DePauw Stories

From new courses to new spaces, DePauw is equipping its students with the most up-to-date tools for innovation and success. One specific expression of this priority is a growing emphasis on podcasting and other forms of digital media.

“Back around 2015, the Pulliam Center still had three or four working wet dark rooms that were just filled with stuff and no one was using,” recalls Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, professor of communication and theatre. “We had recently received some money to do some work, so we decided to build a podcast studio. Immediately we started trying to get students interested in it.”

At that point, podcasting was still relatively new to the media landscape. Groundbreaking shows like This American Life and Serial were captivating millions, new podcasting apps were vying for a growing number of listeners, and advertisers were starting to recognize the potential for unprecedented engagement with niche audiences.

Nichols-Pethick and his colleagues at the Pulliam Center saw this as an ideal opportunity to begin educating students about this emerging medium and preparing them to leverage the power of podcasting in their own creative pursuits.

“I developed a winter term class called Podcasting: Craft and Culture,” he explains. “I wanted to combine training on how to actually do this with a sense of the history of the form and some of the critical ideas starting to circulate in academia about how to think about podcasting as a critical object.”

After two iterations as a winter term class, Nichols-Pethick took what he had learned from those experiences and expanded the course into a full semester-long format. It was a shift inspired by the launch of the Creative School as well as the transformation of DePauw’s film studies program into film and media arts – a move made to accommodate forms of non-film media, podcasting being one of them.

In the fall of 2024, Nichols-Pethick taught the expanded course for the first time. “It went pretty well,” he says. “We had some ringers in there who were really skilled, and we also had some people who'd never touched a microphone before. But they all ended up having a pretty good time.”

One reason for the course’s success was the intentional collaboration that Nichols-Pethick built into the projects. “All these students come in with different skill sets. Some parts of podcasting aren't going to connect with them very well and some are. But I started to see the possibility for little teams of people who could bring all their different skills together and end up doing something great.”

This collaborative spirit wasn’t limited to peer-to-peer interactions. When it comes to podcasting and other contemporary forms of media, Nichols-Pethick is quick to point out that many of his students are actually more experienced than he is. This paradoxical reality has opened up exciting opportunities to share ideas and create a synergistic learning environment.

“They’re so far ahead of us in some of these things,” he admits. “I have students who say, ‘Yeah, I have a podcast. I've had it for five years.’ So they can actually tell me more about how that works than I can tell them. It forces me to have some humility about it. If some of the students know more about some of these things than I do, let's bring that in and learn from them.”

As new and innovative as podcasting may be, however, its inclusion in the curricular programming at DePauw is rooted in the university’s long-standing commitment to the liberal arts and its historic reputation for excellence in media. That core identity has remained unchanged.

“This is about storytelling in all sorts of different ways,” argues Nichols-Pethick. “I see podcasting as deeply connected to the long trajectory of humanities education and liberal arts education that we do here.”

More specifically, he believes podcasting builds upon DePauw’s tradition as a leader in college radio – something the university has been doing well for 75 years and counting. Although there are certainly new techniques and technologies to pass along, what he’s teaching his students is an extension of what students have been learning for generations.

“There's a way of seeing podcasting as the newest toy,” he says. “But really it's just another iteration of the tools we've been using all along.”