The Bachelor of Arts in Communication at Great Northern University will provide you with the tools, knowledge, and experience to effectively use the art of persuasion so that you can inform local, national, and global issues from a Christian perspective.

Through the courses in this program, you will learn how to identify and evaluate the dynamic relationships involved in personal, career, and ministry communications. You will also get the chance to closely examine how meaning is created through language and how to apply that in future careers.

Suggested Program Plan 

What Can I Do with a Communication Degree?

  • Editing and Design
  • Journalism and Media
  • Marketing
  • Public Relations

Sample Core Courses

Communication Theory

This course is an introductory examination of a broad range of theories analyzing, describing and testing the human communication process from personal ministry to broader social contexts. This analysis will include the examination of theoretic models drawn from interpersonal, intrapersonal, small group, nonverbal and intercultural communication.

Media, Culture and Society

This course carefully examines popular cultural forms, institutions, rituals, artifacts, practices and worldviews. Topics range from private and public mediated experiences of popular culture in movies, news, music, fashion and advertising along with their relationships with wider cultural contexts and biblical verities.

Rhetorical Theory  

This course immerses students in the key themes and issues that have shaped rhetorical theory and practice from the classical era to the present. Through a series of reading and writing assignments, students interrogate the role of rhetoric in society, the rhetorical nature of knowledge and learning, and examine the uses of rhetoric in a Christian context, both global and local. Students will be given the task of examining the communication strategies of Christian organizations by applying appropriate rhetorical theories.

Communication Research Methods

This class provides an introduction to the intellectual foundations and practical methods of qualitative and quantitative research in order to engage with the problem of how we know what we know, how we ask questions about what we don’t know, and how we go about finding reasonable answers. We will then focus on achieving competency in gathering, organizing, interpreting and presenting research information using ethically sound research strategies.

Students will evaluate published studies to analyze validity measures, reliability of research results and ethical issues in conducting and reporting research.

This course will guide each student to propose and conduct research for a directed research project to be conducted with a mission’s agency or community nonprofit: the research results will become an integral part of the communications portfolio. This course is designed to provide both a broad overview of the research process and practical experience in conducting research.

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