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Developing Data-Savvy Communicators: Teaching Students to Think Critically About Audience, Evidence, and Narrative

Empower students to craft clear, compelling stories with data through critical thinking and audience awareness.

  • Higher Education
  • Event
  • On-demand
  • Business Communication
  • Composition Lunch & Learn
  • 55 Minutes
  • On-Demand Video

Description

In this webinar, we explore several research-backed frameworks designed to strengthen students’ abilities to exercise critical judgment about audience, evidence, and narrative in data-rich communication. These frameworks also provide scaffolding for faculty, supporting assignment and course design as well as feedback and evaluation. The webinar includes examples from businesses and organizations that illustrate how business communicators use graphs, charts, data-rich visual aids, and narrative structures (including storytelling strategies) to help audiences connect with and understand data.

About Your Speaker

  • Patricia Harms -

    Patricia Harms

    Patricia Lynn Harms is a professor of Management and Corporate Communication and teaches written and oral communication. Her research interests are visual rhetoric, slide design and communicating with data; performance feedback; virtual teaching and learning; and business writing strategies and trends. In 2023, she received the Meada Gibbs Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Award. She is the current Vice President for the Association for Business Communication (ABC), and previously, she served as the Southeastern U.S. Regional Vice President. She serves on the review board for Business and Professional Communication Quarterly and is also a member of the Management Communication Association. She received her PhD in rhetoric and professional communication and her MA in business and technical communication from Iowa State University, and her BSN from the University of Pennsylvania.