Communication Studies professor discusses how his teaching has evolved over 35 years to prioritize experiential learning and relevancy to students’ lives.
How do you keep innovating as an instructor?
I learn so much from my colleagues who are skilled teachers. They remind me that the Socratic lecture and questioned and answer method is not dead but needs to be modified to serve all students productively. I still lecture and generate discussion in class, but my days of lecturing for 3 hours straight are over! My lectures are shorter and then I generate discussion and then we do an in-class exercise or case study… I've become very convinced that the most important part of my teaching needs to be my accessibility to students rather than me pontificating about issues, concerns and knowledge that are not necessarily relevant to student centered learning.
Why is this important to you?
Teaching is foundational in the discipline of communication. Whether it be great teachers of rhetoric of communication and theorists such as Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Cicero to even modern theorists in mass communication such as McLuhan and critical theorists like Foucault and others, teaching remains the fundamental means by which communication is best understood. I've written numerous peer-reviewed articles, and I've published books, but I'm convinced that the best way for me to promote my discipline and the exceptional skill of articulation is through a well-crafted and relevant in-class and online course. Even as an administrator I promoted teaching as fundamental to any faculty member’s promotion tenure and evaluation. It's our primary professional and academic obligation to teach well.
Can you give some examples from your classroom?
Every short lecture and discussion and in-class assignment, regardless of its format, must be an assignment that is grounded in the fundamental role of relevancy. For me relevancy is the heartbeat of teaching. That is to say that as teachers we need to make the content of our courses identifiable, recognizable, and relevant to our students' lives. Relevancy has changed over the years, of course. Now the notion of relevancy becomes fundamental for students who've lived through a pandemic. Many of our students have learned the importance of personal safety and life and death when it comes to attending classes as elementary, middle, high school and college students. So, the relevancy I teach of the content must change over time to meet the life experiences and perspectives of our students.
In what other ways do you serve students?
Besides teaching, I serve students by giving advice and counsel and by sharing my experiences as an administrator where I not only championed high quality teaching but also experiential learning. It's through experiential learning and by offering those opportunities that I continue serving students. There's a direct line of understanding between experiential learning and making the content of what I teach relevant to our students. Our students want a practical, accessible, and relevant education and that's what we should strive to provide them.
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SENIORS TAKE STUDENT MEDIA
For more information, contact Faculty
Isaac Hinson, Editor-in-Chief, The Observer On stands every Thursday | www.cwuobserver.com
Hometown: Portland, OR
Major/Minor: Media & Journalism / PR
Graduation: Spring 2025
Involvement: When I was younger, I wrote about the Portland Trail Blazers online, and I think that is what sparked my interest in journalism as a serious profession, along with growing up reading Trail Blazers beat reporters like Sean Highkin, Casey Holdahl and Jason Quick.
Favorite memory: I still think about my first trip with student media to the ACP conference in Washington, DC in Fall 2022. That really opened my eyes up to how special of an opportunity it is to be a part of student media. I learned so much there and was really able to hone my craft. But that trip also showed me that you could make connections with the people you work with here beyond the newsroom, which is truly the best part of being involved with student media.
Advice? Get involved! Being a part of student media is fantastic, yes and we would love to have you but there is a plethora of other opportunities around campus, and you would be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't put yourself out there and join something bigger than yourself. There is so much to do, and so little time that we get to spend here on campus before we're shipped off into the real world (Trust me, senior year comes at you fast), you should spend it being a part of something.
Future plans: As much as I love Ellensburg, I'm planning on moving back to a big city likely home to Portland, up to Seattle or down to Los Angeles and beginning my career in media. I also am going to spend the summer catching up on all the movies I missed these last four years.
Involvement: I knew that I wanted to write professionally, and I felt that journalism was a great way to do that. I took a media writing/reporting class in the winter of my sophomore year, then got involved at PULSE in Spring of 2023. Since then, I have worked for PULSE every quarter and have worked my way up from reporter to editor to editor-in-chief.
Favorite memory? I would say that my favorite experience with student media so far was the trip we took to San Diego last Spring for the SPJ conference. As PULSE editors, we all became very close on that trip, and we got to know the staff at our sister publication, The Observer, much better. I felt that we all bonded on that trip and learned valuable information about what our jobs meant and how we could best serve in our roles.
Advice? My advice would be to try new things and to bet on yourself, even when there's a chance you might fail. It's scary to do, and I was very intimidated when I first joined PULSE, but taking that chance has paid off for me in all the best ways. While you have the opportunity to explore, there's no reason not to.
Future plans? Post-graduation, I plan to move back home for a while to try and earn some money before striking out on my own. I intend to pursue journalism further, though I have yet to fully figure out what that looks like yet.
Hometown: Bonney Lake , WA
Major/Minor: Comm Studies / Media & Journalism
Graduation: Spring or Fall 2025
MEDIA LEADERSHIP ROLES
Benita Jangala, Director
Central Communication Agency | www.cwucca.com
Involvement: I was drawn to public relations and working with CCA, the Central Communications Agency, because I like working with people. I like working with clients, giving people what they need in communications. I'm planning on working with possibly government and nonprofits. Ideally, I'd like to be a liaison between organizations.
