Peter Smudde named a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow
Released: November 3, 2005
“Everyone in a classroom is a student and must work together to advance their knowledge,” University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Assistant Professor Peter Smudde said. He believes learning is an ongoing process for both teachers and students. “A teacher is just a master student guiding others and helping to ‘connect the dots’ between theory and practice.” This philosophy, along with an innovative method for teaching public relations courses, are what helped Smudde earn the Wisconsin Teaching Fellowship for 2005-06.
“The fellows program is a perfect fit for a self-directed learner like Pete who wants to learn more about his teaching,” Associate Dean of Graduate Studies John Stone said. “He is one of the most intellectually-curious and engaged individuals I’ve ever met.”
Each of the University of Wisconsin System institutions select one tenure-track faculty member per year to be a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow. UW-Whitewater chose Smudde based on his interest in using The West Wing, a fictional television series about communications activities in the White House, to teach public relations courses.
“I’m happy to have been given the opportunity to do some in-depth research on this project and get some hard data on the effectiveness of using The West Wing in PR classes,” Smudde said. “It’s exciting that somebody saw something in my ideas and that it’s early enough in my teaching career to be able to use the results in the future.”
In the past, Smudde and UW-Whitewater Lecturer John Luecke have shown clips of particular episodes of The West Wing to public relations classes as they complement assignments.
“The benefit of watching the show in class is that students can see problems being figured out instead of just reading about it in case studies,” he said.
Although students’ feedback suggests the clips are helpful in understanding the practice of public relations, Smudde hopes to get hard data to prove the program’s usefulness and effectiveness as a public relations teaching tool.
Smudde’s hypothesis is that watching particular clips of The West Wing can be beneficial to all levels of public relations students. Students in Public Relations Tactics I, a beginning-level course, can see the importance of using language effectively and persuasively. One of Smudde’s favorite examples is the “Celestial Navigation” episode in which the White House deputy chief of staff replaces the press secretary at the daily press conference. The deputy chief of staff does not prepare appropriately and ends up making several false statements and regretting things he said. By watching this episode, students can visualize the difficulty of choosing the right words for the right situation.
Moreover, students in Public Relations Planning, the capstone course of the major, can analyze actions and talk about finding the right strategy for an opportunity. In the “20 Hours in America” episode, the deputy chief of staff and communications director for the White House are temporarily stranded in Indiana during the presidential re-election campaign. A local man in the hotel talks with them about his stress of trying to afford college tuition for his daughter. This single conversation revealed to the deputy chief of staff and communications director a new campaign message to target the public’s concerns “make college tuition tax deductible.” The situation shows the difficulty public relations practitioners may have staying in touch with an audience’s true wants and needs. Despite access to opinion polls and other audience research, it took a conversation with a local man to develop an effective strategy that targeted actual public concerns.
To quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of showing students these clips, Smudde has developed several actions to take while teaching spring semester public relations courses. He plans to track his own observations of students’ reactions, track students’ notes about what they learned, compare assignment grades from past semester’s courses to look for improvements and conduct a survey of students’ overall opinions. He hopes to not only see an improvement in the average of grades for assignments connected to The West Wing clips, but also gather more insight on how students learn.
As a teaching fellow, Smudde also attends several programs held by the UW System’s Office of Professional and Instructional Development, including the Faculty College and Summer Institute. Both are designed to facilitate learning and discussion between fellows, Wisconsin Teaching Scholars and program coordinators. Teaching fellows improve their teaching abilities, strengthen the university’s program and help make students’ learning experiences better. At the end of the year, fellows are encouraged to publish and share their results with other faculty.
“The objective is to learn more about both teaching and learning,” Smudde said.
Although he spent many years in the public relations field as a lead executive, his personal goal was to become a university professor.
“I always wanted to teach and I have more fun doing it than anything else. That’s what is exciting for me,” Smudde said. One of the things that Stone said makes Smudde so valuable in the public relations curriculum is the vast amount of professional experience he acquired before coming to UW-Whitewater.
“There aren’t a lot of people who would give up the career he did to chase a Ph.D. and become a teacher and scholar,” said Stone.
Smudde has published and presented a number of conference papers on communication and public relations-related topics and is currently wrapping up the publication process of a book he co-edited, “Power and Public Relations.” The book will be available for sale in early 2006, and results from his teaching fellowship may be available as early as the following year.- Cassandra Sura,suracc09@uww.edu
