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A podcast from the University of Puget Sound about Loggers reaching to the heights.
Nick Brody (00:00):
One of the things that I really think sets Puget Sound apart, and one of the reasons I'm really happy to be here is that teaching is valued.
Narrator (00:10):
This is Greater, We Ascend, a podcast from the University of Puget Sound about Loggers reaching to the heights.
Nick Brody (00:19):
Hi, my name is Nick Brody and I'm a professor of communication studies at the University of Puget Sound, where I teach and conduct research on topics of communication and technology.
(00:32):
The University of Puget Sound is an institution that really puts its money where its mouth is when it comes to teaching. A lot of institutions talk about how important teaching is, but as faculty members, we are primarily evaluated based on our teaching. So when we are helping our new colleagues acclimate to the university, when we're reviewing our colleagues as they go up for tenure and promotion, primarily what we're focusing on is their engagement in the classroom. And what that translates to for all of us is that we put a great deal of time, of thought, of energy, of emotional labor into developing classes that are going to challenge students, engage students, allow them to get their hands dirty and have just transformative experiences.
(01:23):
Experiential learning can be defined a lot of ways, but really what it comes down to is actually using what you learn in the classroom to go do things. So what does doing things mean? Well, it could mean leading workshops and classes in the community where you translate maybe sometimes jargony academic theoretical ideas into practice by delivering workshops in Kâ12 schools or working with retirees, or going in, working with companies and organizations in the community to develop marketing plans, all the way to traveling across the world and engaging in international programs so that you can see how the context in which you've engaged with this, engaged with this learning and content in the United States might extrapolate out to other cultures and other contexts where you could have never imagined how it would play out sitting in a classroom in Tacoma, Washington.
(02:26):
I think that communication and technology â and obviously I'm biased because this is my life's work and my life's passion and what I put most of my time and thought and effort into â I think it's vital because most of the interacting, relating and communicating that we're going to be doing from here on out is going to be mediated in some form or fashion. And by mediated, I mean our interactions are going to be taking place through some sort of technological device. When I first started researching and studying this, which at this point was more than 15 years ago, we could kind of separate our lives into our online lives and our offline lives, right? There were things that we would log on and do on our computers or our PCs, and then we would have our separate offline lives. That's just no longer the case. Our online and offline lives are just completely integrated and they overlap almost completely. Our closest friends, we engage with them via our devices, via text messages, via various social media apps, our loved ones, our coworkers. So much of work is now happening in a distributed fashion. In other words, we work remotely and even if we're working in an office, we're often working with other people who are not physically co-present with us, and we take that for granted.
(03:50):
But there are profound challenges to communicating at a distance, and there's a lot of things that we don't know. We don't understand that we're still researching as scholars and as researchers, but it's also something that I think our students will really need to grapple with and think critically about as they move into their own lives. So how this is going to affect their jobs and their lives in the workplace as they engage with colleagues and tackle some of the big challenges that we hope our students go on and tackle post-graduation. And then for what I study, most importantly, I find that people find the ideas that we are grappling with in our classes really valuable because we often find meaning in our lives through our close personal relationships. So our romantic relationships, our closest friendships, our family relationships. That's what truly brings meaning and value to our lives. And if we're engaging with people via technology, we should be really thoughtful and mindful about how that technology changes our relationships and changes the dynamics of our communication in those relationships for both good and bad and being really thoughtful about some of those dynamics and some of those challenges that we're grappling with now and that we might have to deal with 10, 20, 30 years into the future.
(05:16):
I think that's a really important question. How are we creating leaders for the world of tomorrow when we don't know what that world is going to look like? One of the benefits of being a liberal arts school is that we are not necessarily just training you to do one specific job. We are training you to be humans. We are training you to be deep thinkers, to be critical thinkers. We are giving you skills in public speaking and in writing and in small group work and collaboration that are going to allow you to be flexible in your approach to whatever it is you do post-graduation and into future 10, 20, 30 years away.
