Roder and Schuster Retire from the UW-Madison School of Nursing

Patricia Roder, clinical associate professor of nursing, and Robert Schuster, director of technology resources, will retire from the UW-Madison School of Nursing in early summer 2005, capping off careers that have lasted a combined half-century at the school.

A Teacher’s Creed: Respect Is Key

Packing up her office at the School of Nursing, Roder removed from her bulletin board a piece of plain white paper with the inscribed words: “The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.” She lived by these words for 29 years as a teacher and mentor of nursing students.

Roder joined the School of Nursing in 1976 as a clinical instructor with medical-surgical expertise. Her responsibility was to teach students clinical skills in an acute care setting and equip them with the cognitive and technical skills to succeed in their profession.

Since that time up until her retirement, Roder influenced hundreds of students who, today, are nurses themselves, caring for patients in health care settings throughout the country.

Roder continually challenged herself to find better ways to teach, better ways to evaluate what was taught, and better ways to engage students in their clinical experiences. Students valued this approach to learning, describing her as a “patient, respectful and conscientious instructor” who was very “interested in each student as an individual.”

“As a teacher,” says Roder, “I strongly promoted analytical thinking, questioning, and sorting the important from the not important. I strove to emphasize reciprocal learning … interactions between nursing students at the same clinical site, yet on different units, are significant factors in learning.”

Roder’s teaching role was complemented by her nursing role at St. Marys Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. There, she worked as a staff nurse in the coronary care and medical intensive care units.

Possessing a strong clinical understanding of health issues related to arthritis and lupus, Roder provided in-service and distance education programs to nurses and patient education on these issues. Additionally, she served on health care teams that educated people about a variety of autoimmune diseases.

Forever the teacher, Roder intends to become involved with a program that teaches reading and writing skills to seven-year-olds through the Madison Metropolitan School District. For now, she notes, her plans in this very early stage of retirement “are not to make plans.” Some days, she adds, she will just “watch the clouds make fun formations in the sky and weed the garden.”

Director Answers Call to Tell State’s History

Schuster will soon dismantle his office wall, removing nine black-and-white photos depicting historic moments in his hometown’s history. The treasured photos of Fairwater, Wisconsin, speak to a renaissance unfolding in Schuster’s life.

With years of experience and expertise in chronicling the history of Fairwater, Schuster has been chosen to help tell the story of rural Wisconsin activism surrounding the Civil War. He has become part of a burgeoning effort to build a regional Civil War museum in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on the lakefront, under the direction of award-winning author and journalist Lance J. Herdegen.

“The museum is designed to expose visitors to the moral and social issues that led to the Civil War and to explore the changes caused by it,” Schuster says. “The museum visitor will be able to hear an anti-slavery sermon … board a train bound for the front, or walk through a military camp.”

The Fairwater native joined the School of Nursing in 1986. His responsibility was to usher the School of Nursing into the computer age. He remained true to his charge for nearly two decades. Under his leadership, the instructional resources staff introduced the School of Nursing to many innovations in technology: the personal computer, e-mail, shared file systems, video conferencing and connections to the Internet, Web servers, and the school’s intranet communications service.

Schuster’s avocation in history and career in technology resources have run along parallel spheres for quite some time now. His interest in Civil War history began some 12 years ago. Eight years ago, Schuster created the Wisconsin Local History Network Web site (www.wlhn.org), for people to share information about the state. While fulfilling a historian’s role in the building of the Kenosha museum, he will continue to devote time to expanding the Web site and assisting the Fairwater Historical Society in uncovering stories of the town’s past.

Years ago, Schuster admits, he saw the study of history as an exercise “as dry as dust.” But, he explains, “I then came at it from the other side … starting at the local level and looking at what shaped the rural community and the families living there. Wisconsin history is incredibly fertile.”