Growing evidence suggests that tomorrow's workers face challenges interacting with one another competently and compassionately (Turkle, 2011). Meanwhile, young adults increasingly struggle to maintain meaningful relationships and hold emotionally competent conversations (Barnwell, 2014). Despite the importance of relational communication competence in the workplace, life activities provide decreasing opportunities for its practice. This is why organizational communication courses are essential for creating future employees who understand and can practice or negotiate compassion, emotional labor, conflict negotiation, workplace bullying, and emotional intelligence. In this essay, we propose an ontological-phenomenological-phronetic-transformative (OPPT) approachsomething we call OPPT-in-for providing students with access to engage in relational organizational communication in live, real-time experience. This approach differs from the traditional approach evidenced in most textbooks and syllabi.To create a picture of current practice, we conducted a Google search for organizational communication course syllabi from the past 5 years. From this list, we selected 17 syllabi as a maximum variation sample (Tracy, 2013) and

This article represents a collection of discoveries influenced by academic mentors, insightful research methods courses, and personal introspection that together demonstrate how I have come to make sense of, and apply self-reflection as a methodological practice of qualitative inquiry. To begin, I share a sequence of brief narrative excerpts, influenced by the scholarship of Dr. H. L. “Bud” Goodall, that demonstrates the self-reflexive writing process as narrative inquiry. I position my story as a reflexive piece of comedy writing (and eventual performance) alongside historical narratives of diverse death rituals to demonstrate how the process of self-reflection makes complex cultural knowledge accessible to both authors and readers. Next, I explore the meaning of self-reflection as method—its purpose, characteristics, and formal and informal practices. The article concludes with a short discussion of the rewards of self-reflection as qualitative inquiry to researchers and audiences alike.

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