ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the history of discipline followed by the interdisciplinary foundations of instructional communication. It traces the roots of the discipline from its infancy with the goal to examine the trajectory and future directions of instructional communication research. The chapter provides a discussion of few distinct disciplines that have contributed to the development of instructional communication scholarship. The beginnings of instructional communication occur at the intersection of three disciplines: educational psychology, pedagogy, and communication. The communication as interaction model introduces a feedback loop from the receiver to the source, and receivers now have the opportunity to encode messages to deliver back to the source. Instructional communication scholarship will continue to explore new content and context areas in an effort to extend our knowledge about the teaching-learning process. Instructional communication scholarship, as opposed to these complementary fields of inquiry, centers on messages and relationships between instructors and students and the influence of these on the teaching and learning processes.
