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Preface

One of the things I love most about teaching interpersonal communication is the connections I forge with my students. Spending time with smart, interesting, and diverse young people who are curious about ideas and hungry for knowledge is an honor, a privilege, and a delight. In class and during office hours, we discuss how course content can solve perplexing real-life communication challenges. During these conversations, I can’t help but notice how different my students today are from their predecessors. Hairstyle and clothing variations are obvious. So, too, are the differences in pop culture referents; current students grew up with Arthur, South Park, and Glee rather than Sesame Street, Friends, and Cosby. But the biggest difference is the students’ degree of technological immersion. When teaching, I see row after row of laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Before class begins or while standing outside my office door, students seamlessly transition between talking directly with one another to communicating online—texting, checking Facebook, watching and commenting on YouTube, or posting to Twitter.

Yet despite these differences, my current students and their predecessors share the same motivations for taking the class: they want to communicate more skillfully; they want to know how to better handle jealousy, anger, betrayal, and grief; and—more than anything else—they want to improve their relationships. It is an enduring joy for me to help them master material that can achieve such goals. When they complete the course, they may still be tethered to their technology, but they’ll also carry with them the latest theory and research on social media, interpersonal relationships, and communication competence, empowering them to make wise communicative decisions both online and off.

My students and my experiences teaching them are what originally motivated me to write Reflect & Relate. I wanted to provide my fellow interpersonal teachers, and their students, with a textbook that is at once welcoming, friendly, personal, trustworthy, and practical. A book that is rock solid in content, represents the finest of new and classic scholarship in our discipline, and provides a clear sense of the field as a domain of scientific endeavor, not just “common sense.” A book that doesn’t read like a typical textbook, but instead is so engaging that students might “accidentally” read through entire chapters before they realize they have done so! A book featuring examples that hook students’ interest, clearly illustrate the concepts being discussed, and help students relate theory and research to real-life situations. And, of course, my core mission: a book that doesn’t just tell students what to do, but teaches students how to systematically reason through interpersonal communication challenges. Thus, students walk away from reading it knowing how to solve their own problems and flexibly adapt to dynamic changes in contexts and relationships. Everything in Reflect & Relate is designed to achieve these objectives.

When it came time to revise Reflect & Relate for the third edition, I drew upon suggestions given by instructors and students during my conversations with them, and the wisdom so graciously offered by many of you in your detailed reviews. From this rich knowledge base, I built a revision that radically boosts the book’s utility for teachers and increases its relevance for today’s tech-savvy student population. My first step was to reach students where they already spend most of their time: online. In addition to providing the latest scholarship on online communication, I want students to take advantage of the Web’s interactivity while reading Reflect & Relate. The new VideoCentral feature is one way to do just that. By prompting students to watch and respond to online videos, VideoCentral merges online and book resources to help students better understand key concepts. Even more, the new InterpersonalClass provides students and teachers with a robust online course space where they can access the e-book, watch videos, take quizzes, and interact through discussion forums and message boards, giving students a chance to practice all the online interpersonal skills Reflect & Relate teaches!

The third edition also contains a ton of new and recent research representing the very best of interpersonal scholarship, including the impact of the Internet on listening and attention, long-distance romantic relationship maintenance, supportive communication, and much more. Two new chapters on family relationships and friendships, respectively, provide students with in-depth coverage of these important relationship types, while scores of new examples—The Hunger Games, How I Met Your Mother, Walter Mischel’s famous “marshmallow experiment,” and even the NFL, to name just a few—will resonate with students and illustrate key concepts for them. In addition, interpersonal communication competence now appears throughout the book—including a special section on online competence in —so students will be thinking about interpersonal skills from the very start of the book. Meanwhile, the new Instructor’s Annotated Edition offers more instructional support than ever before.

I’m thrilled about all that Reflect & Relate has to offer you and your students, and I would love to hear what you think about it. Please feel free to drop me a line at mccornac@msu.edu or on Facebook so we can chat about the book and the course, or just “talk shop” about teaching interpersonal communication.