From Theory to Practice

Abstract

In this article, an educational project is described that was formulated with the aim to give master’s students in business communication the opportunity to experience how theory could be applied to shape practice. A 4-week project was developed in which students were urged to use communication theory and linguistic theory to manage the communication with respect to a simulated crisis at the university. The students were enrolled in collaborative learning teams. In this article, the architecture of the project is described, and drawing on an analysis of the students’ work and their evaluation of the project, its outcomes are discussed.

Keywords

crisis communication linguistics collaborative learning classroom practices peer reviewing

Introduction

First and foremost, Flemish educational context master’s programs need to be aimed at developing students’ academic orientation toward a subject (Nederlands-Vlaamse Accreditatie Organisatie [NVAO], 2011). Offering opportunities to develop practical skill is a secondary goal of these programs. Yet, as the internal evaluation of the program in business communication by the students shows time and again, students often expect the teaching staff to help them in becoming communication practitioners. One way out to address the expectations of both teaching staff and students is a teaching practice that helps students develop theoretically based practical skills. In this article, we discuss the opportunities an exercise in simulated crisis communication can offer to realize this goal of developing theory-based communication practice.

Corporate communication is a field of inquiry that is empirically and practically oriented. Well-known theories in public relations (PR), such as the excellence theory (e.g., Grunig & Grunig, 2000), the stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984), and the image repair theory (Benoit, 1997), are not merely abstract and conceptual theories but have a strong link to practical application. To develop practical applications, theory plays an important role. Van Ruler and Verčič (2004) define bridging theory and practice as the “fundamental asset” of PR scholarship (p. 6). Cornelissen (2004) is another advocate of the close link between theory and practice in order to “enhance our overall knowledge and understanding of the field” and “advance the day-to-day practice of communication practitioners” (p. 13). Nevertheless, many PR practitioners tend to underestimate the practical applicability of academic theory. In the Belgian context, this underestimation of the value of theory can be explained by the fact that although 93% of Belgian PR practitioners hold a degree of higher education, only 25% of these degrees were obtained in a communication-oriented program (Van Gorp & Pauwels, 2009).

For the purpose of this article, we define theory as a set of assumed causal relationships between entities in a field that allow for a prediction of outcomes of certain actions. In the field of communication, this means that theory allows practitioners to develop communication activities in a way that warrants the expectation that their communication goals will be realized. In our view, these causal relationships relate to the organization of the communication process as well as to the actual formulation of messages. In other words, we look for useful theory in communication science as well as in linguistics.

Cornelissen (2000, pp. 317-322) made a distinction between three models for typifying the way PR theory and practice inform each other. In the instrumental model, the confidence in scholarship is the most explicit since it assumes that academics are perfectly capable of prescribing rational solutions to all practical problems. In the conceptual model, academics’ primary focus is not on formulating directly applicable theories. They aim more at providing PR practitioners with a set of meaningful concepts and ideas with which the practitioners get to work. In the conceptual model, however, a one-way relationship is assumed between theory and practice. Only the translation model fully takes into account how theory and practical knowledge interact to inform the academic and support the work of the practitioner. The translation model places intuitive theory, ideas based on trial and error, and experience of practitioners on an equal footing with academic theory.

Wehmeier (2009) indicates that academics strongly agree with the idea that theories need some kind of transformation to be used in daily practice. Theory should not be seen as a collection of mechanistically applicable laws but as a set of probabilistic guidelines for the development of that practice. In that sense, PR professionals need to be “reflective practitioners” (Schön, 1983). However, it is questionable whether more traditional forms of teaching help students develop such a full-fledged, theory-based, reflective attitude. In our own experience, theory is most often used reactively, as an objective basis for reflection on practice. Students are presented with practical examples and are expected to use theory in determining the quality of the practice they have been presented with. Chances are that this type of activity will not lead to the development of the above-mentioned theory transformation in view of daily practice. In order to attain that goal, students need to be given opportunities to apply theory proactively, to use their theoretical insights as guidelines in predicting the consequences of the choices they make in tackling a real-life communication assignment. In order to help them develop this attitude further, we developed a learning activity in which students were expected to use their theoretical communication background to manage a simulated crisis at the university.

