College classrooms can seem stuffy and boring at times especially when there is little interaction among the students. But at Park University there are some instructors who are stepping outside of the box allowing for a more fun and hands on learning experience.

Christine Buta, adjunct instructor of communication arts, is the one who is apart of this. For her CA105 Human Communication course, she has her students learning in a multitude of ways.

“My philosophy is we like to have fun when we learn but learning has to have value,” Buta said. “I try to cover other things that still connect back to the textbook.”

You might consider crayons, markers and scissors to be a thing of the past once you enter college but not in this classroom. Professor Buta enjoys getting her students involved in ways you typically wouldn’t see while still learning the core values of the course.

“It’s the idea of using real life things and applying them to learning, it just sticks more,” Buta said.

When Buta’s class covered non-verbal communication, she remembered this idea she had seen many years ago.

“I told them to bring arts and crafts of any kind and I took them outside,” she said. “When they got there they couldn’t talk or write notes and they had to break into groups by eye color. The task was to build a castle without talking,” she said.

The result of this experiment was to show how much non-verbal communication is used without us knowing it.

“We are usually uncomfortable in silence and they were shocked that they could build a castle without talking,” Buta said.

Do you have an instructor teaching a class in a unique way? Send us an email at [email protected] with your suggestions for our next Classroom Corner story.