Teaching and learning as a Dialogical Knowledge Exchange: Through the lens of the Transactional Model of Communication

Over the years, the pedagogical process has rarely been seen as a multidisciplinary praxis. The current literature shows that many researchers and teaching and learning instructors have always perceived the pedagogical process from the perspective of the education discipline. Moreover, while teaching and learning are reciprocal, it has been largely contextualised within the boundaries of a teacher-to-student (one-way) transfer process of contextualised knowledge. Therefore, this study synergised two disciplines, education and communication, to provide philosophical tools for articulating pedagogy as a communication process. In doing so, this study used the Transactional Model of Communication to understand the teaching and learning process in higher education from the perspective of communication science. A qualitative grounded theory based on inductive reasoning was used to understand Barnlund’s Transactional Model of Communication (TMC) elements of communication in relation to the teaching and learning process. Also, this study employed the Critical Communication Pedagogy (CCP) theory to understand the relationship of all three. The outcome of this paper is the development of a Pedagogical Communication Model (PMC) for teaching in a diverse university classroom. Thus, this paper, drawing from the proposed PMC, argues and concludes that communication and teaching and learning are inextricable, with the teaching and learning process relying on communication as the carrier of the educational messages between the teacher and the student during the class interaction. Therefore, the contribution of this paper is to offer a starting point in the debate on the role of communication in the success of the teaching and learning process.