New major offered in '03 catalog

by Dora Galvan
Staff Writer

With the new spring semester came the new Speech Communication major and minor offered by the department.

Chair of speech communication and assistant professor Jeanne Flora, along with director of forensics Ian Lising, created the major knowing that effective speech communication skills are the pathway to many careers.

Flora already explained that the University requires students to take a spoken English course with an emphasis in communication skills.

"This major is for students who want to really become specialists in good communication, so they can go beyond the general education requirement and really focus on becoming a better communicator and understand the theory of communication," Flora said. "It's an area that's in a lot of demand when you think of the state of our society right now."

While the major requires 42 semester hours, the minor only requires 24. Both cover all aspects of the department's mission statement.

These include examining communication theory, improving communication skills in different contexts and exploring communication from a multicultural perspective.

"Like every other major in this school, we strive to serve students and help them prepare for the world outside the academia," Lising said. "Our's is specifically unique because it really helps with the facility of being able to express yourself orally and have the academic foundation to do it," he said.

"The approach of being able to communicate through a non-mediated form is so basic to every human being, but we can take it for granted so often and we can forget that real communication happens between people and not technology; and it's important to bring us back to that basic idea."

Since other departments agreed to be a part of the major, it is designed to give students the flexibility of focusing in their areas of interest. These departments include journalism, behavioral science, economics, business, anthropology and humanities.

"You can package your major depending on the way you choose your upper division electives so that you can have jobs in the business or in a public relations context or social and human services or you could go into speech writing and politics, so there's a lot of different directions," Flora said.

Along with the new major, the department also introduced five lower division courses and three upper division courses.

Flora explained that the focus of the classes is being able to study the general field of communication.

"You get to see how scholars in the field study communication in a variety of different contexts. For example, I teach the interpersonal communication class, where we look at mostly how people communicate in personal relationships," she said. "The intercultural communication class looks at how people communicate across cultures, differences and styles of communicating, which is really fascinating."

The new classes will include skill practice work which will help strengthen communication skills.

"The persuasion class looks at how we get other people to do things and how to influence them. The rhetoric: public controversy and criticism class looks at important topics of controversy in society and how we think critically about those topics and develop arguments about those topics," Flora said.

Although Flora helped write the major's components, she shares the workload with Lising, the other full-time faculty member in the department.

"Ian and I really compliment each other well, because I am more of a specialist in interpersonal and intercultural communication and he is more of a specialist in public communication, persuasion, argumentation and debate," Flora said.

The major and minor will appear in next year's University catalog, but students can take classes now for either one.