Background of the Program

At the University of Leuven in Belgium, some 170 students are enrolled in the master of business communication program. Although the master’s program is officially called Bedrijfscommunicatie (business communication), it deals with the communication of commercial as well as noncommercial corporations. As the linguistics and communication departments of the university jointly organize this 1-year master’s program, both disciplines provide the theoretical background of the program. In line with the general targets of master’s programs prescribed by the NVAO, the program strives for students to attain a thorough theoretical understanding of the field as well as develop skills to apply this theoretical background in shaping their professional practice. In order to reach this goal, the program provides classes in which theory is presented and used to analyze diverse forms of real-world communication. In addition, a number of opportunities are offered to students to develop theoretically informed practical skills. The educational project reported on in this article is one of those opportunities.

From a communication perspective, there is a strong focus on communication management, with references to PR literature (e.g., Doorley & Garcia, 2007; Grunig & Hunt, 1984; Theaker, 2008) and to scholarship on reputation and image (Cornelissen, 2004; Van Riel, 1995; Van Ruler & Verčič, 2004; Wehmeier, 2009). As such, the program focuses mainly on communication as a management instrument oriented toward the aim of establishing strong relationships with groups of stakeholders. Two main means to accomplish this goal are the strategic coordination of all communication and the maintaining of a favorable organizational reputation.

From a linguistic perspective, the program starts from a usage-based approach to language and linguistics. Language is not seen as a system that needs to be applied correctly but as a means to engage in joint projects of intersubjective meaning making (Clark, 1996, pp. 11-14). The quality of communication is determined in functional terms; that is, a text is considered to be of high quality when it yields the effect that the text was intended to yield. Within that effect, a referential and a social component can be distinguished. With respect to the referential component, cognitive linguistic theories on how meaning is produced are introduced. Framing theory (Fillmore, 2006; Hallahan, 1999), blending theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002), and ideas on language and institutionalization (Searle, 2010) are presented to the students. Insights from pragmatics, discourse studies, and conversational analysis, regarding the construction of utterances and their organization in texts, are also introduced during the theoretical courses. From a social meaning perspective, a lot of attention is paid to face management (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 1967). The application of these theoretical insights requires of the students that they become proficient perspective takers: The functional quality of their texts will depend to a large extent on their ability to assume the perspective of the text’s intended audience and to predict how that audience will react on it.

Putting theoretical insights from linguistics and communication into practice turns out to be a rather tall order for our students. First, even after the introductory courses, their theoretical basis is limited. In order to let them experience the merits of developing a theoretically grounded communication practice, they need to be able and willing to enlarge that basis of their own accord. That means we have to find ways to help them develop the attitude of looking for a theoretical basis as a starting point for their communication planning. Second, they seem to expect either too little or too much from planning their communication strategies. On the one hand, communication as a spontaneous process seems so strongly embedded in the way they behave that it is hard for them to plan communication on the basis of theoretically predictable outcomes. On the other hand, when they do plan communication based on theoretically predictable outcomes, they tend to lose sight of the probabilistic nature of these predictions, and treat theoretical insights as fixed ways to an expected outcome.

In answer to these challenges, we designed a project in which students first could acquaint themselves with theoretical answers to specific communication issues and were then asked to put these theoretical insights into practice in a simulated crisis communication. Crises require immediate communicative responses, which makes communication practitioners fall back on the theoretical knowledge they have acquired beforehand. In our case, students can start from the insights they have been offered during the theoretical courses on image repair theory, framing, politeness theory, media relations management, and strategic issues management. On the other hand, crisis communication illustrates better than most other forms of communication the probabilistic nature of theoretical guidelines. In crises, things very often do not turn out the way they are expected to, and this requires immediate adaptation of strategies and procedures developed earlier. Therefore, we determined that a simulated crisis would be an excellent strategy for our students to learn to deal with the theory-practice dilemma.

