Faculty Profiles

Building Understanding through Communication

“My mission is to teach students to think about thinking,” says Leda Cooks, professor of communication and graduate program director. “I am particularly interested in associations between concepts embedded in everyday vocabularies about identity, relationships and culture and the epistemologies advocated by texts and research in interpersonal and intercultural communication. So, I present students with representative scholarship while teaching them the skills by which to think critically about the material.”

In the classroom Cooks often uses a circular questioning technique, as well as media and hands-on application in the community, to enter “the grammars around race, ethnicity, and culture. I encourage students to think about these concepts on a relational and identity level, in addition to knowledge of their content. I encourage and embrace resistance to dominant epistemology while showing students that ideologies and philosophies are intertextual and interdependent.”

Cooks is fortunate, she points out, that the communication department promotes these types of challenges and supports faculty efforts in this area. “My pedagogy,” Cooks says, “puts communication at the center of our understanding of concepts, like racism and classism for example, and tries to get at their contextual—and fluid—meanings.”

Since Cooks’ arrival at UMass Amherst in 1993, she has seen a change among students. “Early in my career, it seemed many students could not get past their anger that the ‘facts’ about their culture were not as valid and reliable as they thought. These days, they seem more comfortable with the idea that communication constructs their social world and thus their ideas about race, gender, ethnicity, and other things.”

As a researcher, Cooks focuses on the construction of identity, collective memory and (Central and Native American) nationalism; desire, resistance, body, and performance in the classroom; learning in social, cultural, and mediated contexts. Throughout her career, Cooks has been concerned too with the intersections of community service learning (CSL) and critical pedagogy. “I was one of the first service-learning faculty fellows here,” she explains, “and have worked on a number of university and professional committees and as an adviser to faculty across campus and the country.”

Cooks developed a department-wide curricula effort in CSL and instituted community service as an option for all of her classes (currently she’s teaching three, in addition to being GPD). “Our media literacy project is built around race, conflict and mediation—even the methods courses I have taught have been used to help community-based organizations assess their work for evaluation and funding purposes. I have used CSL projects in a variety of courses: interpersonal communication, interracial communication, conflict/mediation, intercultural communication and gender. Organizing them can be difficult and stressful, but the energy and learning that come out of these connections are well worth the effort.”

Case in point. Since the 1990s Cooks and students in her media literacy and violence class have been working with children at Lynch Middle School in Holyoke, where the student body is largely Puerto Rican. “Our main concern is to make information concrete for 12-year-olds,” she says. “We talk about what critical thinking is, we role play and write stories. We also talk about stereotyping in the media, try to clarify the difference between race and ethnicity, and together find stereotypical statements. But we also ask them about their perceptions of white people, helping them discover that stereotypes don’t apply only to them.”

The program has morphed over the years, and grown to include Deerfield and South Hadley schools. “It’s stressful getting all the logistics in order, but every year I see how valuable the experience is for both the children and my students. They learn things from each other that can never be taught in a classroom.”

Widely published, Cooks is a past recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, as well as many teaching and research awards. UMass Amherst, she says, “is the kind of place where students can get an incredible education. There’s so much to do, so many opportunities—you get the sense of a ‘real life’ environment. My department is unique in my discipline for its breadth and theoretical focus—I am proud of it and my colleagues. The campus is becoming more and more diverse—that’s really important to me. Certainly, it’s not a perfect picture, but I’m incredibly attached.”

July 23, 2007