Wabash professors have abandoned traditional pedagogy that once featured a teacher-centered classroom full of grammar drills and verb conjugations. Their current pedagogy is more student-centered and contextualized within written and spoken discourse. Not only are languages being taught, but cultures are as well. When culture is taught in the classroom, it all too often reinforces pre-existing stereotypes and becomes saturated with cultural tokens for example, the Spanish siesta and bullfighting. While professors attempt to teach not only language, but also culture, an impossible task lies ahead.
Nonverbal communication lies at the heart of both language and culture.
Wabash students may communicate with each other in the target language for hours at a time, but they are still culturally bound to the environment of Wabash and that of their upbringing. Because so much of communication is nonverbal, the Spanish spoken in the classroom at Wabash is distinctly different from any Spanish spoken in Spain or Latin America. To truly learn about a culture, one must experience it not merely read about it in a book. Science majors supplement their textbooks with labs. The labs allows students to transform the theoretical into practical information.