Communication Across the Curriculum and in the Disciplines: A Call for Scholarly Cross-curricular Advocacy

Communication-across-the-curriculum (CXC) programs provide assistance to other disciplines on the teaching and learning of communication meeting an increasingly important need for students not only to be content specialists, but also coherent communicators. Research emerging from this initiative details programmatic challenges and emphases, but also provides insight into the unique interdisciplinary issues involved with teaching communication in other disciplinary cultures. Through a systematic thematic analysis, this review provides a synopsis of CXC scholarship over the past 25 years highlighting three distinct eras of CXC scholarship that illustrate differing approaches to negotiating the mission of interdisciplinary change: cross-curricular proactiveness, cross-curricular skepticism, and cross-curricular curiosity. Over this time period researchers in this scholarly discussion have engaged in work that has produced detailed program descriptions and assessment, transferable instructional resources, and increasingly more discipline-specific empirical results and theoretical contributions. To increase CXC's impact, though, future scholarship could respond to pressing challenges by adopting a stance of cross-curricular advocacy that is proactive in ways characteristic of early research but with a more focused commitment to empirical rigor, theoretical sophistication, and reflective scholarly partnerships.