is marketed to three different groups. Read More

Visual Literacy Bridge to Our Decisions

Insight and visual literacy have much in common. Both provide an a-ha moment and a new expanded awareness of what is around us. As educators we use transactional communication. Transactional communication is a form of communication that is ongoing and multifaceted all at the same time. Read More

Civil War Mystery Solved

For several years, I searched for a woman who was involved with the Surratts as a spy during the Civil War. When I stood before her actual grave I felt a significant sense of peace envelope me. After many years, I had finally found her. Read More

The Media Mirror

Stuttering has long been a problem for individuals in personal communication and in public experiences. The recent movie, The King's Speech, is a wonderful look into the development of speech therapy and provides historical insight into the British Royal family. Read More

Healing Wounds

I recently had a discussion with an associate about the Baby Boomer generation and ramifications of the Vietnam War. I started to reflect on the influence of the media on our collective nation's emotional psyche to ‘heal' or refocus the multifaceted wounds perpetuated by that conflict. Read More

Millennial Media Consumers

Although the millennial generation is said to be self-absorbed, they are in reality the most technologically savvy generation. Quantity of news such as investigative or watchdog reporting consumes their time – never mind the quality of the news. Read More

The Value of the Narrative

Narratives emerge when we communicate through verbal and nonverbal language. The story we tell becomes our narrative. The domain does not matter because each approach recognizes the inherent value of the story. To illustrate, in caregiving medicine the narrative helps the patient to heal and the caregiver to understand. Read More

The Ah-Hah Moment

A recent article by Susan Cook and Karen Krupar (2010) shows the changing socio-economic dynamics of current college students: as a result we need to rely on different types of teaching styles to address the changes. Here are two different but memorable ones. Read More

What's Your Script?

The old Gerswin song from the 1937 film Shall We Dance brings focus on how one says certain words such as either or neither...tomato or tomahto...and this is a clear example of how we formulate our own scripts in our language as well as in the media. Scripts are our perceptions on an issue. Read More