About Our People
Jim Steele (Business) has been elected to a second three-year term on the board of directors for the Human Resources Certification Institute, the leading certification provider for the global HR profession with 135,000 HR professionals in 100-plus countries. In addition, he’s been named secretary-treasurer elect for 2015-16. The secretary-treasurer is an officer of the nonprofit corporation and also serves on its executive committee.
Randy Woodley (Seminary) wrote an article, “How to Acknowledge Native Americans this Thanksgiving,†that appeared in online issues of Time and The Tufts Daily in late November.
Kevin T. Jones (Communication Arts) presented seven papers at the National Communication Association’s annual convention in Chicago Nov. 20-23. He presented the paper “Walking on Eggshells: Exploring Creativity Versus Crisis Management as Pedagogy for High Anxiety in the Basic Course,†in which he shared the insights and activities he uses in the classroom to reduce communication anxiety. Next, Kevin presented “The Past, Present and Promising Future of the Undergraduate Capstone Course at Small Colleges and Universities,†which featured his research on the effectiveness of service learning in the senior capstone course. He followed that with a presentation on “Demonstrating Effective Audience Analysis through Analysis of Presidential Crisis Rhetoric Speeches,†using Ronald Reagan’s Challenger disaster speech and George Bush’s Columbia disaster speech to argue how Reagan used effective audience analysis to turn a negative event into a positive event while Bush engaged poor audience analysis and failed to move his audience.
Kevin then presented “Mortification and Apodiorizo: Re-framing Apologia,†in which he presented an image management theory he created based on Tiger Woods’ 2010 sex scandal speech. Next, Kevin served on a panel and presented “Who is Responsible for Student Learning,†in which he shared his pedagogical strategies to engage students more in the learning process in each course. He then presented the paper “The Presence of Communication Learning Outcomes in General Education Assessment.†Finally, as the former president of the Religious Communication Association, Kevin was invited to present a paper titled “Past Presidents’ Reflections for the Present and Future,†in which he shared his perspective on his tenure as president and what the future holds for the organization. Kevin was also invited to serve as the chair and respondent to a panel titled “Bringing Insights of Interpersonal Communication Theory into Conversation with Other Subfields.â€