A Crisis Simulation Exercise

Aims

In view of the challenges facing our students in their attempts to develop theory grounded practice, we set up a project that aimed at attaining the following goals:

Enable students to add to their theoretical knowledge through the following:

• Selecting relevant insights from their theoretical background

• Collecting new theoretical information from the scientific literature

• Learning from the theoretical insights brought in by fellow students

Let students experience the effectiveness of praxis grounded in theory through the following:

• Experimenting with theory application

• Seeing theory put into practice by fellow students

• Combining the experience of the effect of their communicative efforts with feedback on their theoretical ground

Overview of the Project

To attain the goals just defined, we enrolled students in a 4-week project in which they were expected to manage the communication of a simulated crisis. Figure 1 presents an overview of the three stages of the project: preparation, integration, and simulation.

Figure 1.

Overview of the project.

Stage 3 forms the core of the project. During that stage, which started on Monday morning of the fourth week, students were notified of some disturbing events that had taken place at the university, and asked to take care of the internal and external communication these events required. In the first two stages of the project, students were given the chance to prepare themselves for the task that awaited them in Stage 3. In the first stage, students were divided in groups and asked to prepare for the role they would have to take up in the third stage. Seven roles were identified: copywriter internal communication, copywriter external communication, copywriter product communication, internal communication manager, external communication manager, product communication manager, and spokesperson. In Stage 2, students were assigned to their crisis communication teams (CCTs). Each CCT consisted of seven students, one student for each role. In total, 18 CCTs took part in the project. In this stage, each team was expected to develop a crisis communication plan, based on the expertise each student had gained in Stage 1. This communication plan could then serve as the basis for the communicative actions of the CCT in Stage 3.

For Stage 3, four detailed crisis scenarios were developed, each containing the course of action of the crisis, a list of key characters in the scenario, and a description of the position and evolution of these key characters during the development of the crisis. The whole project was directed by a central team of three staff members (the three authors of this article). They managed the overall direction of the project, the logistics, and the feedback on the actions of the students. During Stage 3, they were assisted by 20 other staff members, who all played the role of a stakeholder in one of the scenarios. Each scenario served as the basic document directing the actions of these staff members. If the CCTs reacted as expected, the crisis developed following the scenario. If, however, a CCT made an unexpected move, the scenario was adapted, confronting the team with the consequences of its action.

Four (six in the case of Scenario 1) CCTs were assigned to each of the following scenarios:

In one of the buildings of the university, a large absenteeism through illness of staff and students is observed. As it turns out, the absenteeism started after the floor covering of the building was renewed. Some glue was used that makes people sick. Rumor has it that it may even be carcinogenic.

An administrator of the university had been bullying a colleague for such a long time that the latter retaliated by changing some students’ examination marks in the computer system.

Researchers of the faculty of medicine have developed a “mind reader,” a device that could help people with aphasia express their thoughts. As it turns out, the medical use of the device appears to be a front that allowed the professor to earn a lot of money developing espionage devices.

The management of the university decides to switch to the exclusive use of English in some master’s programs, among them the master in business communication program, engendering massive student protest. At the same time, one of the professors in the master of business communication program gives evidence of his really poor proficiency in English during a guest lecture. One of the students has filmed the professor struggling with English and shown that film in a satirical program on national television.

Didactic Concept

Because we wanted to encourage peer learning and facilitate the effectiveness of the process, we assigned students to collaborative learning teams, using an adapted form of the so-called jigsaw design (Aronson, Blaney, Stephin, Sikes, & Snapp, 1978). In a jigsaw design, students are given the opportunity to develop specific expertise before they are required to use this gained expertise to the benefit of group work. In this case, we embedded the development of individual expertise in a cooperative activity as well. In the first 2 weeks of the project, students developing the same individual expertise were given the opportunity to work together. In this way, we wanted to ensure that even the weaker students could, with the help of their fellow students, develop the specific expertise to secure their unique position in the group in the subsequent stages of the project. As our students come from different bachelor’s and master’s programs, they constitute a heterogeneous group with respect to their prior knowledge. To allow them to elaborate on that knowledge, students were asked to focus on specific expertise in line with that prior knowledge, and to do so in collaboration with students from the same educational background. Students with a background in communication were given the function of communication manager, whereas students with a background in linguistics were appointed copywriter or spokesperson. Only in the next stage of the project were students sent to their CCTs where they teamed up with students who had developed expertise in different areas.

