Instructor Bio(s)
Mary Lahman, Ph.D.
Hoping to engage the inquisitive spirits of her students, I encourage students to give voice to and make sense of their “little” stories—their own experiences—in light of the communication discipline's big” stories—knowledge and theory presented in the classroom. Students in advanced public relations class agree that they learn the most from the problem-based learning methods used in this class, allowing me to serve as a “guide on the side” as students research local issues, build client relationship, figure budgets, and meet deadlines. I am a 1983 graduate of Manchester College and hold advanced degrees from Miami University of Ohio and Indiana University. Throughout the course, I will be using material from my textbook, Awareness and Action: A General Semantics Approach to Effective Language Behavior. You can download a pdf copy here Download download a pdf copy here, or read the assigned excerpts as they are posted to the course.
Greg Thompson, Ph.D.
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development. I served for two years as the Sanford I. Berman Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and remain as a Research Associate with the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at UCSD.
I'm currently serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, where I study pedagogical interactions.
Steve Stockdale, M.A.
I serve as the Instructional Technology Manager and Canvas administrator for the Grants campus of New Mexico State University in Grants, New Mexico. While completing a Masters degree in Educational Psychology from the University of New Mexico in 2012, I realized that my passions are defined by the intersection of education (how we teach), brain science (how we learn), and technology (how we connect). Underlying that intersection is the role of language in perceiving and expressing life experiences, which includes the study of general semantics (GS).
I first learned about GS in 1979, but my dedicated study of it didn't begin until 1993. I attended three week-long summer seminar-workshops offered by the Institute of General Semantics as a student, then served as a Trustee of the Institute for 8 years and as Executive Director for 4 years. I oversaw the organizing, digitizing, and classifying of the Institute's archives, the merger of the Institute of General Semantics with the International Society of General Semantics, the Institute's move from New York and New Jersey to Fort Worth, Texas, and the renovation of a building in a historical district that became the Institute's home (Read House). From 2005-2008 I taught "General Semantics for Mass Communication Practitioners" in the Schieffer School of Journalism at TCU. In 2009, I self-published the eBook, Here's Something About General Semantics, available for download as a pdf file Download available for download as a pdf file.
My previous lives included serving in the U.S. Air Force as a KC-135 Instructor Navigator and as a program manager for Texas Instruments' Defense Electronics Group (now a part of Raytheon).