Understanding through storytelling: Ariel Gratch

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Understanding through storytelling: Ariel Gratch

“I want students to know how to manage nerves and know that they have the skills to speak in any situation.”

Assistant Professor of Communication Arts Ariel Gratch discusses the role communication arts plays in every aspect of our lives, whether we realize it or not.

Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself!

A: I grew up in Southern California and I moved to Georgia when I was 16. Since then, I’ve lived in California, Georgia, North Carolina, Louisiana, Ohio and now New York, so I’ve moved around a lot. I’m married and my wife teaches at Syracuse University and I have a 3-year old son who’s awesome. Professionally, I teach communication, and my focus/research is on tourism and storytelling.

So I’ve spent a lot of time researching tourism from the perspective of being there. I also do storytelling and look at how it impacts culture. I’ve performed at the New Orleans French Festival, a number of different universities and at the National Storytelling Festival.

Q: What do you find most interesting about communication arts?

A: I think communication arts is something that a lot of people take for granted, until you’re in a conflict and the only way to get out of it is through communication. It happens on every level, from your interpersonal relationships to the national level, as we see politicians engaging in rhetorical discourse to a greater or lesser degree. Everything we do, we say, we wear, and we read communicates something to someone and so communication arts is looking at all the ways that those things are communicated. I think that’s why I’m drawn to storytelling as an art form, but also as a craft. It’s the only way that we have of really taking our experiences and helping someone else understand what that experience is like. Especially, if we think in terms of journalism, journalists try to take the experience that someone else is having and then help other people realize what that experience entails and make them connect to it. So storytelling for me is at the core of what helps people get that experience across to others.

Q: What do you hope students get out of the classes that you teach?

A: I think it was Kenneth Burke who referred to communication as equipment for living and so at the base level that’s what I want students to get out of my classes. With advanced classes, like Rhetorical Theory and Criticism, I want students to be able to understand how everything they encounter in the world can have a persuasive message and to be more critical consumers of the messages they encounter every day. With my introductory classes, like public speaking, I want students to know how to manage nerves and know that they have the skills to speak in any situation.

Q: What brought you/attracted you to Utica College?

A: There are a couple of things. First off, I like the small campus size, because I never pictured myself being at a big research university. I like spending time in the classroom more than I like spending time on research, so when I’m doing my research, it’s a better way to help students understand communication problems. Utica College really helps me do that. I can have one-on-one conversations with students in this capacity because classrooms are fairly small and I can have lots of time with the students which is great. Working with administration to come to tough decisions at other institutions is often a very top down power structure and one of the things that appealed to me about Utica College is that it feels more dialogic.

Q: What is different about Utica/Syracuse versus other areas you have lived, such as California?

A: The weather is different, coming from the South and California. I’ll be honest, I don’t think there’s much that’s different.

Q: If you didn’t go into communication arts what could you see yourself doing?

A: I wanted to go into coffee roasting and purchasing and I wanted to work at a roasting plant become fluent in Spanish and go down to South and Central America and purchase coffees for large coffee retailers. My option was either that or graduate school and I’m happy that I chose graduate school. The other thing I think I would be doing is working as a professional storyteller. It’s something before I found this job, I was still kind of considering with my previous position.

Q: What has been the most interesting thing that has happened to you at UC so far?

A: I think one of the things, my wife and I realized is how consistently over the last five or six months, that we’ve just enjoyed our days. I think part of that is that we love where we live, we love our neighbors, we have a great community and we both really enjoy our jobs, where in a way we just liked where we were before. I think if anything I would just say the steady level of happiness that we’ve found in Central NY is really great.