As the nation's personal, social, and political divides deepen and become more contentious, administrators, faculty, staff, and students face the challenge of navigating this division. Issues of human rights, free speech, and college and university policy converge with remarkable contention, leaving many higher education professionals believing…

Community and campus partners face inherent differences due to their distinct cultures, assumptions, practices, and constituencies. How partners handle the resulting tensions can impact how well the partnership functions. This article introduces relational dialectics as a framework to think about recurring tensions as natural and normal when…

As countries become increasingly interdependent, student populations in the United States are becoming more culturally diverse. These students' transnational perspectives present significant challenges to teachers, but a disconnect exists between the skills teachers need and those provided to them by colleges of education. As teacher preparation…

Educational administration scholars have long argued that reflective practice and meaningful critical dialogue are important aspects of thoughtful leadership. This article explores the efficacy and utility of these two activities in relation to learning about and enacting leadership for social justice. The article centers on the reflective…

Reports a preliminary study of the four-level theory of role-taking. Investigates the hypothesis that the use of each role-taking level in describing the self correlates with the use of the same role-taking level in describing other persons. Discusses implications for interpersonal communication research. (PD)

Interpersonal sensitivity refers to the perception of the thoughts, feelings and reactions of another person with whom one is interacting. To examine the effects of sex and leader/subordinate role upon interpersonal sensitivity, female, male and mixed-sex dyads (N=72) were first observed in interaction and then asked to complete questionnaires.…

The addition of an interpersonal element to the rhetorical devices offered students as they learn how to construct persuasive messages can enhance their writing by helping students discover why they produce the writing they do. To do so, teachers must help students to become more sensitive to the audience and involve them more in the…

Undergraduates discussed a moral issue with a confederate who had the same opinion (no controversy) or opposite opinion (controversy) within either a cooperative or a competitive context. Subjects in the controversy conditions indicated more conceptual conflict, engaged in more information seeking, and were more accurate in taking the cognitive…

Presents a teaching method for enhancing student awareness of social issues by developing student's ability to take the role of others. States that this process allows students to develop a sense of "other" as a social construction created by the dominant group. Recommends use of journals and primary sources. (KO)

A primary internal concern of an intimate relationship is that each partner communicates with the other. A breakdown of communication may occur when an occurrence construed as minor or negligible by one partner precipitates a major explosion of anger, rage, and hurt by the other. Both partners may be at fault for allowing a disagreement to reach…

This paper describes the philosophical perspectives that individuals bring to their study of the communication process. These perspectives, called presuppositions, include conceptions of reality (existential, essential, contextual), ways of understanding knowledge (objective, subjective, intersubjective), and types of value systems (well-defined…

Discusses interpersonal sentiment and research that suggests individuals are more likely to comply with or help others whom they like than individuals whom they do not like. Reports on two studies of 237 undergraduate Japanese students. Finds that positive sentiment toward a target person increased the subject's willingness to help. (CFR)

A multifaceted approach to adult development was empirically tested with 449 adult students enrolled in a large metropolitan community college system in the midwest. This approach suggests that most adults assume multiple life roles (relationship with self, with work, with others, and with family). The Adult Life Roles Instrument was designed to…

A readiness for effective empathy training develops during the same time period that secure abstract thought, augmented moral development, and the ability to introspect appear--during the college years. College females initially showed higher empathy scores, but both genders were equally teachable, being most effectively taught during college…

A common aim of teacher education is to have prospective teachers inquire about their teaching. In that regard, there has been concern about the effects of contexts within which such inquiry takes place. Recent deliberation and research about context has tended to focus on the structure and content of teacher education courses, the environmental…