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his paper describes the benefits of business teachers interacting with their liberal arts colleagues to gain a better understanding of how to incorporate recent advances in multicultural learning into their pedagogy. It particularly focuses on helping students become aware of the impact of electronic media on their ability to think deeply and thoughtfully. Xavier University conducts an annual summer program, The Multicultural Fluency Institute, for faculty across fields to share best practices, with a focus on understanding how to teach an increasingly multicultural student body more effectively. My goal in attending as a Management and Entrepreneurial Studies teacher was to improve my ability to understand how current thinking about diversity impacts the way students communicate when they write and speak in their personal and professional lives. I ound the workshop, by exposing me to the best thinking of my colleagues in the liberal arts and social science colleges, increased my sensitivity to a variety of issues including disability, age, gender, religion, race, ethnicity, incarceration, sexual orientation, and addiction, each of which students have raised in class and in one-on-one office hours' interaction, and, most importantly, to issues of adapting our pedagogy to the new realities of living in an age of instant electronic communication, where using processes that encourage in-depth thought and critical thinking skills may be giving way to more compelling, yet intellectually shallow, dependence on unreliable electronic sources, such as Wikipedia. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

HOW THE WORKSHOP WAS CONDUCTED

The workshop was held over one week, with two 75-minute sessions each morning, and, following lunch, one each afternoon. Thirty faculty participated with fifteen of these faculty, drawn from the departments of social work, psychology, history, philosophy, education, biology, political science, and occupational health, also serving as lead presenters at individual sessions. Prereading assignments and a post-workshop paper on how workshop learnings were translated into pedagogical improvements were required.

Topics included the seven "isms" that separate the privileged from the disadvantaged; feminist approaches to literature, social work and history; gender norms as expressed in different cultures; reconceptualizing sexuality as a continuous rather than a binary construct; insight into the impact of societal prejudice against gay, lesbian, and transgendered persons; injustices suffered by the urban poor; student service learning opportunities and experiences; the difficulties the disabled face in living productive lives, and of particular relevance to business teachers, the challenges of communicating in an age of instant information (Jackson, p. 13).

UNDERSTANDING A CRITICAL APPROACH TO TEACHING

The critical approach advocated by the participants can be summarized into three main assumptions:

1 . It enhances student critical thinking skills as it teaches students the importance of critically analyzing the context of a situation.

2. It advocates a student centered pedagogy, favoring assignments and exercises, that are experiential, such as role playing, case studies, and intergroup simulations that put teachers and students on a more equal footing: in short, a shift from the "sage on the stage" to the "guide by the side."

3. It takes a social perspective. It foregrounds processes of power that are embedded in the media by which we communicate. It assumes all decisions are interested and not neutral, while considering the social, institutional and cultural aspects of which the experience is comprised. This would include an account of power and ideology as well as inequalities, helping answer the question of who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged by the technologies that are facilitating the drive toward global capitalism.

EXPLORING ASSUMPTIONS

A primary theme of many presentations was to consider the assumptions embodied in the theory and practice of a discipline. As I reflected on what I had learned, I identified three almost unspoken premises that we might explore with students: that non-English speaking peoples need to master English to compete in the new Web economy; that words we use everyday carry unintentional prejudices; and perhaps most significantly, the privileging of instant forms of communication to more deliberative forms.

ENGLISH AS THE NEW ESPERANTO

After a number of speakers addressed the idea of "American cultural hegemony," I considered it appropriate to ask students to consider the implications of English increasingly becoming the international language of commerce, especially in light of the transformation of the web into the world's premiere selling medium. As Colchester and Patrick (2007) indicate a recent article in the Wall Street Journal: "The Internet may be a global platform, but when it comes to advertising, one language speaks louder than others: English. For example, BBC Web sites draw more than double the readers per month than France and Germany's top news sites. Significantly, BBC's foreign visitors outnumber national visitors, allowing it to attract those looking for international coverage. To compete, Der Spiegel now offers its web content in both German and English (B3)." In short, English has become the new Esperanto, and we should encourage students to consider the implications for communicating in a global economy of the privileging of those who speak English as a first or second language compared to those who do not.

LANGUAGE AS A CARRIER OF PREJUDICE

I was also intrigued by the number of social science and liberal arts faculty who stressed how established communication terms can cause division and promote stereotypes. For example, an occupational therapist indicated how the use of the word lame as a derogatory adjective is perceived by the disabled as evidence of subtle disrespect. Similarly, writing that an individual gave a speech while bound to a wheelchair focuses on the disability while writing that someone gave a speech while seated in a wheelchair focuses on the accomplishment.