(05:59):
When I teach my communication and technology classes, students will often say to me, why are we talking about this particular platform, right? Why are we talking about, why are we talking about Facebook or MySpace? Those things happened 10 or 15 years ago, and sometimes we'll read research articles that still talk about those particular platforms. And what I explained to them is that might be true, but if I made this entire class about Snapchat or ChatGPT, now that would feel out of date in 10 or 15 and 20 years. What we really want to do as scholars, which you all are, all of our students are scholars, our budding scholars, you need to be really thoughtful and mindful about how this research that we're building on might extrapolate into the future. What can we pull from this that scholars were really interested in 15 or 20 years ago, and what is still relevant today? So those are kind of on-the-ground research analysis skills that I think prepare our students for tomorrow.
(07:00):
I can think of this idea of the term "to the heights" from a few different perspectives, and the first one is teaching. And I'm often reflective of one of the great things of teaching at a place like Puget Sound is that I get to work with students across their entire academic journey. So I'll often have students in their first year of college, first semester, fresh from high school in one of my introductory classes, and then I might have them again in their sophomore or junior year in a departmental class like a comm theory class or a statistics quantitative methods class as they continue their academic journey. And then I might have them again in their final year as seniors, as they work on their capstone projects. And to me, just being able to see students on that journey to the heights, if you will, from somebody who has never experienced really niche topics, has never really experienced college-level academic work, where we can see all of the growth that they are going to experience and project all the growth that they're going to experience over the next four years, and then to be able to see that actually come to fruition as they get to their senior-level classes.That's kind of like watching students on this journey from the bottom of the mountain all the way to the top, to the heights, if you will.
(08:33):
I often think of it as this metaphor of, I'm looking out my window right now, and I feel very fortunate. I have a beautiful view of Mount Rainier. It's a clear day looking right out my window to Mount Rainier. So when I think of "to the heights" with the mountain always looming over campus, I often think of that particular mountain, or Tahoma, I should say, of Tahoma being outside of my window, being able to look at it out my window on these clear days and knowing that students are going on a really similar journey over their four years while they're at Puget Sound.
(09:09):
Well, I would say that the thing that inspires me most is working with our students. So I love teaching. That's one of the reasons why I came to the University of Puget Sound, because I knew that I would have a chance to work really closely with students and that that work would be valued here. So that's really what inspires me. There are some summers where I've done summer research projects with students, and those are the summers that I really think back on fondly. Being able to have that ability to work closely with the student to take their ideas and their passions and translate into, into a project that is going to produce new knowledge to put out into the world is always something that just gets me really excited. So working closely with students on their own research involving students in my own research, those are the experiences that I really value.
(10:11):
I teach a class, a quantitative research class, and communication studies students are often afraid of math classes, just to be honest. They don't love math. They're not always excited about taking math classes. But this is a class that is one of my favorite classes to teach. I'm teaching it in the fall. Again, I always get so excited about it because we get to, as a class, create from the ground-up research projects where my students are going to design a research study, develop their own hypotheses and research questions that are derived from the literature, design a data collection methodology, go out and actually collect data, use statistics to analyze that data. And what we talk about in that class is ultimately they are producing new knowledge about the world, right? They're pushing the boundaries of knowledge. They're answering research questions and testing hypotheses that in many cases have never been asked and never been tested by anybody else.
(11:18):
And being able to, that process of research was so formative in my own experience that being able to see that in students who are largely hesitant and sometimes scared to take a class like that is a really valuable experience for me and an experience I really get excited about every semester when I teach that class.
(11:40):
So I'm not from the Pacific Northwest. I'd only ever been to the Pacific Northwest two times before I moved here to begin as a professor. And I sometimes have to pinch myself just to remind myself that this is where I get to live. I mean, I get to look out my office window and look at the mountain. I can walk 20 minutes away from campus and have a sweeping view of Puget Sound. Being able to drive into the Cascades or the Olympic Mountains and have those places be so easily accessible. Having a spot like Point Defiance a mere short drive from campus, and just being this old-growth forest, which is nothing I ever saw growing up. I have two kids and they were born here, and sometimes it's just wild for me to look at them and experience it through their eyes because they take it for granted. But having never been here before, I'm still just in awe of the beautiful scenery and the landscape around us, and try not to take it for granted.
Narrator (13:07):
Greater We Ascend is a production of the University of Puget Sound. This episode was produced by John Moe. Our theme music is by Skyler Hedblom, Puget Sound, class of 2025. Learn more at puget sound.edu/greater.