Conference Agenda

Abstract: Adhering to our students’ needs to meet complex challenges in the future, many have argued for the power of implementing transdisciplinary educational initiatives and a project-oriented, problem-based learning pedagogy. This is particularly relevant in strategic communication, emerging at the intersection of several pre-existing fields, while surprisingly neglecting the pedagogical implications of this transdisciplinary heritage. But pedagogical research also describes the challenges when heterogenic teaching teams are mixed, and with that blending of cultural academic and pedagogical approaches often experiencing clashes. This paper points to a hitherto underestimated communicative dynamic of transdisciplinary courses, identified through the author’s pedagogical experience from a course taught in strategic communication. While finding none of the previously emphasised challenges, the course instead struggled with communicating the course’s transdisciplinary core. This created a pedagogical challenge for both the teachers in planning the course and upon communication with its students, necessitating students to independently connect the dots between the introduced disciplinary perspectives. Thus, the pedagogy shifted from a transmission view to a co-constructed view as the course’s core crystalised through communicative exchanges between teachers and students. The discussions were anchored in relation to a running course project (aligning with project-oriented, problem-based learning) that facilitated communicative exchanges on an internal (teacher-teacher), external (student-student), and intercommunicative (teacher-student) level. The results point to a broader venture, applying theoretical frameworks from strategic communication to understand and develop the practice of teaching and learning in higher education.

Bearing in mind the amount of complex situations that are currently part of the global agenda setting (Ukraine war, challenges of climate change, revolutions in Iran, etc.), it seems more important than ever that the governments and supranational governance institutions have strong and credible spokespersons to endure and explain to public opinion what is happening. In fact, this is their responsibility. But paradoxically, the universities seem to be not offering large spokesperson training in their official program studies.

For this reason, the main objective of this paper is to analyse the content related to spokesperson training in the official studies offer by the top 100 universities with communication studies, according to Times Higher Education (THE) ranking. The research would aim to understand the current state of spokesperson training in communication studies and to identify areas for improvement. The methodology of this study will be mixed since it will combine quantitative and qualitative methods such as the content analysis of the curricula of official programs and interviews with professional spokespersons.

Tracing the training given by the universities, we have only tracked down 19 universities in the world that, according to their official program studies, offer spokesperson training. There is no university that offers an entire official program dedicated to training spokespeople. However, the subjects offer by the 19 universities were on topics related to this training such as communication skills, among others. Universities have a gap in this type of training that they will have to fulfil in the coming years.

This paper will present findings from a systematic literature review on public relations education in the context of feminisation and professionalisation of Public Relations. All public relations, communications and media journals were searched and a total of 196 articles were identified for the analysis capturing a period from 1949 until 2021. The criteria for inclusion of articles to the analysis was that the article discusses either of the three topics, public relations education, professionalism and feminisation. The articles were analysed using categories such as the location of the study, theory and methods used, highlights and main findings, practical application, etc. Thematic analysis has been conducted to capture trends per decade and an overall thematic analysis was conducted at the end. The analysis is currently ongoing, but initial findings show that the majority of works have been published in the United States and the UK with American scholars focusing on professionalising the field by analysing the curriculum and PR ethics whereas debates in the UK remain within the area of professionalism. The article is analysed from a British perspective where there is a demise of PR education with undergraduate programmes across the country shutting down, thus an aim of the article was to capture trends in the literature but also learn what has been done historically, how the debate on PR education evolved and what can be learnt for the future and potential re-establishing of PR education in the UK.