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Abstract

In 1992, Jo Sprague challenged communication educators to think more critically about how we teach and what we include in our communication curriculum. In the decades since Sprague’s powerful call for instructional communication researchers and instructors to ask ourselves, “What is knowledge and how is curriculum established?” (p. 11), we find ourselves needing to engage with ongoing contemporary conversations about what counts as knowledge in a basic communication course and which knowledge is viewed as important enough to include in the curriculum. A meta-synthesis of basic communication course surveys showed little change in the basic communication course content over the last 60 years (LeFebvre and LeFebvre, 2020). The radical changes that have occurred in our society and in higher education student populations over the last decades have required a rethinking of how college classrooms function to create inclusive and equitable campus communities. Campus Chief Diversity Officers who inform institutional policies surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion and Centers for Teaching and Learning are working to support faculty in critically examining their curricula and teaching practices in support of campus inclusion efforts (Ruiz-Mesa, 2022). In the previous essays, the authors offer a variety of creative and pedagogically-informed practices to support campus and classroom inclusion and equity. This essay responds to the Basic Course Forum submissions about how instructors and basic course directors can effectively support diversity, equity, and 94 inclusion efforts through course materials, pedagogy, and instructor training in the basic communication course by focusing on three emergent themes.

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