Communications & Rhetoric

Combine communication skills with discipline-specific content, and broader interdisciplinary and professional applicability in real-world contexts.

How can Communications & Rhetoric courses be used?

  • Electives to complement your degree
  • Expand the scope of your Major and/or Minor
  • Develop academic, professional and cross-cultural communication skills

Courses in Communications and Rhetoric develop advanced level communication and research skills in specific discipline areas: humanities, sciences, and social sciences.

Students will gain interdisciplinary knowledge in a range of communication and rhetoric concepts, theories, and skills, to help them work efficiently in academic, professional, and diverse sociocultural contexts.

Rhetoric is embedded in every act of communication through the purpose and persuasive strategy that we weave into our verbal, non-verbal, and creative acts. Communications and Rhetoric provides additional ways of knowing, learning, and producing collaborative research through different pathways of experiencing  communication concepts: through literary and cultural studies, the creative arts, world literature and languages, as well as management, the sciences and social sciences.

Courses offered in this area will prepare students for the vital role of written, oral and digital communications in the 21st century workplace. They will produce a variety of texts and creative artefacts in professional, intercultural and community settings to enhance career opportunities.

Anita Chaudhuri | Communication; Rhetoric and Composition; Second language writing; Critical Discourse Analysis.

Joanna Cockerline | Management communication; engineering communication; interdisciplinary and intercultural communication; survivor narratives and narratives of marginalized populations in Canada; East African literatures.

Marie Loughlin | 16th-century poetry and prose; early modern women’s writing; early modern drama; women’s literature; 16th and 17th-century literature; spiritual autobiography; speculative fiction; feminist and queer theory.

Aisha Ravindran | Internationalization of higher education; academic writing in multilingual, multicultural, and globalized environments; English as an additional language (EAL); university writing pedagogy; the intersections of language, culture, literacies, and student and teacher agency and identities; second language teacher education; new materiality and posthumanism; Gilles Deleuze.

Jordan Stouck | Composition studies; Canadian and Caribbean literature; postcolonial and decolonization studies; scholarship of teaching and learning.

Courses taught this year Academic Calendar

  • Communication in the Humanities

    This is a practice-based course that develops advanced level communication and research skills in the humanities. Understanding expectations as they vary across academic domains can help writers more successfully participate in a range of conversations and communicate effectively within those disciplines.

    Students will work on advanced writing skills, while also considering the topic of human migration as a starting point to recognize how different disciplines within the Humanities argue it differently to establish an awareness of audience and style. Research topics will change each year to address diverse academic conversations. (Course: CORH 204)

  • Communication in the Sciences

    Classroom

    This is a practice-based course that develops advanced level communication and research skills in the sciences.

    This course will explore how knowledge is constructed in the physical and natural sciences and communicated through a broad range of genres and contexts within specialist communities in the scientific disciplines, and to non-specialist audiences.

    Students will gain the skills necessary to navigate through a variety of genres and discursive modes in science writing, verbally, orally and digitally, and to present information precisely and persuasively.

    (Course: CORH 203)

  • Communication in the Social Sciences

    This is a practice-based course that develops advanced level communication and research skills in the social sciences. In this course, students will gain an understanding of how to effectively communicate the issues pertaining to human and non-human communities, the environment, and sociocultural and sociolinguistic contexts to varied audiences.

    Students will generate ways of engaging multiple approaches from a social science communication perspective to respond to these issues. (Course: CORH 205)

  • Communications across Marginalized Populations

    This course explores perspectives, narratives, and cultural productions about and by conventionally and systemically marginalized populations, including those who have experienced homelessness, mental illness, poverty, addiction, sex work, and incarceration. This course enables students to develop communication and research skills across disciplines, including the social sciences, sciences, health care, and humanities.

    (Course: ENGL 394D: Interdiciplinary Studies in English. coming in 2021 as CORH 312)

  • Why Communications & Rhetoric?

    Communications is vital for talking about pressing social issues, and for thinking about how certain stories, ideas, and perspectives are shared. Rhetoric is embedded in every act of communication through the purpose and persuasive strategy that we weave into our verbal, non-verbal, and creative acts, explains English professor, Aisha Ravindran.

    “Being aware of how language is used to persuade, and using it strategically and ethically to achieve your objectives, can make you more productive, confident, and highly respected as an efficient communicator.” She says.

    Read more…

Certificate and Minor in Communications & Rhetoric

Communications & Rhetoric is being developed into both a Credit Certificate (anticipated launch date: Fall 2021) and a Minor (anticipated launch date: Fall 2023).

The 15-credit Certificate structure contains four thematic interdisciplinary clusters, with the learning outcomes for each cluster of courses focusing on a specific conceptual aspect of communications, and a final capstone project. The course design will have an experiential learning focus, and the program will have a final capstone to combine different disciplinary strands in a research-centric collaborative project.

The 30-credit Minor will align with the communications needs of students across the disciplines at UBC Okanagan. The suite of 10 courses will combine communication skills with discipline-specific content, and broader interdisciplinary and professional applicability in real-world contexts.

The program advisory team includes faculty from the Faculty of Creative & Critical Studies, Faculty of Health and Social Development, Faculty of Management , Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Okanagan School of Education, School of Engineering and the UBC Okanagan Library.

Communication skills are highly valued in most industries and identified as essential employment skills by the Government of Canada, as well as a core expectation from a university degree by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

UBC Okanagan students have noted the value of communication both for their university studies and for their future careers (OPAIR, 2017).