Hello, Substackers!
I’m Jenny Baumgartner, and I’ll spearhead the Teaching C-I Substack alongside the LSU Communication across the Curriculum (aka LSU CxC) team. We love learning from Substack communities and are excited to engage with other educators through this platform. We’ll share what we’ve learned (and are still learning) about Communication-Intensive teaching, and we hope to hear from you, too. Before diving in, let's start with a little context about who we are and what we do.
Who are we?
As we begin this Substack, I want to take a moment to introduce who we are at LSU CxC. The team behind the program (and this Substack) is made up of teaching faculty and staff at Louisiana State University. We work with students, faculty, and administrators to increase communication skills and opportunities for undergraduate students at our institution. At our core, we are teachers, and that is what brings us together. But we come from multiple disciplinary backgrounds (ecology, fine arts, coastal studies, social science, business, etc.). We see this cross-disciplinary identity as a core strength, and communication and teaching as the components that cut across all of our work and pull us into the community.
What is LSU CxC?
We’ve mentioned LSU CxC a few times, so now let’s talk about what the program is.
Though many universities have writing across the curriculum programs, LSU saw a need to go beyond writing to best prepare undergraduate students. For the communication challenges of the 21st-century globalized marketplace, writing is still important, but so are other forms of communication. Enter LSU CxC.
LSU CxC began in 2004 as the first program of its kind focusing on multimodal communication (e.g., written, spoken, visual, and technological) within the disciplines. In 2010, LSU CxC was named the sole recipient of the National Conference on College Composition and Communication Program of Excellence Award, with commendations stating that this program has “set the bar to which other universities should aspire.” Then in 2020, the USC Pullias Center for Higher Education, in collaboration with the American Association of Colleges & Universities, recognized CxC as a Delphi recipient for its progressive work in transforming faculty support and LSU’s institutional culture surrounding teaching excellence. Today, LSU CxC remains one of the few holistic programs offering multimodal communication skills development within all undergraduate majors.
As one of the first CxC programs in the country, LSU CxC continues to build and support an innovative approach that contributes to the knowledge and discussion about communication-intensive pedagogy and instruction. Annually, more than 15,000 LSU undergraduates experience C-I teaching and learning from an average of 300 faculty members. In the past 20 years, LSU CxC staff (past and present) has produced 165 local, state, regional, national, and international publications and presentations about communication-intensive pedagogy and instruction.
Now that you know who we are and what our program is, let’s connect and start talking about teaching! We hope you'll subscribe to receive posts in your inbox and join us in the comments to share what you think and what you might want to see here. We're looking forward to this new opportunity!
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