A faculty expert on African culture showed us how the typical use of word tribe to identify African communities, reinforces images of primitivism, whereas the common use of nationalities to describe European communities, privileges a more positive, Eurocentric perspective. In a similar vein, we might ask students to examine some of the assumptions behind phrases we commonly use to refer to classes of workers, such as Mexican, civil servant, hourly wage employee, manual laborer, housewife, and subordinate.

PREFERENCE FOR INSTANT COMMUNICATION

Perhaps of most significance to us as educators, our students may take it for granted that faster communication is better communication, so text messaging, instant messaging, conference calls, PowerPoint slides, Twitter updates, voice mail and email are privileged over longer messages, such as papers and speeches that are composed over days and weeks rather than in minutes. In short, we are increasingly teaching students who participate in a world of perpetual contact, information overload, and cognitive switching from one medium to another, leading to a highly fragmented communication environment. In fact, recent research indicates some disturbing facts: In total, interruptions take up to 2.1 hours of an average knowledge worker's day and costs the US economy $558 billion a year. Even more disturbing, 45% of interruptions are self initiated. The research also indicates it takes the average worker eight minutes to regain the focus needed to resume the work that was interrupted (Jackson, p. 85).

This is a significant contrast to the learning environment that many of us who were born in the 1940's, 50's, and '60s's experienced as college students, where books and a library took center stage and thought was communicated on paper and absorbed through reading. By contrast, Richard Lanham points out, "It is the right brain that popular culture, and especially television, stimulates." Given the volume and richness of new media, and the inundation of meaningless information created by electronic media, "human attention is the new scarce ingrethent in an information society" (p. 232). Lanham contrasts multisensory media which are characterized by "novelty, interest, curiosity" with the written word which he describes as an "enormous act of simplification with no pictures, no color, strict order of left to right; no type changes; no interaction; no revision" (pp. 33-34).

UNDERSTANDING STUDENT COMMUNICATION ENVIRONMENTS

So that I can prepare students to analyze the impact of modern electronic technologies on their ability to write and think, I first survey them about their electronic communication habits. Questions include the following:

1. Do you feel you spend too much time online or plugged into other electronic media? Do any of your friends or family comment on this? If so, what do they say?

2. Do you multitask? Give an example. How many minutes do you estimate it takes you to return to a complex task once you have been pulled away from it?

3. Do you ever feel like you suffer from information overload? Give an example of when you particularly experienced this feeling.

4. Do you feel the need to slow down? How do you deal with a feeling of "too much to do and not enough time to do it in?"

5. Do you feel like you have enough time to think? Give an example of a time when you felt like you were handing in a paper or delivering a presentation before you had given it the attention you know it deserved.

6. What is the range of lengths of papers you have written for class assignments? How do you conduct research for such projects? What search engines do you used most frequently? Are there any sources to which you repeatedly turn?

After we discuss answers to these questions, I assign two online readings, Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (2008) and Walter Kirn's (2007) "The Autumn of Multitaskers."

I first ask students to form discussion groups to analyze Carr's argument that interaction with the Web is rewiring our brains in ways that inhibit sustained reading and sustained thought. I particularly call attention to his claim that

Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going - so far as I can tell - but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, and begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing ... the great databases of the Internet.

After soliciting feedback on the impact of the Web on thinking skills, we consider the following passage in the Kirn article on the impact of multitasking on our ability to think effectively and efficiently:

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires-the constant switching and pivoting - energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on.

What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects' brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus - which stores and recalls information - to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction - but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they'd been sorting once the experiment was over.

Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as Cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.

The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They're the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. "I get bored if it's not all going at once," said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They're the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it.

This is the great irony of multitasking - that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we're interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. (Fact, and one more reason the bubble will pop: A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and- forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing.)

That is, we consider whether new communication media may encourage instant analysis versus thoughtful, collective consideration of ideas, and doing many things poorly rather than a few things well. As James Gleick (1999) argues in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything: "We have heard of unhurried qualities like wisdom and sagacity, but we think nonetheless that the students who plowed through laborious calculations cannot be quite as smart as their comrades who snap their fingers and know the answer." He continues that history tells us otherwise, as "one could make an all-star list of slow by effective thinkers. Charles Darwin considered himself too slow-witted to engage in argument. ... Einstein modestly described himself as a slow thinker (109)." Similarly, David Levy asserts (2007) "certain activities associated with education and learning - searching for information, collecting it, and superficially reviewing it, can be speeded up, while others - sustained reflection and contemplation simply cannot (21)."

As college may be the last place often to inspire students to do in-depth academic research and to think deeply, we, as teachers, have a responsibility to advocate the values of slow and serious thinking as central to successful decision-making while at the same time using some 21st century technologies in teaching our classes to demonstrate that we have an understanding of the electronic environments in which our students participate.

