As students walk into the David Letterman Communication and Media Building on Tuesdays and Thursdays around 12:30 p.m. for class, they open the doors of Room 125. They can hear music playing loudly and conversation among the students before class starts. They can also hear Laura O'Hara, associate professor of communications studies, among the noise. She, too, is engaged in in conversation with students before she begins her lecture on intercultural communication.
Coming to Ball State out of graduate school from Ohio University 13 years ago, O'Hara began teaching COMM 290: Intercultural Communication.
O'Hara said the original class started with only 12 or 13 students, but today, the course enrolls almost 100 students each semester.
"It was just one of those courses that was offered every semester, but it didn't really have a very large enrollment," she said. "But the enrollment has just grown and grown and grown over the past 13 years and I think that's, in part, a reflection on how important people believe it is that we are schooled in learning how to communicate with people that are different than we are."
Recently, the class was added to the new university core curriculum. It will be a Tier 1 social sciences course and will be open to everybody at the university.
Marilyn Buck, associate provost and dean of the University College, said that in order for a course to be added to the core curriculum, there is a certain process that is followed.
"Core proposals are developed following the guidelines provided by the University Core Committee," Buck said. "They are approved by the department and the respective college and then submitted to Academic Systems which then forwards the proposal to UCC for review."
O'Hara grew up in the small town of St. Joseph, Mo., where she said she was really protected from intercultural experiences. Once she was in graduate school, O'Hara took a critical culture class similar to COMM 290, which she said is part of the reason why she was interested in teaching the course and furthering her knowledge of intercultural communication.
She said the COMM 290 class helps students by teaching them how to be tolerant of other cultures and to know that there is more than just one culture in the world.
"I think everybody who is educated, really needs to understand that to do well in this world, or to be a good human being in this world, you need to understand that there are so many more ways of thinking, being, doing, acting ... and understanding the world than the way you understand it, the way you act in it, the way you are in it," O'Hara said. "The quicker you learn that lesson, the better off you are in your interpersonal relationships, your work relationships [and] your school relationships."
Buck said it is important to add the course to the core curriculum because it adds to the selection of courses that students can choose from.
"We want students to have a number of quality choices for courses in the core to take," she said.
Freshman telecommunications major Alyssa Villablanca said she really enjoys the class and thinks O'Hara is a great teacher because of her passion for what she is teaching.
"I think that Dr. O'Hara is very good at keeping the class involved because she has such positive energy and such a positive vibe that I don't feel bored in the class, and I don't feel like I'm wasting my time," Villablanca said. "She also is good at just giving examples that are relevant to exemplify the subject matters that she's going over. This solidifies concepts in my mind."
Amy Yount, a graduate teaching assistant for the class, said O'Hara does a good job of making students in the class realize how important intercultural communications is. She also said that O'Hara has a special skill in knowing how to keep students entertained in the classroom.
"Laura is one of those lucky people that loves what she does. She has this incredibly dynamic personality that just draws you in," Yount said. "She also has a great sense of humor that keeps the students laughing throughout the class period. I think when a professor can provide humor and personality into their subject matter, it really makes the students want to learn."
O'Hara tries to keep things fresh in her class by using lectures, videos, music and interactive conversations. She also has an assignment called "conversation partners," which is an important aspect to the class.
In this assignment, students have to find someone from another culture and spend time with them throughout the semester in order to compare and contrast differences between their cultural patterns. The students are encouraged to explore differences in religion, lifestyle and geography.
Villablanca said she thinks the assignment helps accomplish O'Hara's goal for the class to better understand other cultures.
"I think that the conversation partner assignment is a great assignment because it gets a student to really get out of their comfort zone, which is something that people need to have skills with if they want to climb the ladder of success in the future," she said.
O'Hara said she thinks students benefit a lot from the assignment.
"I think this assignment is one way, if it's done well, that maybe we can build a couple relationships between American students and more international students," she said. "It helps the American student kind of broaden their experience and it certainly helps the international student feel a lot more welcome and broaden their experience as well. So I think that's a huge benefit."
Yount, who took the course four years ago, said the conversation partners assignment allows students the chance to act on what they are learning in the course.
"It's a great opportunity for the students to learn something new about intercultural communication," Yount said. "It's one thing for students to learn about intercultural communication, but it's another thing to have them actually practice it. That's what this assignment does."
The course was officially implemented into the curriculum in Fall 2010. Any student who is currently taking or will take the course during the 2010-11 school year will be able to use the class as a core course as long as they do not graduate before Fall 2011, Buck said.
In the coming weeks, read about students' experiences with other cultures. In Laura O'Hara's COMM 290 class, students had to find a student from a different culture and hang out with them throughout the semester. This series will document the students' experiences with their "Conversation Partners."
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