Feature Story on Communication Media Studies Professor Leanord Shedletsky
By Chris Tiner | Co-Editor-in-Chief
Leanord Shedletsky is a professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at USM and has served as a prominent figure at USM for forty-five years. You especially know him if you are a part of the Communication Media Studies department or have taken any classes within that department. Still, Lenny can also be found around campus occasionally. Many students recognize seeing him at the Sullivan Gym, in and out of class buildings, he is a prominent figure at our University and has been contributing his efforts for a long time.
“You learn your way by doing it,” Lenny stated after asking him about his learning path to becoming an educator. Lenny started his career as an educator, taking a credential course for teaching in community college while he was attending San Francisco State as a Masters student. Here, he would shadow a community college teacher and be able to teach a classroom once or twice a semester. He also had a teaching assistantship as a PhD student. A one-year program introduced him to teaching, which changed everything. It turned Lenny from what he had been his whole life, a student, to a teacher.
Post receiving his PhD, Lenny accepted a job at the University of Connecticut—his first experience with full-time teaching. After spending a couple of years at the University of Connecticut, Lenny decided to come teach at the University of Southern Maine in 1979. Lenny has been teaching at the University of Southern Maine ever since.
As we go through life, things change and develop. One of the most important things to a college campus is the culture and environment built within it. Lenny has been a part of USM for forty-five years, so he has seen many different changes in USM’s environment over time. When asked what factors he believes contribute to the shifting culture surrounding USM, he provided a more specific answer about how attitudes toward college as a whole have changed in recent years.
“Some of it has to do with the number of people who want to go to college, the expense of college… how we think about college has changed. The attitude toward college has changed. College has become very expensive for people, and that plays a role in their decision.”
Something Lenny said interested me when talking about the finances and economics of college nowadays. “The college is an institution; they need to pay the bills. Students and their families also need to pay their bills. The amount of money that goes in and out has changed a lot. That aspect has changed college a lot compared to when I was back in college.”
When asking Lenny to go further into detail about the student life at USM changing over the years he has been there, he brought up that he believes technology plays a part in how student life has changed in college.
“Especially in young people’s lives, people born in the late nineties and early 2000s, today college students have grown up with screens that didn’t exist when I was a young guy. Technology has changed how people spend their time and how they interact or don’t interact. These have also impacted college life on campus and how people interact.”
Although technology wasn’t a thing when Lenny was a young guy, he sure has taken advantage of it while it has been around during his adult life. I spoke with one of Lenny’s colleagues in the Communication Media Studies department, Professor Maureen Ebben, and she provided me with some insight into Lenny from her perspective.
“He (Lenny) was a groundbreaker in using technology for instruction—particularly remote instruction. He was one of the first in the university and in the CMS department to teach distance-learning classes back when students would gather at learning centers (physical sites in communities across the state of Maine) to watch real-time streams of course lectures. When the speed and accessibility of the internet evolved, Prof. Shedletsky was an early adopter of the forms of online learning that we know today. He was instrumental in building the online Communication major at USM.”
Professor Ebben also talked about how her interaction with Lenny has been able to be shaped by common interests that the two share in research.
“My research focuses on communication and technology, especially information technologies like the internet and artificial intelligence, so Lenny and I have those shared interests about how technology shapes our interactions and what that means for how we communicate. As a colleague, I’ve always enjoyed discussions with Lenny about our work with students, especially teaching, and our various research projects. We both earned our Ph.D. degrees at the same university—the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana—so we share that common history of having been grad students out on the Midwest prairie. Lenny’s intellectual curiosity is inspiring, and I applaud his deep engagement with the field of Communication over all these years”.
Lenny shared with me that he is very excited about some new ideas he has been exploring in recent years. These ideas that have been forming have become full research topics for him that have turned into courses he has started to teach here at USM.
“The titles and topics of these courses are somewhat unusual; they engage in critical thinking on topics and discussion instead of centering around textbooks. One of the titles of my course is titled “Calling Bullshit,” which is an empirical study I did with David Bantz on how we perceive and reason things we believe to be bullshit.”
Anyone who has taken courses with Lenny knows this directly describes his teaching style. Very focused on critical thinking and discussion on that thinking to be able to understand each other and have discussions about our thinking. It is much less centered around pulling information from a textbook. An educator, critical thinker, learner, academic role model, and staple in USM’s community are all things that describe Lenny Shedletsky.