New Dogs, Old Tricks: Teaching Foundational Public Relations Principles through the Lens of Digital Communications to Build the Next Generation of PR Practitioners
Creators: name: Pell, Kenna
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2024

description: In a just over a century, the public relations (PR) profession has emerged, been refined, even digitally revolutionized — and now, jobs in this field are among the most coveted and fastest growing on the market. As the job market for the profession continues to grow, it is not only crucial that college graduates are trained to meet the needs of the profession, but educators must be equipped to train this unique, emerging generation of Generation Z (Gen Z) public relations practitioners. It is therefore important to understand the teaching materials available to educators in the profession and whether the foundational concepts in the texts are presented in ways that meet students’ and society’s changing needs. This project conducted a thematic analysis of textbooks (N=5) recently assigned in introductory/foundational public relations courses across U.S. universities to understand how one of the field’s most influential conceptual frameworks, Grunig and Hunt’s Four Models of Public Relations, are presented. The four models serve as a framework to describe the field’s various management and organizational practices (Roberts, 2016). While the four models are time-tested concepts that have transcended into the digital world and exist today, little is known about how they are presented in materials to students who are just learning about the field and to instructors who may rely heavily on these materials. The key question driving this research project was ‘How are the four models currently taught in leading PR textbooks?’ with the overall aim of supporting PR educators in gaining maximum benefit from the model as a teaching tool. To answer this question, a thematic analysis was conducted of five PR textbooks recently used in undergraduate PR classes. Ultimately, findings showed that the majority of the sample (three out of five textbooks) briefly mentioned the four models as a part of the field’s history only, not as a lens to understanding today’s digital PR world. The two textbooks that did emphasize the four models’ relevancy in today’s PR world presented them in a way that were suitable to Gen Z learning styles including short bits of information and real-world, recent examples that students would find relevant. Building on these findings, this project also includes a university-level lesson plan for introducing the four models to students in an introductory/foundational PR course. The lesson plan is equipped with built-in materials and instruction based on researched characteristics of the current generation of college students. This project, with research on the learning preferences of Gen Z, helps to fill the gap between the relative shortage of these transcendent concepts in textbooks to provide PR educators with recommendations to equip the future generation of practitioners with the time-tested Four Models of Public Relations that continue to exist today.