You may have received a survey recently, asking about your experiences in our department and your current career. We are grateful to everyone who responded; our alumni community remains strong and generous, no matter where they are. To give some context: This survey is part of an annual process that academic departments undertake called "assessment." Each year, we assess different aspects of our major, our curriculum, our pedagogy, and our career development initiatives for students. Last year, for example, we focused on how our writing courses are sequencing and scaffolding writing skills as students pass through them.
This year, we focused on alumni careers and outcomes. We always want to know if our department served you well for whatever you are doing now. If it did, we are eager to know how and why. We're just as eager to get feedback on where we need to shift and improve our approaches. Your feedback will help shape the curriculum and create opportunities for current and future students in our department, so again, we could not be more grateful for your time and thoughts.
Assessment is just one of many processes that departments implement to ensure that we are delivering the best and most appropriate curriculum, with cutting-edge pedagogical approaches, for all our students. With that in mind, I would like to highlight just a few of our courses and initiatives that students have continued to find very high impact:
- Several years ago, we created a new course called Secret Pittsburgh. It is modeled on the tourist guides that walk you through the lesser-known and quirky parts of cities. In this course, students read about the histories of Pittsburgh far and wide, then they go out in the community and develop, along with the people who maintain and promote local sites, a website that guides users through the city with all of its richness. This course was recently featured by the University's Pittwire, and you can explore the website yourself!
- Making the Documentary is a hands-on class that centers creation and production: Students have been involved in making films such as Chasing Covid and The Shot Felt 'Round the World. Both of these films have proved valuable contributions to the discourse around science in a time when public health conversations have been muddied by disinformation.
- Seminar in Composition: Service Learning, a special section of the University-wide mandatory first-year writing course, offers students the opportunity to perform meaningful service in the community and craft essays about it. Student immerse themselves and learn to write with community partners, adding purpose and passion to a perennial "required course."
- We also foster a number of innovative projects through our Digital Media Lab and Vibrant Media Lab. You can read about these opportunities and more on our new website. Student projects that have emerged from these spaces have found their ways to showcases and to startups alike!
We are extraordinarily proud as a department that, once again, our faculty have won prestigious teaching awards on campus; they recognized by the chancellor for their research and public service as well. For those of you who have taken a course with Teaching Associate Professor Elise Ryan (who regularly teaches Secret Pittsburgh), please join us in congratulating her in particular this year for winning the Tina and David Bellet Teaching Excellence Award! Furthermore, Associate Professor Diana Khoi Nguyen won the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award, and Teaching Assistant Professor Sara Watson won the College of General Studies Teaching Excellence Award—a banner year for us! [link to awards article in this issue]
As we hope you know from experience, what distinguishes our department goes beyond any single course or professor or initiative. It is the quality of attention our faculty bring to each student they teach and mentor. An education in our department is, at its core, a deeply personal one—that is what we intend every day. Learning to read carefully, to write with precision and feeling, to think through complex and competing ideas: all of this is cultivated through sustained relationships: a faculty member who reads your work closely and responds with genuine investment; a mentor who sees your particular strengths and pushes you to develop them further; an advisor who helps you imagine a future you may not yet have pictured for yourself.
I myself am the product of such mentorship, I am proud to say. Like many, I began college as a premed major. After some very unforgettable grades and some very forgettable courses, I was pulled aside by a kind instructor of a lower-level English course who believed I had some different potential than I thought. The path from there to what I do now is surprisingly linear, and filled with support and grace.
Our faculty take this responsibility seriously, and the results speak for themselves. Our graduates—all of you!—go on to do amazing things, in every field imaginable. And when we ask what made the difference, the answer is almost always a person in this department, a professor who took their ideas seriously. No curricular redesign or pedagogical innovation matters as much as a faculty member sitting across from a student and asking the right question at the right moment. We are proud that so many of you carry those moments with you, and we remain committed to creating them for the students who follow in your footsteps. Thank you again for being part of our success. We look forward to thinking through your ideas once again.
—Gayle Rogers