by Rob Danisch
In May 2024, I revived a version of a course that I had first taught almost twenty years ago. The ideas and questions that motivated the course have remained with me all that time because of how important and pressing I think those ideas and questions are to the future of higher education. Our students have almost instant access to huge bodies of knowledge, and I find it harder and harder to justify the value of higher education by pointing to the ways that teaching passes on knowledge to students.
Instead, I think we ought to be teaching critical habits for making, building, and creating – for using all of that knowledge available to us. How do you teach those creative habits? That’s been driving my teaching and research for all these years.
I think about this as the difference between teaching episteme and techne. Episteme is abstract knowledge – think about musical theory and the abstract sense of what a note is or what an octave is. Techne, in my field, is embodied knowledge; it is a kind of know-how – think about someone that can just play the guitar or the piano regardless of whether they can read musical notes or have perfect pitch. I’ve always been more interested in helping my students learn how to play then teaching them an abstract body of knowledge.
In my case, I’m a Professor of Communication Studies. This means that my classes focus on the kinds of communication practices that can foster or catalyze innovation. It’s not music we are learning to play, at least not necessarily; we are learning an embodied knowledge about our everyday habits of interaction. And I’ve long wanted to teach the embodied communication practices most helpful for creating a culture of learning and catalyzing innovation.
Do we know what those practices are? Can students learn them? What makes someone an innovation catalyst? How can collaboration enhance creativity and invention? These kinds of questions are being asked by a range of scholars, teachers, and professionals who want to help students develop and apply workplace innovation capabilities.
Along with my teaching colleagues in a diverse pan-Canadian collaboration, I’ve been helping students to learn and use job crafting skills, the ability to adapt and integrate research insights in their workplaces, and skills for enabling inclusive innovation in the organizations where they work. My current goal is to drill down to the specific communication habits that might better support these ends.
My 2024 course at the University of Waterloo explored the questions above in the context of professional workplaces, visiting theories of invention, innovation, and critical thinking from the fields of rhetorical studies and communications studies to do the granular work of identifying constructive communication habits for innovation. In reflecting on cognitive processes, communication practices, and communication systems we studied the ways in which our interactions with others and our own thinking can be improved, clarified, and made more sophisticated.
My job, in this kind of class, was to introduce students to thinking about, analyzing, critiquing, and creatively engaging the problems they will confront as professionals, employees, and entrepreneurs through attention to their communicative responsibilities and roles. This course did not offer technical solutions to problems or an abstract body of knowledge, but instead offered a way to consider the very process of problem solving and invention that focused on how specific communication habits can aid in those tasks.
I think of innovation as the process of making improvements by introducing something new: a new idea, a new method, a new technology, or a new practice. In all fields of study (engineering, economics, history, government, etc.) something new must introduce a substantial change, and that change increases value, makes someone better off, or improves some circumstances (of course, it can also generate backlash or resistance). This change may be radical or incremental. In all cases, therefore, innovation or invention is a bridge between past practices and ideas and future possibilities.
The aim of my course was to help students learn how to develop creative skills and habits in relationship to the process of innovation, to learn an embodied sense of how to build these bridges between past and future. The course also showed students how to apply these new skills, personally and in team situations, to help innovate, improve, better, implement, enhance, increase, or strengthen a product, service, opportunity, or person. We applied creativity to problem solving at the organizational level and through processes of communication. And we learned about how communication systems and organizational culture can foster creativity and innovation. Our goal, in other words, was to foster this ability to generate new ideas while, at the same time, learning how to build effective bridges between past and future.
One of the great advantages of teamwork, especially when a team includes diverse kinds of knowledge and expertise, is that effective cooperation and collaboration can allow a team to outperform any individual. Constructive interactions across difference can be a resource for imagination and invention, but only if and when those interactions can stay constructive. Our communication habits play a constitutive role in making innovation and change possible. More students need to learn how to do this kind of work because this epitomizes the abilities that workplaces will seek out and reward in the coming years.
Our final assignment asked students to create an imagined communication utopia. The central characteristics of this place were effective cooperation and collaboration so that a culture of learning flourished. The students had to suggest what kinds of communication habits would need to be taught, promoted, encouraged, and made normative. They also had to suggest what communication systems and structures they would need (including which technologies or apps they’d use) to help build this utopia.
I think contemporary organizations and corporations can learn a lot from what my students suggested. I encouraged them to evaluate their own places of employment along the standards they set out for their utopia. If many of us did this, we’d have a better sense of whether our organization was capable of innovation and what role we might be able to play toward that end. This assignment was, in its own way, an exercise in learning the embodied sense of how to imagine a better future. We need more of that kind of work in higher education right now.
In the Spring term of 2025, I hope to offer another version of this course where students can engage in simulated exercises to evaluate specific communication habits – where they get more experience learning the embodied knowledge of how to play. This can include a communication “audit” that constructs an inventory of specific practices and how to apply them in professional settings, as well as practical performance indicators of cultures of innovation and learning that would identify the group communication habits that drive change.
About the author
Dr. Robert Danisch is a Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada).