With this professor, teaching is passionate and personal.
You can’t help but smile when Susan Dente Ross talks about what students experience at WSU. The smile comes from seeing the passion and dedication in this associate professor in the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication and associate dean for corporate giving.
“We really believe in paying attention to who our students are, what they want to do, and how they want to accomplish it. And we try to attend to all three things. It’s not good enough to train individuals as if they were a cog in a machine; it matters who they are.
”Highly talented, highly motivated students should come to WSU because they will know their professors. And we will work with them one-on-one, and they will work in small groups with us, and we will be committed to their progress and to their career, and we actually know them, and we care about them. . .We invest more.
“If you have a passion and you want to follow it, you come and talk to us and you will find one of us who will work with you.”
What’s so special about the WSU approach?
“Critical thinking. It’s core to our practice in everything we do.”
When she thinks about how the Edward R Murrow school trains journalists compared to the universities of North Carolina and Florida, where she has also taught, she says WSU’s journalism students are informed by communication theory, which means they understand there is no neutral presentation of facts. “Every time you tell a story, you’re constructing a reality, and your story changes how people view the world.
“Most journalism schools don’t try to inform their students of that perspective; they just teach them, ‘Here’s the formula for writing news stories, go out and do it.’ And they teach that fairness is to quote ‘both’ sides as if every story has two equal sides. Well, there are a multiplicity of sides, and they’re never equal.”
WSU teaches journalists to be informed, self-aware, and self-critical. And that’s a vital piece of re-thinking the news media role in society.
Research into “peace journalism”
Research tells us that the news media actually help keep conflict going and make it worse. Ross leads one of about only three journalism projects at a U.S. university in looking at peace journalism as a mechanism for changing the way the media contribute to global war.
Because of the freedom at WSU, students move across fields to offer themselves, and faculty members like Ross, much more dynamic and interesting teams. Her peace journalism team has nine students from disciplines that include communication, political science, criminal justice, and American studies. And these students will present their research at an international PaXIM Conference held at WSU. PaXIM stands for “peace, cross-cultural communication, identity and media.”
To sum it up
Ross says, “I think WSU is a research-one institution that feels like a small liberal arts college … and that’s maybe unique.”
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