Favorite memory: The thing that is a little bit of a superpower with me is people will drop airs, and they will start telling me everything. They'll start giving me the juice behind stuff and that just tickles me because I feel honored that people do this, that they trust me enough that I'm not going to be writing really bad stuff about them, and yet they're giving me little pieces of their frustrations or things that have happened that they wouldn't normally just tell everybody. And that’s a superpower.
Advice? Put yourself out there. It's uncomfortable, but just try things. Be excited, be uncomfortable. It doesn't matter. If you fail, if it’s something you feel like you didn't show in the best light. What's the best light, you know? Come on! This is the time. This is the time to put yourself out there and try anything.
Hometown: Hollywood, CA
Major/Minor: Public Relations
Non-profit Organization
Graduation: Winter 2025
Future plans: I want to sail around the world. I was laid off and I just jumped into school and doing something that I had put off for a long time because I had a comfortable job, and it was hard to leave. And then the universe kicked my butt out of there And going into this, it's been a whirlwind. My life's been a whirlwind, so I'd actually like to just take a gap year.
Hometown: Edmonds, WA
Major/Minor: Public Relations
Sports Business
Graduation: Spring 2025
CCA provides PR and marketing services to clients both on campus and off.
Gil Martínez-Camacho, Co-Director Central Communication Agency
Involvement: It was easy for me. It correlates directly with my major, so it seemed like a no-brainer! I’m happy to do anything that can help me in the future.
Favorite memory? One of my favorites is interacting with our clients and working with Ellensburg Community Radio as well as meeting the DJs there to produce content for their social media. This experience also provided me with the opportunity to edit videos, which I had never done before. It was incredibly rewarding to learn a new skill and continue to apply it in my work.
Advice? Get to know your professors! There are some fantastic people that we have working in the Communication Department. They are great resources, very knowledgeable, and have a ton of experience.
Future plans? Travel! There is so much left for me to see. Ideally work for a company that has offices around the country or world. So then they would literally pay me to travel.
ALUMNI CORNER
Lindsey Wisniewski is Senior Editor of The Athletic, a role she got after holding production and reporting jobs at places like FOX Sports, Pac-12 Network, USA Today and NBC Sports.
“I found an opportunity to shift my focus to the editing side and join The Athletic, where I get to be hands-on with NBA reporters covering the Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knicks, Golden State Warriors and more.”
She credits her studies with teaching her the ins and outs of journalism. Her favorite class was a reporting class where she learned to cover a beat as well as to build a blog and use social media. “My website was called ‘The Food Beat Girl,’ and I highlighted local restaurants and owners.”
Other highlights she cites were “classes with Steve Woodward, Jennifer Green and Cynthia Mitchell, working with Rob Lowery in the CWU athletics department as an intern, helping launch the first print publication of PULSE, and serving as flag bearer for the College of Arts & Humanities at graduation.”
“My journalism degree at CWU was really the launching point for my career,” Wisniewski says.” It gave me the itch to want to learn more and to continue my studies. I ended up going to ASU soon after and specializing in sports journalism for my master’s degree.”
Her advice for current students? “Build those connections! A lot of the doors that opened for me throughout my journey were because of who I knew and the relationships I built. Slide into someone’s LinkedIn DMs, offer to take someone to coffee if you’re interested in what they do. You never know when that person might just pass along your name.”
WHITNEY HAHN
Class of 2013
“I’ll wear twelve different hats in a day, and that’s what keeps the day-to-day exciting.”
LINDSEY WISNIEWSKI
Class of 2015
“Future journalists, take note. It may not be your first job or your second job, but by your third or fourth job, if you can hang in there, you will start making the money that you envision you’d make. ”
Whitney Hahn graduated in 2013 with a degree in public relations and a minor in advertising. She currently serves as a Global Marketing Operations Lead at Indigo Slate working with Microsoft as a client. She leads a global team of three.
“I help drive the partner marketing as a service offer that helps strengthen the relationship between Microsoft and their partner ecosystem,” she explains. “My actual day-to-day consists of people management (both clients and internal teams), strategic and creative thinking, problem solving, relationship-building, and more.,” she adds.
Hahn has never been known to rest on her laurels. While at CWU, she was involved with the student PR association, PRSSA, and founded the Business Networking Club. She received 5th place out of 1,033 students in Central Washington’s Business Plan Competition. She hosted a Top Chef event with chef Kevin Camarillo at the SURC and the Turkey Trot Thanksgiving of 2012, both among her favorite college memories.
“Deciding to become a communication major always appealed to me because of its expansiveness,” she says. “It’s a diverse field that gave me the ability to be a sort of chameleon. Communicators all have similar skill sets, but our passions and personal interests lead us to pursue different fields. And it’s best to embrace that – explore many fields and find what fits.”
“During my experience at CWU I developed leadership skills that helped me understand people better. I also learned that ‘failing’ was ok, and you just take that failure, learn from it, and try again but a different way,” Hahn adds. “Central also influenced my life by showing me the importance of your network… Connections are everything. They will be the reason you do or don't get the job.”
