Consultants in the Classroom: Pilot Study Assessing Multidisciplinary Center Collaboration

Communication center clients come in various forms. Many centers work with individuals and groups while some work with entire classrooms, departments, or colleges. Very few centers both partner with other campus consulting services and interact with large units. While a considerable amount of literature focuses on one-on-one consultations and some work focuses on collaboration between similar centers (McCall, Ellis, & Murphy, 2017), little, if any, research deals with these unique partnerships and how they collaborate to serve groups. This article examines how one communication center partnered with two other campus consulting services to create a purposeful and collaborative relationship with three sections of a communication course for an entire semester each. The goal of this work is to test effectiveness value of communication and similar consultants in the classroom, and to understand if one approach to consultant inclusion in the classroom is more empowering than another. To accomplish these goals, three groups, or classes, of students were used. The control group excluded all consultant participation. One experimental group had consultants embedded themselves into each class meeting. The other experimental group had consultants provide service-specific workshops during select class meetings. The collaborative partnership for this study included speaking, writing, and research center consultants and pre-and post-semester scales were used to compare empowerment levels and subject knowledge values between groups. Results suggest the workshop group produces higher empowerment and learning levels than other groups