Teaching and learning as a Dialogical Knowledge Exchange: Through the lens of the Transactional Model of Communication

Teaching and learning as a Dialogical Knowledge Exchange: Through the lens of the Transactional Model of Communication

Quatro Mgogo

Issue: Vol. 7 No.3 2026 Article 19 pp. 903 – 919
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.20267319| Published online 29th April 2026

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ABSTRACT

Over the years, the pedagogical process has rarely been seen as a multidisciplinary praxis. The current literature shows that many researchers and teaching and learning instructors have always perceived the pedagogical process from the perspective of the education discipline. Moreover, while teaching and learning are reciprocal, it has been largely contextualised within the boundaries of a teacher-to-student (one-way) transfer process of contextualised knowledge. Therefore, this study synergised two disciplines, education and communication, to provide philosophical tools for articulating pedagogy as a communication process. In doing so, this study used the Transactional Model of Communication to understand the teaching and learning process in higher education from the perspective of communication science. A qualitative grounded theory based on inductive reasoning was used to understand Barnlund’s Transactional Model of Communication (TMC) elements of communication in relation to the teaching and learning process. Also, this study employed the Critical Communication Pedagogy (CCP) theory to understand the relationship of all three. The outcome of this paper is the development of a Pedagogical Communication Model (PMC) for teaching in a diverse university classroom. Thus, this paper, drawing from the proposed PMC, argues and concludes that communication and teaching and learning are inextricable, with the teaching and learning process relying on communication as the carrier of the educational messages between the teacher and the student during the class interaction. Therefore, the contribution of this paper is to offer a starting point in the debate on the role of communication in the success of the teaching and learning process.

Keywords: Transactional Model of Communication, Teaching and Learning, Pedagogical Model of Communication, Critical Communication Pedagogy, Higher Education.

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ABOUT AUTHOR(S)

Dr. Quatro Mgogo is currently a Senior Lecturer and the Deputy Head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University. Dr Mgogo has published his academic work in research areas such as Media Representation, Xenophobia, Intercultural Communication and Communication Pedagogy in Higher Education. He is an Executive member of the Humanities and Social Sciences Alumni Association (HSSAA) in South Africa, and an executive committee member of Communicating Migration and Mobility (CoMMPASS) in Africa. Also, he is a former Fellow of Oxford Media Policy at the University of Oxford, UK.

TO CITE ARTICLE

Mgogo, Q. “Teaching and Learning as a Dialogical Knowledge Exchange: Through the lens of the Transactional Model of Communication.” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 7, no.3 (2026): 903 – 919. https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.20267319