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Contrary to popular belief, higher education does not exist in an ivory tower. Indeed, higher education is no stranger to adopting and implementing new pedagogical approaches and trends. One endeavor is the class collaboration, or Class Collab, which is a form of instruction that integrates the learning community with experiential learning. Although the basis for the class collaboration dates to Dewey, no studies have assessed this education model as it exists within media education. Given this gap in the literature, the current study uses a small sample pretest-posttest design to explore the impact of class collaborations with film and public relations courses. The results show that there are differences between the pretest and posttest data and that overall, the Class Collab is associated with positive learning outcomes. However, an emergent finding within the data is that there was an overwhelming number of students that described difficulty working across industries, especially as it relates to communication. The result is that students working to create interdisciplinary media products need more of an understanding in the strategic elements of communication.

Differences arise in macro-activities, such as the production of energy, food, and healthcare, where the management of these differences happens in polylogues as many actors pursue scores of positions on a variety of issues in numerous venues. Polylogues are essential to the large-scale practices that organize macro-activities but present significant challenges for argumentation theory and research. Key to the challenge is conceptualizing the variety of argumentative roles that go beyond the classic normative definition of protagonist and antagonist. A macroscope is devised for identifying argumentative roles in the communicative work of organizations, and the communicative work of the network of organizations, related to the production of gas from shale in the Marcellus region of the Northeastern United States. The macroscope scaffolds a design thinking inquiry into the variety of argumentative roles in the communicative work of organizations in a polylogue and finds: (1) innovation and entrepreneurialism in the design of organizations as devices for managing disagreement; (2) argumentative roles as services specializing in particular aspects of argument; and (3) networks of organizations with prominent types of specialized roles that give shape to the disagreement space around a large, complex practice. It is proposed that the varieties of argumentative roles in polylogue are not random or arbitrary but derive from more general pragmatic principles about how disagreement is organized and how methods of disagreement management emerge within communication relative to a macro-activity.