Maria Hannah

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies

• Email: mariahannah@augustana.edu
• Office: Old Main 210

My mission as an educator is to build healthy classroom communities through meaningful connection and content. As such, I value opportunities to develop positive working relationships with students in order to co-create knowledge in the human communication classroom. At Augustana I teach courses related to communication and social relationships (COMM-220) and communication and culture (COMM-260). The notion that communication is a skill to be intentionally developed toward more satisfying, diverse, social relationships is the essence of my teaching. I look forward to partnering with students in an effort to better understand and optimize interactions across a variety of contexts.

My primary area of research is instructional communication, which is the study of the teaching-learning process as a communication process. I am specifically interested in teacher goals, behavior, and influence messages, student communication about mental health, and student behavior including student-to-student communication about learning experiences. I am published in Communication Education, Atlantic Journal of Communication, Southern Communication Journal, Ohio Communication Journal, and Texas Speech Communication Journal. I have also contributed to book chapters related to students’ cognitive learning, conflict in the classroom, compassionate pedagogy, and strategies for communicating about mental health concerns. 

Before joining Augustana I was an instructor of record at Ohio University (Athens, OH) where I earned Outstanding Researcher in the School of Communication Studies, facilitated workshops about communicating motivation and learning needs in teaching-learning contexts (with an emphasis on doctoral advisor-advisee contexts), and presented at the university-wide Spotlight on Learning conference. 

Specializations: Instructional communication, Interpersonal communication