One question we might ask students is "what is lost in an age that privileges speed of transmission over carefulness of thought?" For perspective, we could point out that Douglas Wilson (2006) shows that Lincoln, considered by many to be the finest writer to serve as president, was an effective communicator because he took extensive pains to write and rewrite his letters and speeches, which he edited for clarity, economy, and authence acceptance.

As I thought about our rapid immersion in new electronic technologies, I was struck with the idea that thinking only in fast time can have serious intellectual and emotional consequences: are current students reading, studying, reflecting, analyzing, and debating? Do they take time to empathize and sympathize, to consider how to best communicate in terms of the feelings of others? Maggie Jackson in Distracted goes so far as to say that "the way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention - the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress (p. 13)." For example, she observes that PowerPoint critics, "say the software shapes thoughts and data into alluringly professional yet narrow and simplistic formats, fostering uninformative and often misleading presentation that discourage creativity or argument. Partly as a result of [Edward] Tufte's work, NASA blamed its reliance on PowerPoint for a pattern of obfuscation and miscommunication that helped doom the Challenger space shuttle (p. 21)."

In addition, Carr (2008) points out that as companies such as Google learn about its users from web surfers' habits, it serves the ends not simply of knowledge but of capitalism. He argues: "The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network's reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web - the more links we click and pages we view the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link - the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction."

In response to the changing environment of electronic media, I am now giving increased attention to educating students on the considering the importance of communicating in fast time in some situations and slow time in others. I teach, for example, that what Richard Lanham (1993) calls CBS writing - clarity, brevity, and sincerity -is appropriate for often recurrent, noncontroversial messages such as requesting information, providing information, summarizing results, and reporting on the status of a project.

On the other hand, I point out that students should be thoughtful and plan time carefully when dealing with complex and sensitive issues such as strategic planning, issues analysis, responding to competitive pressures, and selecting appropriate marketing strategies, as well as interpersonal issues, such as communicating during disciplinary and exit interviews, performance reviews, and meetings to address employee concerns. These require careful consideration, with feedback, review, and revision being built into the decision-making process. In short, I teach that good decisions are supported by good reasons, good facts and sound inferences: they typically improve over time with significant editing and revising.

USING TOULMIN'S MODEL AS A TOOL FOR TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS

The approaches I find most useful in teaching how to reflect good reasoning in writing, ones taught by many of our colleagues in the English Department, are the process approach and a simplified model of argumentation most frequently associated with Stephen Toulmin (2003). We first make a case for the process approach, asking students to divide their paper preparation planning into three phases: prewriting, writing, and revising. We stress that the thinking required for an important business memo is a "slow time" activity, so we require the assignment be completed in three parts corresponding to the three phases of the writing process: with an outline (described below), a first draft, and a final draft submitted at separate times.

At the same time, we teach a simplified Toulmin model to help them organize an argument in the prewriting and writing phases. Specifically we asked students to do the following:

PREWRITING

1. Determine investment of time needed in a decision based on its relative immediacy, impact on the organization, sensitivity, and authence.

2. Gather the best information you can find in the time available.

3. Use a model of argumentation in which you outline your argument into three aligned columns: objectives, findings, and steps. (See Figure 1 for an example of a completed matrix.)

4. Specify what readers are to do in response to the message (Tell, Sell, Join, Do). In the first of three columns, objectives, write down what your shared objectives are in dealing with the topic being analyzed.

5. In the middle column, findings, write down an assessment of how the organization is doing versus each objective.

6. In the third column, action steps, identify a plan of action that moves your organization from where it is to where it wants to be. Make an explicit plan-meets-need argument in support of each action step.

This matrix has the virtues of order and simplicity, as it aligns key ideas that need to be closely related into a pattern that simplifies the task of organizing a coherent argument.

WRITING

Compose the document from top to bottom, organizing the message previously outlined in a matrix format. For each claim be sure to develop complete arguments that assess the status of organizational performance versus a goal. We call this the "Because, Based On, Therefore" test. See Figure 2. Here students learn how to construct a complete argument by indicating the reason why the claim is valid, providing evidence for the claim, and indicating implications of the claim to the ability of organization to achieve that goal.

REVISING

1. Practice mental rehearsal by imagining how your intended readers will react to this argument. By mental rehearsal, a tool that separate effective managers from less effective ones, we mean asking writers to imagine themselves as their readers reading the document and revising it in terms of their those expectations.

2. Recheck the logic of the argument, making sure that each objective is correctly and clearly stated, each claim and action step clearly related to an objective, and each claim supported with good reasons and convincing proof.