As pointed out by Slavin (1980), the jigsaw design creates high task interdependency among students but generates little reward interdependency unless some form of group evaluation is included. In order to ensure this reward interdependency, we made sure that the team effort formed the basis for our feedback and our personal appreciation of the work of the students as well as of the grades individual students received for their work. By maximizing both forms of interdependency, we aimed at creating a learning environment that could boost self-esteem, learning satisfaction, and, consequently, a high degree of collaborative learning.

Instruments

Throughout all the stages of the crisis exercise, students had an online toolbox with wiki software, discussion boards, a file exchange, and a group e-mail at their disposal. As an online collaboration platform, a wiki enables a group of people to work on one product without physically having to be in the same place. Every student could make contributions to interlinked web pages, suggest adjustments to the contributions of others, and motivate all of his or her actions. As every action was registered, students were also able to go back to earlier versions and, if necessary, to undo changes. The discussion board provided students with the opportunity to start up threads about different topics, making it easier to keep the discussions organized and clear versus the difficulties of communicating via e-mail.

These web-based instruments also enabled us to supervise, guide, and evaluate the students throughout the crisis exercise. While the wikis showed us how the students’ work evolved, the discussion boards gave us an insight into group dynamics and the motivation behind each decision. This insight not only helped us formulate specific feedback but also evaluate student performance in the expertise-building part of the project and group performance during the crisis communication management exercise.

Practical Organization

Stage 1

At the start of the project, students were told that the university was planning to outsource some of its communication activities. All interested communication agencies had to participate in a crisis simulation so the university’s communication department could determine which candidate was the most suitable for the job. Each student was expected to take up a role in a communication agency that was interested in having the university as a client.

As students would be expected to turn theory into practice, their first assignment was to establish the theoretical basis for their actions in the communication agencies. They were given 2 weeks to select relevant insights from theory they had encountered during their undergraduate work and from input that was given to them in the master’s courses taught prior to the start of the project. We also encouraged them to explore the scientific literature in search of theoretical approaches that were novel to them and that they believed to be relevant to crisis communication. As pointed out earlier, students were instructed to do this theory building in cooperation with students of the same educational background. They were advised not to stop at vague ideas on the applicability of theory but to anticipate a number of possible crises and to try to apply a number of typical actions that those crises would require. During this initial stage, students were asked to describe how a press conference would be set up, which press release they would write under certain circumstances, and so on. In addition, they had to become acquainted with the university as an organization, its mission, and its core values.

After a week, each group was given the opportunity to approach the central team staff members with questions and to ask for feedback on the work they had already done. All groups made maximum use of this opportunity.

At the end of the stage, students were asked to rate the degree to which each of the team members had contributed to the successful realization of the assignment. This peer evaluation, combined with the individual student’s contribution emerging from an analysis of the wikis and discussion boards, yielded the individual student mark for this stage.

Stage 2

From Week 3 onward, students were assigned to their CCTs. In recognition of the importance of pre-event planning for crisis communication (Seeger, 2006), students were given the assignment to integrate their individual role preparations into a crisis communication plan that could serve as a manual during Stage 3. During this stage, CCTs interested in feedback could pose their questions to the three staff members of the central team through e-mail. As it turned out, groups only used this opportunity to ask questions about the organization of the project.

Stage 3

On Monday morning of the fourth week, a description of one of the crises was posted on each wiki. Each CCT then had to take full responsibility for the management of the crisis communication assigned to their group. They were instructed to publish each decision and the products resulting from these decisions (press releases, statements, minutes of meetings they organized, etc.) in real time on their wikis. These logs enabled us to monitor and adjust the crisis development. For example, when a team had made an unwise decision, we, as supervisors, could immediately step in and let them know they had just caused the crisis to escalate.

Each CCT was also given a list of phone numbers from key characters in the scenario they could contact. It was up to the CCTs to decide who needed to be contacted and for what purpose: asking for information, giving instructions, asking for permission, and so on. Moreover, these and other contact persons also contacted the teams unexpectedly, enabling us to test the validity of the CCTs’ on-the-spot decisions as well as their actions that allowed more planning time.

