University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Faculty, Students, and Alumni represented the department at the National Communication Association Conference in San Diego (November 20th-25th). From chairing panels and responding to papers to presenting competitive scholarship, the Department of Speech Communication was a bright light in San Diego. Consider some of the highlights:

• Dr. Robert Ulmer joined 25 leading scholars in the field of crisis communication in an NCA forum that focused on how to handle emergency responses related to bioterrorism.

• Dr. Gerald Driskill presented a paper with Sasha Arjannikova and Tiffany Schneider, two of our alumni. Their study proposed a model for assessing and promoting intercultural communication competence.

• Dr. Kristen McIntyre chaired a panel focused on experiential learning in the classroom. The panel features current and past colleagues in our department including Mrs. Laurie Metcalf, Dr. J.J. McIntyre, and Dr. Misty Wilson.

• Dr. Julien C. Mirivel and Dr. Avinash Thombre presented a research report that described how burn survivors recover from life crisis as part of a panel that focuses on communication after traumatic events.

The conference was a great success.

This fall Professor Arivnd Singhal visited the department on Oct 9th and 10th. Dr. Singhal was here to guest lecture in Dr. Avinash Thombre’s Communicating Change and Information Diffusion class. His appearance as guest in the class has become an annual feature from the last three years. While he was here he also shared his recent research with our faculty.

Among other things Dr. Singhal talked about his recent work in the area of organizing for social change in Uganda and Indonesia. The two sites were chosen as Uganda has been ravaged by 18 years of bloody civil conflict that has maiamed, uprooted and killed thousands of people and Indonesia is encountering a high incidence of underage girl trafficking for commercial sex purposes.

In the first case study, Singhal and his partners are presently working with 500 young mothers and vulnerable girl survivors of the more than 40,000 children and an equal number of adults who have been abducted, traumatized, brutalized, raped, and held against their will, away from their families and loved ones. He uses the positive deviance strategy to work with these abducted children who are turned into outcastes and pariahs now that the civil war has ended. His research identifies the positive deviants who are individuals whose special practices/ strategies/ behaviors enable them to find better solutions to prevalent community problems than their neighbors who have access to the same resources. In its first phase, the intervention research has already started yielding results with the participating girls learning, adopting, and implementing many positive deviance practices which have made a substantial difference in their life. Similar successes have been achieved in the Indonesian case study.

The full text of Dr. Singhal’s report can be found at the end of this page. For more information on this research please email Dr. Singhal at: asinghal@utep.edu

Dr. Arvind Singhal is the Samuel Shirley and Edna Holt Marston Endowed Professor of Communication, and Senior Research Fellow at the Sam Donaldson Center for Communication Studies of University of Texas, El Paso. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of diffusion of innovations, organizing and communicating for social change, and the entertainment-education communication strategy. Dr. Singhal is author or editor of eight books.

report

The glow in the face of Sarah or Katie as she is called says it all for our first graduate of the interdisciplinary program in master’s in health communication. When enquired how is she feeling we get an instant answer, “It was not easy but every bit worth it.” Katie Swearingen started the program in the Fall of 2006 and after taking classes at the Speech communication department and over at College of Public Health at UAMS, she successfully defended her masters project last month.

She worked tirelessly on her project “Healthcare as a Partnership: Factors that Determine Initiation of Complementary Treatment Communication Between Physicians and Patients. The over 50 page project report provides several insights about how today’s proactive patients initiate conversations with their physicians about complementary treatment and in turn how physicians manage the delicate balance of providing medical advice and at the same time encourage complementary treatment options. Her theme analysis of the interview data of patients reveals that patients face challenges of time, ownership and accountability while physicians struggle to provide nonjudgemental healthcare.

We asked Katie to reflect and respond to three questions on her experiences with our health communication track.

1. What have been your most valued experiences in the Health Communication track?

KATIE: I feel the diversity of instruction was extremely valuable. I felt like I was getting a 2-for-1 deal because I was experiencing 2 graduate programs in 1 degree. I was able to get diverse perspectives from the faculty, reading materials, class discussions, and assignments. I gained a better understanding of healthcare organizations, health behavior change, and health communication campaigns. The classes at UALR and UAMS challenged me and gave me a new way of looking at communication interactions.

2. What aspects of your MA are you able to use in your new role?

KATIE: I use communication as a perspective in a lot of my training programs. I tie it in to generational issues, teamwork, interviewing, patient safety, and co-worker relationships.

3. What would you tell someone considering the Health Communication track in the MA in Applied Communication Studies program?

KATIE: Examine your professional and personal interests when deciding on which track you take. You can’t go wrong. You will find value in both tracks. If you are leaning towards a career in healthcare or if you have personal interests in health-related issues, you will definitely want to explore the Health Communication track.

While Katie was midway in the program, she was hired as the employee development specialist in Human Resources Development at Baptist Health and she loves her new role applying several concepts she learnt in the program to her job. She undertakes a variety of short and long duration training sessions on generational issues, teamwork, employee relationships, patient safety and interviewing for healthcare providers and other employees. She also undertakes leadership training for new employees. Prior to working at Baptist she was the Job Development Specialist/Coordinator for the Cooperative Education Program at UALR. Congratulations KATIE.

In case you missed it, the workshop on Managing Generational Diversity was held on September 18, 2008. Participants gained practical information about diverse generations in the workplace.

Our applause and gratitude to Dr. Pledger, former Graduator Coordinator, and alums Michelle Phillips (2003) and Anna Olson (2004) who presented this workshop as a way to raise funds for student scholarships.

We are already planning for future workshops.

Melissa (Haisty) Johnston began the program in 1998. If you had asked her 10 years ago if she would eventually create a leadership training program for a major hospital, she would have been likely to say, “Not in a million years!”

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Dr. Avinash Thombre began his global research on transformational experiences while he was completing a doctoral degree in speech communication at the University of New Mexico.

The native of Pune, India, worked initially in New Mexico with HIV and AIDS patients, later including cancer patients in his study to examine the coping strategies used by individuals when they have been diagnosed with a chronic disease. Thombre noticed a series of stages that patients go through, but he noticed one in particular that not many individuals were able to progress through.

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An alumni asked me recently about the current faculty in the department. We are currently updating the webpage, but I thought his question is likely one that others might have. Here is a list of the current tenure track faculty and instructors serving in the program. I included course and contact information as well.

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Here are the alumni updates you have been waiting for! The year following each name indicates the year the alumni started in the program. Find out what your former classmates are doing, and then take a moment to send your news about missing alumni and/or your own news to gwdriskill@ualr.edu.

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Over the past few months several of our faculty have received renewed energy and excitement from our visits with you, the alumni of this program. We want to do more to share with you about events and plans that are part of a long standing tradition in this Department—seeking to improve the way we serve students and the community.

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