Confronting Students’ Personal and Interpersonal Communication Anxieties and Needs through Constitutive, Experiential Communication Pedagogy

Today’s college students are experiencing unprecedented high levels of anxiety, resulting in devastating effects. This essay challenges communication educators to respond directly to this significant issue by employing an experiential pedagogy that offers students constitutive opportunities to initiate, experiment with, and receive feedback about new communicative behaviors that will enable them to interact well and achieve positive outcomes in high anxiety-inducing interactions. The essay explicates how that constitutive, experiential pedagogy informs the course “Communication and Human Relations,” enabling students to acquire communication competencies to reduce their anxiety about and to manage effectively their personal and interpersonal communication difficulties. Although college students always have faced mental health issues, those issues are at an all-time high today (Hibbs & Rostain, 2019). Lipson et al.’s (2019) longitudinal study of college students’ mental health service utilization, using 10 years (2007–2017) of annual survey data from 155,026 students across 196 college campuses, found that those diagnosed with a mental health challenge increased from 21.9% in 2007 to 35.5% in 2016–2017, and that 26.9% screened positive for depression. Additionally, Gruttadaro and Crudo’s (2012) survey for the National Alliance on Mental Health found that 80% of students felt overwhelmed by their college responsibilities, 50% rated their mental health as below average or poor, 50% struggled greatly from anxiety that affected school performance adversely, and 30% had schoolwork problems because of mental health issues. As these (and many other) studies have revealed, today’s Lawrence R. Frey and Emily Loker, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO CONTACT: Larry.frey@colorado.edu Constitutive, Experiential Communication Pedagogy 21 college students face a “campus mental health ‘epidemic’” (Gross, 2019), which, undoubtedly, in this unprecedented moment in the 21st century, has been exacerbated significantly by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic! Despite experiencing mental health issues, 40% of affected college students fail to seek help (Gruttadaro & Crudo, 2012) and many stop taking (often, intermittingly) their antidepressant medications (at record numbers for this “antidepressant generation”; Iarovici, 2014), putting on a happy face, instead; in large measure, because of the stigma and culture of silence associated with mental health (see, e.g., Joy, 2018). That combination is a recipe for disaster, with, for instance, one in five U.S. college students having had thoughts of suicide (Liu et al., 2019), and 1,100 committing suicide each year, the second-leading cause of death among U.S. college students (Rosiek et al., 2016). Explanations about why current college students experience such high levels of stress/anxiety focus almost exclusively on “external” issues, such as increased costs (from tuition to housing), materialistic societal values (e.g., consumerism and financial success), and parental expectations, as well as, when bad, the economy. Today’s college students, especially those with controlling (e.g., “helicopter” and “bulldozer”) parents, have a high external locus of control, seeing their lives as directed by outside forces and other people (Dreher et al., 2014). The almost sole focus on external mental health issues, however, leaves two major gaps: “internal/personal” and “interpersonal/relational” challenges. Little to no emphasis has been placed on, for instance, identity and self-esteem issues, relationship issues, and connections between personal and interpersonal issues. An important question in this context is the extent to which education, in general, develops students’ competencies to manage their personal and interpersonal difficulties. Bowen’s (1978) classic work more than 40 years ago found that college education had only a moderate impact on students’ personal dimension (e.g., verbal skills and empathy), and if Konrath et al.’s (2011) meta-analysis 37 years later, showing a 40% decline (since 2000) in college students’ empathetic concern for and willingness to take others’ perspective, is any indication, college education today may be having even less effects. Developing students’ competencies to manage personal/interpersonal issues is especially important for communication educators, for, from a constitutive communication perspective (see Craig, 1999), those issues are produced through communication (with problematic interactions, such as conflict between relational partners, creating anxiety about subsequent interactions), and, from a transactional perspective, those issues are managed via communicative practices (e.g., conflict-management communication competencies are required to benefit from relational conflict interactions). Examples of communication difficulties that students have identified (from the course described below), and a representative statement acknowledging problematic behavior that they want to change, include: a. Sharing perceptions/feelings about themselves with others (e.g., “I seldom admit to others that I am wrong”) b. Expressing “positive” perceptions/feelings of others (e.g., “I want but do not tell my parents that I love them”) c. Expressing “negative” perceptions/feelings of others in healthy ways (e.g., “Whenever I confront my friends, I scream at them, which just makes the situation worse”) Constitutive, Experiential Communication Pedagogy 22 d. Receiving “negative” feedback about themselves (e.g., “Immediately, I get defensive when someone confronts me”) e. Responding to others’ emotional expressions (e.g., “I try to stop my partner’s crying because I do not know what else to say in that moment”) f. Asking for and/or offering aid/support (“I want but do not ask others for support, because I see it as being weak, although I love offering others support”) g. Talking with someone to whom they are attracted physically (“It is incredibly difficult for me to talk with someone to whom I am attracted”) h. Communicating with people perceived to be very different from themselves, such as people of other races and cultures (e.g., “I am cautious about what I say to someone of another race, because I don’t want to be perceived as ‘racist’”) i. Meta-communicating about relationships (“I want to but don’t talk with my partner about our communication problems”) We contend, based on our longtime professor and student experiences, respectively, that although some communication courses address personal and interpersonal communication difficulties (e.g., romantic relationship issues in interpersonal communication courses) and a few offer experiential learning opportunities (e.g., public speaking course activities to reduce students’ anxiety about giving speeches), most courses privilege theory and research over (and, sometimes, to the exclusion of) application and experiential practice. Communication education, consequently, rarely enables students to acquire competencies needed to communicate effectively (e.g., in appropriate, sincere, and personal and relational growth-producing ways) in the type of high anxiety-producing interactions identified above. Although it is valuable to learn theory and research about, for instance, beneficial effects of asking for support when needed, changing high-stressed students’ lack of asking for support because it shows weaknesses demands educational opportunities to enact and experience that behavior’s benefits. The relative dearth of such communication education is a significant lost opportunity for both communication educators and students. Although experiential learning has received much scholarly attention (see, e.g., Beard & Wilson, 2013), many classroom-based practices, such as students analyzing case studies of other people (see, e.g., Braithwaite & Wood, 2015) and participating in highly structured artificial “activities” (e.g., icebreakers) address only indirectly the specific needs of the individual students in those classrooms. Other experiential learning immerses students in “real-world” experiences (e.g., internships, service-learning, and study abroad), but, typically, offer limited guided instruction about developing communication competencies from those experiences. Although all of those pedagogical practices are valuable for “learning-by-doing,” they do not offer experiential opportunities for individual students to initiate, experiment with, and practice (often not successfully the first few times) new communicative behaviors that will enable them to interact well and achieve positive outcomes (e.g., more intimate relationships) in what, eventually, they viewed previously to be high anxiety-inducing interactions. To illustrate a constitutive, experiential pedagogy that offers opportunities for students to initiate and experiment with new communicative competencies to address their personal and interpersonal Constitutive, Experiential Communication Pedagogy 23 communication anxieties, the next section offers an example of such a communication course (called “Communication and Human Relations”). The course reveals the importance and value of this communication pedagogy. Communication and Human Relations Course “Communication and Human Relations” (CHR) is an interpersonal communication senior seminar that has been taught by Frey at least once a year for the last 45 years (Loker served as a “facilitator-intraining” for a section). According to Frey and White (2012): CHR provides opportunities for students to understand more fully, critically reflect on, and enact alternatives to taken-for-granted communication principles and practices in dyadic and group settings by participating in creating and understanding how the constitutively constructed high-quality relationships with course members. (p. 299) To accomplish those goals, the course employs a method (actually, a discipline, a practice, and an art form) of “e