As a way of creating an opportunity to raise reward interdependence, each CCT was invited to round up the third stage (and the project) by giving a pitch to a panel of judges. They had to convince the panel that they had been better at tackling the crisis than the other teams assigned to the same crisis (and therefore, their agency deserved the contract). The panel of judges consisted of staff members and communication professionals from the university’s marketing department. The panel used the presentation as an opportunity to give feedback on the overall performance of each group. To give students the opportunity to prepare for this pitch, we let the crises fade out at the beginning of the third day, so each group had at least a day to prepare for the presentation.

A week after the presentation, we asked the students to fill out an evaluation form. In this evaluation, students were requested to indicate their opinion on a 4-point scale ranging from 1 (completely agree) to 4 (completely disagree) on a number of propositions concerning the project as a whole and each stage separately. The propositions related to organizational aspects of the project as well as to the degree to which students felt the goals of the project had been met. Students were again asked to assess the contribution of their fellow team members. This time, in line with the principles of reward interdependence, the peer assessment was combined with an overall group score resulting from an analysis of the wikis and an assessment of the presentation, to yield an individual score for each student.

Discussion

In this section, we discuss the outcomes of the projects. The analysis of these outcomes is based on the quantitative results of the student evaluation (see Table 1) and on the comments students wrote down on their evaluation form. Ninety-five students filled out the evaluation form. We calculated means and confidence intervals for each question. We consider students in agreement with the statement when the confidence interval does not include 2.50.

Table 1.

Assessment of the Project by the Participants (n = 95).

Item	M	Upper bound	Lower bound
1. I lacked the knowledge to carry out the tasks connected to my role	1.98	1.80	2.16
2. The courses provided enough information on crisis communication to start with the assignment	2.32	2.15	2.50
3. The assignment has given me an idea of the essence of this field	1.66	1.54	1.77
4. The assignment has given me a better insight in the applicability of linguistic theory for communication purposes	1.56	1.40	1.72
5. The assignment stimulated me to connect the theory we learned to reality	1.48	1.35	1.61
6. I believe I have learned more about crisis communication than would be the case in a traditional course	1.36	1.23	1.48
7. Interaction with other students increased my understanding of the field	1.67	1.52	1.87
8. Thanks to my fellow experts, I was better prepared for the next stages of the project than if I would have had to carry out the first stage by myself	1.93	1.74	2.11
9. The cooperation with students with a different educational background from mine proved to be a surplus value	2.32	2.15	2.50
10. I have learned things about a field that was unfamiliar to me from students with a different educational background	2.00	1.84	2.16
11. The jigsaw design was a valuable aspect of the project	2.87	2.70	3.04

Note. Opinions on statements were scored as follows: 1 = strongly agree, 2 = agree, 3 = disagree, 4 = strongly disagree. Means and 95% confidence intervals are displayed.

Students as Elaborators of their Theoretical Basis

None of the groups seemed to feel the need to elaborate the theoretical ideas that had been presented to them. They relied heavily on the theoretical insights of the courses taught prior to the project. All literature they came up with themselves expanded the applicational perspective of the theory. They used a multitude of publications offering practical guidelines for crisis communication. Yet, in its current form, the project did not turn our students into autonomous searchers of relevant theory. Rather, they kept expecting theory to be handed to them and searched the body of literature for examples of applications of that theory, preferably in contexts that resembled those they would have to work in as closely as possible. This image of student attitude toward theory is supported by the results of the evaluation (see Items 1 and 2 in Table 1). Students indicated a lack of prior (theoretical) knowledge and were undecided on the question as to whether they had been handed enough information on crisis communication in the courses taught prior to the project. As one of the students expressed it:

The [theoretical] information collected in the first stage . . . is certainly not sufficient to handle a crisis well. Much more attention needs to be paid to crisis handling in the courses.

Another student disqualified the theoretical information students gathered themselves by stating,

The knowledge one gets from the [theoretical] courses in communication and linguistics . . . is much more useful than the information gathered in Stage 1.

A positive outcome of students’ focus on the application of theory is that they invested a lot of effort in developing an understanding of how the theoretical insights could be put to use. The wikis they developed in this stage of the project contained working definitions of almost all of the relevant concepts they encountered in the series of courses. In that sense, there certainly was an aspect of learning from one another at work here. In the past, one of the major shortfalls of the program was that students developed only a superficial understanding of theoretical concepts. As the examination results of the theoretical courses in the program show, the project has certainly deepened the theoretical insight of students. The evaluation results showed that students were aware of this learning outcome, with respect to crisis communication in general and linguistic theory in particular (items 3 and 4).

