Communication Education: The Spiral Continues

Anniversaries of all kinds provide wonderful opportunities for contemplation and rededication. For that reason I welcomed Editor Joe Ayre’s invitation to think about the history and the future of our journal. I am particularly honored to share this reflective space with Professor Loren Reid. I first read his Teaching Speech in 1964 as part of Margaret Woods’ speech methods class at Northern Illinois University and its special blend of idealism, pragmatism and whimsy filled me with hope as I shakily approached my student teaching assignment. I remember the feeling that I was being welcomed into a very special community of people—speech teachers—and that I had found a calling that could provide enough rewards to delight me and interesting problems to challenge me throughout an entire career. And so I had. The journal, Speech Teacher, was accessible and helpful to me as a student teacher and a Teaching Assistant. In a sense, we have grown up together moving toward more “professional” and “scholarly” orientations. Without a doubt, neither the journal nor most of us who read it are appropriately labeled “speech teachers” anymore. I could never have anticipated the incredible range and sophistication of the work that would appear in the journal that became Communication Education or the kinds of activities that turned out to be entailed in my choice to become a communication educator and researcher. I take great pride in that evolution. Yet at this admittedly nostalgic moment, I also pause to hope that those entering our profession today are still invigorated by a sense of calling and a clarity of purpose. Our journal speaks for those of us who identify with communication education and instructional communication, providing a commentary on how far we have come and on where we might go next. In preparation of this essay, I have taken the last few months to revisit my personal collection of Speech Teacher and Communication Education, which is about 80% complete since 1971. I have read and reread the tables of contents in the NCA index, occasionally being driven to the library to track down a particularly intriguing title that predates those on my shelf. Along the way I carefully noted the editorial statements of each new editor, the arrival and departure of new sections of the journals, the themes of special issues, and summary and synthesis essays such as Staton-Spicer and Wulff (1984). My own involvement with the journal includes publication of a few articles and book reviews, membership on the editorial board off and on (more on) since 1976 and a term as Book Review editor. Among my files I found a sampling of my reviews and copies of what other reviewers and editors said about those same manuscripts. My initial goal of conducting a systematic content analysis of the journal for the last twenty-five years quickly gave way to a more impressionistic survey. I first report briefly on my observations as I revisited the fifty years, particularly