In our experience, this approach sensitizes students to the heavy burden good writing demands: clear thinking, relevant data, empathy with and insight into readers, clear consistent argumentation, and refining an argument over time.

USING TOOLS FOR RESEARCH EFFECTIVELY

A related issue that we as teachers face is teaching our students to conduct effective academic research. Carr (2008) acknowledges that today "Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after." As Jackson points out, "We can tap into 50 million Web sites, 1.8 million books in print, 75 million blogs, and other snowstorms of information, but we increasingly seek knowledge in Google searches and Yahoo! (p. 13)" In fact, research indicates that Wikipedia is the typical college student's favored website for finding information for the papers they write. As David Levy asserts in his "No Time to Think," we face a paradox. We now have "a remarkable suite of tools ... developed for research and scholarship. Thanks to networked digital computers, email, and the World Wide Web, access to scholarly information and research results has never been easier; and thanks to the vast computational power now readily available, whole new areas of scholarly investigation have been opened up. . . . We would seem, then, to be losing the time "to look and to think" at the very moment we have produced extraordinary tools for investigating the world and ourselves and for sharing our findings (p. 2).

In response, I suggest we make it mandatory that students learn to identify, find, and use reliable academic sources. Topics to be covered in a class would include the difference between primary source materials and secondary sources, choosing and using the best scholarly databases, locating relevant journal articles, finding online full text journal articles, finding articles in databases, using interlibrary loans to track down articles in print but not in electronic form, finding primary source material in newspapers, finding books both within the college library and through interlibrary loans, knowing how to find other sources such as government documents, including the UN databases, federal, state, and local government documents, and maps, and being aware of a variety of specialized search engines, which have proven to be more focused, reliable and trustworthy than the results of Yahoo, Google, and Wikipedia searches.

REFLECTIONS

One of our greatest challenges is to make good decisions about how we interact with students to best promote their competence and understanding, especially given the dominance of new interactive electronic mediaan environment much richer visually and aurally than the paper driven environment of just a generation ago. And we need to learn how to deliver this information to gain and keep the attention of a new generation of students. Lanham (1993) asserts that simultaneous with the "democratization of education" has been the advent of the postmodern age, with a transition from books being the center of humanistic tradition to electronic media, a fundamental change in the expectations of our current and future students. So to be relevant we have to learn how to communicate with students who have grown up in rich media environments - specifically, learning how to get and keep their attention, which Lanham sees as the new scarcest resource in the electronic age.

As a participant in the Multicultural Fluency workshop, I was struck by how old-fashioned we must appear to today's students. I observed professors reading scholarly papers word-for-word just as scholars did over a century ago; PowerPoint slides that looked no different than the overhead transparencies they replaced, with little use of this medium's capability of showing animation, photographs, videos, and of playing music; and teachers giving lectures as "the sage on the stage" without use of the vastly richer media interactive environments by which their students are engaged in peer-to-peer communication outside the classroom (See Brumberger, 2005).

In other words our challenge is to make sure our pedagogies reflect the actual technologies our students are using - to determine how to use them to enliven our classes, by making them both more relevant to realities and more entertaining as well. For example, I believe the recent choice by Radio Shack to notify over 1000 employees via email that they were being laid off has excellent potential as a case study in which the teacher could talk about media selection theory and its impact on meeting the needs of both senders and receivers.

I am also exploring increased use of film, one of the richest media sources available. The presentation that made the deepest impression on me at the workshop was one in which a video was used to allow disadvantaged, often marginalized, people to speak in their own voices and environments. The film, Children of Gaia, (Milton Media, 1998) highlighted four seriously disabled European adults. Each talked about the obstacles he or she confronted, including those imposed by their environments and by others' cruel assumptions about them and comments to them. As these people spoke, the film allowed authence members to see how each had overcome his or her disabilities to participate in sports, the arts, and internet communication-demonstrating how many disabled have talents equal and superior to many fully -abled people. I was impressed by the film's ability to create empathy for its subjects, as viewers observed them mastering their environments with patience and typically with good humor and self awareness.

In short, hearing the perspectives and noting the pedagogical resources of faculty in other departments encouraged me to examine the unspoken assumptions that underpin many of my communication behaviors in and out of the classroom and also to look at myself through the eyes of students and reconsider the pedagogies that I use in my classes.

I particularly see it as a challenge to participate in the students' world, by selectively using electronic media to enliven my classes, while simultaneously educating students on tools they can use to deepen their critical thinking skills. At the same time, I am committed to keeping up to date on trends in multiculturalism, so that my classes are responsive to the increasing diversity of our students in the increasingly global business environment.