Students as Accomplished Appliers of Theory

An important question is whether we succeeded in helping students become better practitioners by making them develop practice based on theory in a simulated seminaturalistic environment. Our analysis of the students’ evaluation forms revealed that students believe this goal was met. They felt that they had understood the essence of crisis communication better (Items 3 and 4). They also indicated that the project helped them to relate theory to practice:

The practice-oriented approach that was required of us made the [theoretical] knowledge from the courses . . . concrete.

They seem to have appreciated the chance of learning in this way very much as they agreed with the statement that they had learned more about crisis communication in the project than they could have learned in a more traditional course (Items 5 and 6). Students also indicated that the goal of collaborative learning was, as far as they are concerned, reached. Generally, understanding of the field was believed to be increased by peer cooperation (Item 7). More in particular, students agreed that fellow experts, students with comparable prior knowledge with whom they cooperated in Stage 1, had helped them be well prepared for the next stages (Item 8). And at the end of the project, they signaled that cooperation with students with different prior knowledge was an asset, as it taught them insights from a field they were not familiar with (Items 9 and 10). The fact that students stated to have learned from both fellow experts and from students with a different background means that the jigsaw design served its purpose. Interestingly enough, students were not so positive about the jigsaw design (Item 11). Apparently, it confronted them with a number of organizational problems, which obscured the fact that the design has been crucial in creating the beneficial cooperation. On the basis of the above, we came to the conclusion that students took the opportunities the project offered them to learn from one another and that, consequently, the project had a positive effect on the depth of our students’ theoretical understanding of the field and helped them develop practice on the basis of theory. The expected effect on the width of their theoretical knowledge, however, did not emerge.

Successes and Failures in More Detail

In order to get a more detailed insight into the nature of the effects of theory on practice that were instigated through the project, we examined the wikis and discussion boards the students used in all three stages of the project more closely. This examination provided us with a more detailed insight into the extent to which the project objectives were achieved.

1. Theory helps students understand the nature of the tasks of a communication professional better. The focus on crisis theory gave the students insight into the crucial difference between crisis management and crisis communication management. Students who did not make much of an effort to develop a theoretical view on crisis communication were inclined to address the crisis as if they were responsible for solving it. When, as a matter of speaking, a fire broke out, they either tried to extinguish it themselves or called the fire brigade. Those who understood what crisis communication theory is all about left the extinguishing of the fire to others and started to communicate about the fire: How it arose, whether the fire department was notified in time, how the fire fighters managed to tackle the flames, and so on.

2. The actions of all CCTs were characterized by an eagerness to communicate externally and a problematic realization of internal communication. Generally speaking, the CCTs saw media relations as their main task. They were thrilled to organize an event such as a press conference or they found it necessary to send out at least one press release a day. It was observed that students were especially afraid of not communicating to the outside world. This anxiety can be related to what we said earlier about treating theoretical insights in a categorical instead of a probabilistic way. To give just one example, several groups referred in their crisis communication plan to the strategy of “stealing thunder,” that is, admitting to having made a mistake or a failure before a third party announces this error, for example, through the media (Arpan & Pompper, 2003). Whenever they encountered a problem, they wanted to be the first to communicate about it. This urge seems to have blocked their ability to assess the situation and to make an informed decision as to whether the problem was likely to escalate. In Scenario 2, for instance, wrong examination results were communicated to a small group of students. The fact that they were faced with this problem was reason enough for some groups to send a message to the entire Flemish press. One group even included the press in the French-speaking part of Belgium. In a Belgian context, in which the Flemish and French-speaking part of the country function independently for all matters regarding “internal affairs” of the two regions, communicating an incident in one of the Flemish universities to the French-speaking press makes no sense. In Scenario 4, a professor was made fun of in a late-night TV show that has a small audience. Still, this incident was reason enough for some groups to send a reaction to the entire press, delivering a minor incident to a large audience.

