Ellen Wartella, Dean of Communication
 |
 |
|
Concerned about the effect of the media on your children? Worried about video game violence, TV advertising aimed at kids, and children's exposure to online pornography? Ellen Wartella is, too. In addition to serving as dean of the College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin--consistently ranked among the best communications schools in the nation--Ellen Wartella continues to study the media's influence on children and tells everyone from Congress to Sesame Street what she's discovered. And they take notes. From her stylish glasses to the informal, if very busy atmosphere of her office, Ellen Wartella defies the traditional picture of the austere, inaccessible university administrator. A skilled communicator who listens as well as she speaks, she is a warm and energetic presence, moving deftly from a staff member's personal concerns to the latest issues affecting the NDEA (National Defense Education Act). Her colleagues see Dean Wartella as a complete package: scholar, administrator, children's advocate, spokesperson, supportive friend, wife, mother of two boys. "I am who I am," she says. "I talk a lot about who I am in terms of my children, my family. I bring all of that with me to the deanship. Oftentimes it creeps into my conversations, speeches, and research." 
Ellen Wartella received a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1977 and co-authored her first book about the effects of advertising on children (How Children Learn to Buy: The Development of Consumer Information Processing Skills) even before she finished her dissertation. Her resume is an impressive 20-plus pages, and among its highlights are her testimony to the U. S. House of Representatives and the Federal Trade Commission, the Educator of the Year Award from the Ad Society in 1998, the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Communication Society in 2000, and her role as chair of the education committee of the board of trustees of Sesame Workshop. In addition to serving as dean at UT Austin, she holds both the Walter Cronkite Regents Chair in Communication and the Mrs. Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair in Communication. If you ask Ellen Wartella what she's most proud of in her eight years as dean, she'll talk about the growing prestige of the UT College of Communication. After all, this is the college that produced Walter Cronkite, Lady Bird Johnson, Liz Carpenter, Bill Moyers, and 18 Pulitzer Prize winners in journalism and photography. It's the film-school alma mater of writer-directors Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, El Mariachi) and Tommy Schlamme (director and co-executive producer of The West Wing). But that was then . . . "The College has staked a claim to be a leader in the 21st century," Wartella says, proud of past achievements and certain of an even brighter future. "Our goal is to define communication education for this era, developing close ties to the professions in our field and meeting the needs and demands of society as it continues to evolve." 
UT's College of Communication is the largest and most comprehensive program of its kind, serving approximately 3,500 undergraduates and 500 graduate students each semester. More than 100 endowments support the College's students, faculty, and programs. Departments in the College of Communication consistently receive top national rankings for research and teaching excellence. In the most recent U.S. News and World Report to evaluate Communication schools (1996), the magazine ranked three UT programs in the top five:
In a report presented at the International Communication Association's annual conference in May 2001, UT's doctoral program in Communication was ranked second in the nation. But to keep a college in the top national rankings requires creating world-class programs, attracting the best professors, and retaining them year after year. And this is where Dean Ellen Wartella brings all her talents into play. "It takes a lot of folks up and down the food chain to make an ambitious project move forward," says assistant professor of journalism Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez. "So it's a good thing that Ellen, who is at the top of our food chain, does all that she can to facilitate that. She doesn't think of reasons that something can't work, she thinks of how we can make it work. And she gets excited--really excited--about the many wonderful projects in all the departments of the College." And while Dean Wartella is busy running the shop and supporting professors' projects and programs, she's still very active in pursuing her own intellectual interests. Since graduate school she has focused on the media's influence on children, and her work in that area has led to national visibility. She has served on the boards of such organizations as the Magic School Bus, the American Children's Television Festival, Sesame Workshop, and Girl Games, Inc. Most recently she has been learning about interactive media--e.g., video and computer games--a shift from her early focus on advertising and children. "We're still in the very earliest stages of the interactive technology revolution," says Wartella. "My hope is that if we raise awareness and develop a research base about the role of these technologies in children's lives and we show some good models to producers of interactive media, maybe we can avoid the rounds of public controversy, threats of regulation, and the standoff between the industry and critics." With colleagues from Georgetown University, Northwestern, and UCLA, she has recently received five-year funding from the National Science Foundation to establish a collaborative group of children's digital media centers at UT and each of these campuses to study the role of interactive media in child development. But high quality educational content is a lofty goal, and critics are quick to point out that educators had the same hopes for radio, film, and television. Yet very few movies and TV programs are educational. Mention that to Wartella, however, and you get a two-word response: Sesame Street, the television program responsible for helping to teach letters and numbers to countless children. "Sesame Street was developed through research on how children learn from television," she says, and the program is constantly being redesigned based on the latest research. The long-running success story shows that it's possible to educate while entertaining young children. 
But "edutainment" for post-preschoolers has had a more difficult time finding commercial success, because it competes against more mature programs and products that sometimes offer violent and sexually suggestive content. Will the producers of the popular interactive media industry listen to and respect what an outspoken academic like Ellen Wartella has to say about educational programming for children? "Telling them our concerns is important. Maybe we can help encourage the development of high quality, delightful entertainment," she says. "At the very least, benign interactive products, and at the very best, educational ones." It's a long-term struggle, Dean Wartella admits, but she's taken on the media before. And they've listened. Research and Interview by Moira Muldoon |
||
 |
 |