Isenberg School Students Practice Public Speaking in Italy
Wed., Jun 6, 2007
“I’ve never felt entirely comfortable as a public speaker,” confesses Isenberg School honors accounting major Dave Buttry. For Buttry and many of his fellow Isenberg School students who spent two weeks in January on a class trip in Italy, making formal presentations in a political science class of one-hundred freshmen at the University of Milan went beyond nervousness into the realm of culture shock. On the face of it, the challenge seemed straightforward enough. Dressed in business attire, Buttry and his classmates each spoke for five minutes about a different aspect of university life in the United States. (Everyone in the audience understood English.) “My topic was collegiate athletics and athletic scholarships—not a difficult subject for me,” notes Buttry. “I was nervous to begin with, but as I spoke, members of the audience kept talking to one another, some of them turning 180 degrees to converse.”
The Isenberg School’s Italy Study Program is one of seven home-grown initiatives that combine concentrated class work with faculty-led international visits, most of them spanning fourteen days between semesters. In addition to the two-week trip to Italy, the School offers annual visits to China, France-Germany, Brazil, Ghana, Ireland, Denmark, and Australia. During their two weeks in Italy, the Isenberg School students spent time in Milan, Florence, and Rome. They visited businesses, US government offices, universities and historical sites.
“Holly Lawrence, one of the Isenberg School faculty members who accompanied us on the trip, had warned us that speaking to an Italian student audience might be challenging,” recalls Buttry. Lawrence, who is a professor in the Isenberg School’s Business Communication Program, had prepped her student speakers to choose unambiguous words and expressions, enunciate slowly, and integrate PowerPoint visuals into their presentations. In addition, Gina Poncini, American expatriate professor of the business communication class in Milan, had asked her students to observe American standards of audience decorum by sitting quietly and focusing on the speakers. In short, each professor coached/prepped her students on how the other students were likely to behave and the cultural expectations that each might have. “We were prepared for a tough audience, but their behavior really threw us. Many of us felt that they just weren’t interested in what we had to say,” Buttry recalls.
Lack of interest or disrespect had nothing to do with the Italian students’ behavior, Lawrence insists. The Italians, in fact, went out of their way to embrace their American visitors. After the class, many of them missed their own economics class to take their American visitors to lunch, where they made fast friendships. Those friendships deepened during the remainder of the Isenberg School students’ stay in Milan. “The host students went out of their way to be hospitable by introducing many of our students to Milan’s night life,” recalls Lawrence. “Two months after the trip many of those friendships were alive through web messaging.
“Our students did learn that their Italian counterparts place a very high premium on interpersonal relationships,” Lawrence continues. “It’s hard for us to accept, but when students talk during lectures they’re emphasizing those relationships over the more impersonal speaker-audience relationship. When I asked our students how many of them would have skipped an economics class to take Italian student visitors to lunch, many responded that they would have gone to class. During our stay in Italy, we visited many businesses and historical sites, but experiences like our students’ public speaking exercise and their subsequent bonding with the Italian students really helped us to get inside the host country’s culture.”
Find out more about Isenberg's International Study Options.