The Ball State community assembled at the Kitselman Center on Friday to honor the memory of Virginia Ball and celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry.
Each year, four facility members gather teams of 15 students to participate in an immersive learning project for a semester.
Since it first opened in 2000, 40 seminars have been completed through the VBC. According to President Jo Ann Gora, the idea of immersive learning has become the cornerstone of a Ball State education and the university's strategic plan.
Lauren Williams participated in one of the VBC's earlier seminars called "Conversations across the Generations and Centuries." In it, Ball State students and Muncie community members read as many books from the classical canon as possible. They each wrote reports and discussed what they had read.
Williams said the point of the project was to have a conversation among different generations to see how they reacted to the readings.
"It was an eye-opening experience," she said. "We were reading a bunch of different perspectives and reading about different people's spirituality, and that was really challenging at time but now I'm really glad for it. It was defiantly a different structure and experience than any other Ball State class that I took."
Williams graduated from Ball State in 2007 with a degree in English literature. She traveled to France, where she taught English to children. She now works with Muncie-area children in an afterschool program.
At the celebration, students, faculty and community members who have participated in a seminar through the VBC spoke about their experiences.
Melinda Messineo, associate professor of sociology and director of Freshman Connections, directed a seminar through the VBC. Messineo spoke about how the experience is a great one for not only students, but faculty as well.
"The Virginia Ball Center requires that facility take risk and move far outside of their comfort zone," she said. "You can not run a VBC seminar the way you would run a typical class."
At the end of the celebration, Ball Center director Joe Trimmer spoke to the group about Ball.
"I know [Virginia Ball] would be delighted by what the Center has accomplished in 10 years," Trimmer said. "We want to thank her and her vision for education and for providing the opportunity for interdisciplinary, collaborative, project-driven, community-based experiences for a wonderful group of students. Thank you, Virginia."
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