With respect to planning internal communication, students seem to struggle. All CCTs underestimated the role of the internal stakeholders during the crisis. Although they listed the internal stakeholders in their stakeholder mapping in Stage 1, they were not sufficiently prepared to face the internal dynamics that were caused by the crisis. Different interests are at play during a crisis and to identify these interests requires time. For instance, at the start of the crises, most CCTs expected carte blanche from the university’s top management. It came as a surprise that they had to invest a lot of time in establishing a two-way symmetrical model of internal communication with that management: They had to bring about “symbiotic changes” in the behavior of both their own CCT and the other internal stakeholders, including the top management, through communication (Grunig, 2001, p. 12). Those who understood this, and were willing to put in the effort, fared well by it and felt rewarded when the management (impersonated by role-playing staff members) informed them of its appreciation.

3. Students ran into trouble while trying to manage a kaleidoscopic accumulation of demands for action in a coordinated way. Because of the constant input provided by all the characters taking part in the crisis scenarios, there was really no time for the students to sit back and wait to see how one stakeholder would respond before a next stakeholder had to be informed. Most often, each stakeholder needed specific information at a given time while the crisis evolved. The different messages, however, could not contradict each other. During a crisis, stakeholders—even those who are not part of the main target group—experience a high need for information. For instance, in Scenario 2, one of the CCTs gave a different explanation for what happened with the examination marks each time they communicated with the students, the staff members, or the harassed employee. Then, during a live interview on national radio, they dismissed the story about the bullying as gossip. As a result, the harassed employee contacted the press himself, which was now more eager than before to publish his side of the story, causing the crisis to escalate.

4. Students managed to use general principles from linguistic theory to boost the effectiveness of their messages but still overlooked the more detailed predictions linguistic theory can offer on the effects of messages. With respect to referential meaning, the problem students faced is that they communicated for the university, an institution they knew well from a student perspective, but not necessarily from the perspective of the university staff or management. In their external communication, they communicated with an audience that could be expected to know about the university, and might have some general knowledge of how the university works. Detailed understanding of aspects of university life, however, could not be assumed. In general, students seemed to take this differential perspective into account. Yet most of the groups let their awareness of this matter slip here and there. In about 80% of the press releases, some slips of referential perspective taking could be observed. A striking example of this phenomenon was provided by two groups dealing with Scenario 4. In a press release, they referred to an incident that happened in one of the lectures on “Linguistic Aspects.” “Linguistic Aspects” is the short version of the title of a course in the MA program on aspects of linguistic theory that are relevant for corporate communication. As it is an obligatory course, it is part of the common ground of students in corporate communication but, at the same time, completely unknown outside the circle of MA students in business communication at Leuven.

A positive example of the application of linguistic theory for referential matters is offered by the concept of so-called Simplifying Models, one of the features covered in the course mentioned. Simplifying Models are metaphors used for the explanation of difficult matters (Jaspaert, Van de Velde, Brône, Feyaerts, & Geeraerts, 2011). In Scenario 3, being able to apply the theoretical insights into the workings of Simplifying Models came in very handy. In this scenario, rumors were spread that medical use of the device a professor of the medical faculty had developed was just a cover-up to allow the professor to work on a device that could also read the thoughts of people who did not want their thoughts read. Three out of four teams dealing with this particular crisis saw that the term mind reader worked as a Simplifying Model, framing the device in a way that was compatible with the rumor. They sent out press releases in which they tried to reframe the device (e.g., by using the Simplifying Model “mind speller,” indicating that the person on whom the device was used was not a passive patient whose thoughts were being read by somebody else but the actor of the spelling out of his or her thoughts). Incidentally, in doing so, one group took its theoretical knowledge of framing devices to be part of the common ground with their audience as they stated, “The name “mind reader,” which the press ascribed as a Simplifying Model or metaphor, does not adequately represent the function of the device,” assuming that journalists are familiar with the theoretical jargon that was used.

With regard to social meaning, students understood very well that they had to frame the university involved in the crisis in a positive way. In the first stage of the project, ample attention was given to the determination of core values of the university and to the ways crisis communication could strengthen the frame of the university as an institution upholding these core values. All crisis communication plans emerging from Stage 2 expressed the intent to frame the university as an organization providing high-quality research and education in the service of society, while upholding high ethical standards. These intentions resulted in numerous explicitations of that “academic-quality” frame. These explicitations abound in the boilerplate that is added to most releases. In the main body of the text, almost half of the 45 press releases contained statements to this effect. Research is “pioneering,” the university is “committed to high educational quality,” wants to “uphold its high ethical standards,” has “for years been a guarantee for ethical, high quality research,” operates “in all openness,” stands for “accessibility,” is a “‘research intensive university which strives for international quality and innovation,” considers “moral and deontological demands of paramount importance,” has “the sole intention of serving society,” and so on.

