Each week, The Talon interviews a member of the Oklahoma Christian University community, a “Newsmaker,” to answer questions about their role on campus.
Tina Ware, Oklahoma Christian University’s only professor of Spanish, sponsor for the Spanish club and creator of the Spanish Immersion Lab, is the featured community member for this week’s edition.
What is your history with Oklahoma Christian? What brought you here?
“The first time I visited Oklahoma Christian was with my sister. My sister came to college here, my brother-in-law as well. I wanted to do something different, as siblings do, so I went somewhere else for school. My sister stayed here, and when she started having children, I wanted to be near my nephews – At the time, I only had nephews – and the [professor of Spanish] job opened up. I interviewed when I was working on my doctorate, and the job got changed to part time, and so I didn’t pursue it further because I wanted to stay and complete my doctorate. And then the following year, it became a full time position, and I interviewed again, and got the job. I’ve been here ever since.”
Can you explain what the Oklahoma Christian Spanish Immersion Lab is? What inspired you to create it?
“Over the years, I’ve been trying to create courses that fill in gaps in student learning, and to meet the students’ interests and needs. One of the things that I really noticed is that students were wanting to learn Spanish, but their main desire was to be able to speak Spanish. Because OC students are very busy, they don’t always have the time, or maybe they don’t have the funds, to visit a Spanish-speaking country, which would be ideal for them to to practice their Spanish and build their language skills. I came up with the idea of Spanish Immersion Lab, which is a class that doesn’t meet in a classroom. Instead, students, when they get to the advanced level, for a one-hour credit they make appointments with native Spanish-speaking tutors that we hire for Spanish Immersion Lab,” she said. “We hire OC students, native Spanish speaking OC students.I try to have tutors from a variety of countries. A lot of our tutors have come from Colombia, which is just kind of coincidental. But we have Colombia, Mexico represented,” said Ware. “The students are required to have 20 conversations of 30 minutes each, and speak Spanish only, and then write up a description of the conversations. During the conversation, they’re required to learn a piece of culture, either about the country of the tutor or cultural practices. Something to help the students feel like maybe they have gotten a piece of that country. Just in case they don’t ever get a chance to visit that country, they know something about it, they’ve built fluency and they’ve heard the accents of people of that particular country. Also a benefit that I’ve noticed over the years is the students feel like they have made friends with their tutors, so now they have a new friend, and they can speak Spanish or English with them. I think our tutors feel more visible on campus, and so it’s kind of a nice way to allow our native Spanish-speaking tutors or native Spanish-speaking students to feel even more valued on this campus. And I feel like everybody wins.”
Where does your passion for the Spanish language come from?
“I’m from Texas, and so I grew up going to Mexico, and maybe just being around Spanish was helpful. But God gives us lots of talents, but He doesn’t give us all of the talents. But one of the talents He gave me was for a foreign language, and just a real passion for learning a second language. I happen to have a knack for it, and I found it very useful and very practical because there are so many countries where Spanish is spoken, and so many countries near us where Spanish is spoken. I think that’s why I focused on Spanish. Because when I started college, I thought about majoring in Spanish and French. But I just really felt more connected to Spanish.”
How have you seen God work in your department to expand culture on campus?
“You know, I would like to take credit, but I cannot. I think it’s the students. The students who are coming to OC are more and more aware of the world. In part because maybe they have already traveled or they’ve been on mission trips, and they see the benefit of speaking a second language. They come interested in continuing Spanish or studying Spanish. I see them doing so many wonderful things, either they continue mission trips or I’ve run into a lot of students who were pre-healthcare, and they use their Spanish whenever they’re doing their practicums or going to clinics. I’ve gotten to run into some of our alums, and they almost always tell me that they use Spanish in the medical clinics, or my firefighters, or my corrections officers. They’re using Spanish to help people, and my students are already doing that now. I think it was last week or two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting a prospective student and learned that her dad is one of my former students. He’s an ER physician and he minored in Spanish, and he started a mission trip to Honduras. And so she’s grown up going to Honduras. His interest in Spanish started probably 20 years ago, so I think we have students who have generous hearts for the world, and they take Spanish and they really use that while they’re in school, and then afterward as well.”
How is the work that you are doing at Oklahoma Christian affecting the mission field of the next generations?
“I’m a one-person department. Students often go on mission trips, a lot of times it’s with churches because we have so many churches here, some are Church of Christ, some are Catholics, and a variety of religions… I feel like the mission field is not limited to mission trips because of our students who are serving in food pantries. I’ve had a couple of students who have done a class, it’s now called Applied Spanish in the Workplace, and they’ve interned at food pantries. They’re serving people who are struggling to learn English here in Oklahoma City, or at medical clinics, or when they’re helping out in their churches. And so I think being able to speak Spanish can help people locally as well as in more far-reaching ways.”
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