Students also understood that a university in crisis needs to be framed as an active organization, not passively undergoing the crisis but actively showing initiative and compassion. In their press releases, they made ample use of corrective action and mortification as image repair strategies (Benoit, 1997). They stated explicitly that the university “expresses regret,” “intends to look in the matter thoroughly,” “has taken appropriate action,” “had already taken action prior to the crisis which minimizes the impact of the current crisis,” “had already instated a special committee of investigation,” “has contacted outside parties that may help solve the crisis,” and so on. In some cases, they even portrayed an overzealous university. For example, in the scenario in which an employee, fed up with being bullied, hacked the computer system with the examination results, students let the provost of the university express compassion, not only with the bullied employee but also with “all victims of bullying.”

Students seem to have more problems with the application of the somewhat subtler framing devices that often influence the implicit framing of actions and participants. In the mind reader scenario mentioned earlier, it turned out that there is a problem with the financing of the device. At that moment, one CCT announced that “one culprit has been identified” and that there may be “accomplices,” framing in this way the financing problem as a crime. They would regret this decision, as the university later decided not to take action. Another group called the financing problem at this point “a disaster,” which again offered them no way out when the university decided not to act on the matter.

Conclusion

In this article, we described and explained exposing master’s students in corporate communication to the application of theoretical knowledge in a crisis simulation exercise. The project aimed at (a) enabling students to add to their theoretical knowledge of managing a crisis and (b) demonstrating to them the effectiveness of practices that are grounded in theory.

At the onset of the project, students could be seen to use, in Cornelissen’s (2000) terms, mainly an instrumental model in their approach to the relation between theory and praxis. The students seemed to have high confidence in the theory offered by their instructors, as they did not seem to look for confirmation of the validity and usefulness of these theoretical insights in the scientific literature. Rather, they looked for translations of these insights into practical guidelines for crisis communication. As the project progressed, students clearly developed a kind of “reflective practitioners” attitude (Schön, 1983) as an interface between theory and practice, situating their actions in what Cornelissen (2000) called the translation model. The transition to the translation model resulted in the development of a deeper rather than a wider theoretical basis for their actions. Students exchanged their superficial understanding of theoretical concepts for deeper insights based on their reflection on their own actions and those of their group members and on the incorporation of staff members’ feedback on the theoretical basis and the outcomes of their work. They showed to be able to move beyond the level of mechanistic use of a set of communication axioms. As shown in the discussion of our students’ work, their newly developed strategy did not always lead to successful practice. Especially when pressed hard by the circumstances, some groups showed a tendency to revert back to an instrumental or conceptual model. They reacted as the toolbox they had developed in Stage 2 dictated, without sufficiently taking into account the effects of the complexity of the situation on their actions’ outcome. On the whole, however, we believe that the project results, as documented on the basis of the student evaluation and an analysis of the students’ work, warrant the conclusion that the project as we developed it plays an essential role in establishing a master’s program in corporate communication that, as the NVAO requests, brings students to an advanced level of academic knowledge and at the same time offers them opportunities to develop their professional competencies. The fact that students indicated that we made them work very hard during the project but that they considered the efforts put in more than worthwhile adds to our general positive evaluation of the project.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Bios

Tamara Aertsen is an alumna of the master in business communication program at KU Leuven. She worked as a staff member, developing and coordinating the project described in the article. She is currently following a training program for shop managers at Colruyt Group.

Koen Jaspaert is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at KU Leuven, Belgium. His main fields of research are language education and business communication. He is the program director of the master’s program in business communication and teaches linguistic aspects of business communication.

Baldwin Van Gorp is an assistant professor of journalism and communications management in the Institute for Media Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium. His research interests include the framing approach, public relations, and journalism. On these topics, he has published articles in several journals, such as Public Relations Review and Journal of Communication.

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