By SHANNON O. WELLS

Encompassing disciplines from biological sciences and history to neuroscience and religious studies, the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences’ new Seminar in Composition Faculty Fellows Program applies a range of lenses through which first-year Pitt students can explore their relationship with writing and language.

At the same time, it provides opportunities for participating faculty to broaden their own experience and share areas of academic expertise through novel directions and approaches.

“These are some of our strongest teachers,” noted Jennifer Keating, teaching professor in the Department of English. “These are faculty who are very committed to undergraduate studies in their own departments and continuing to support students in that trajectory (and) looking for ways to continue to develop their own skill set professionally.

“The faculty,” she added, “are invested in helping students empower through strong command of language as critical readers as well as writers.”

Seminar in Composition Faculty Fellows was created in fall 2024 to augment Pitt’s nationally recognized Seminar in Composition program — required for most first-year students — as an avenue for students to “navigate complex themes in reading materials” and express themselves through words and language.

Some examples include:

Ellen Kelsey’s course on storytelling and narratives in science, focusing on Nobel Prize winners and the complexity of failure and achievement in those storylines.

Stephanie Nygaard teaching on neuroscience and mainstream media. “So, thinking about the ways in which the narratives associated with different features of neuroscience can be examined, analyzed and explored through this composition course,” Keating said.

A course taught by Ana Sekulić, teaching assistant professor in the Department of History, focuses on nature and historical relationships to nature and another history faculty member is focusing on storylines regarding the grand narrative of World War II, Keating noted.

With the goal of increasing Seminar in Composition’s disciplinary diversity, faculty fellows from multiple departments — informed by their own training and keyed to an engaging theme — design and teach courses for student writers. All sections of Seminar in Composition are expected to share the four learning goals, which are considered essential for student success at the University level. The goals are to:

Engage in composing as a creative, disciplined form of critical inquiry.

Compose thoughtfully crafted essays that position your ideas among other views.

Compose with precision, nuance and awareness of formal conventions.

Revise your writing by rethinking the assumptions, aims and effects of prior drafts.

Fueled by a deep pool of faculty members who Keating described as “really passionate about their discipline areas,” she said the perspectives and framings of the first-year classes provide students an “access point to sensibilities associated with the discipline.” Faculty fellows expose students to certain features of the discipline in a way that’s “expedient” to students meeting their first-year educational requirements.

“It also (provides a sense of) community in regard to teaching practices, to complement the relationships they have in their department,” she said of participating faculty. “I think that’s been attractive to some of these faculty, to learn about how people think across the disciplines and to have a shared enterprise where they can iteratively design a course, have a little bit of support to do so, but also to potentially have a much smaller class.

“I think a lot of the faculty enjoy that, especially coming from some of our STEM fields, where they might teach large lecture courses. This offers an intimate relationship with undergraduates that they really seem to relish professionally.”

‘Multidisciplinary exposure’

Keating, a writing in the disciplines specialist in the Dietrich School’s Institute for Writing Excellence, said the program builds on the English department’s success record in building specific seminar and composition course designs for entities like the Swanson School of Engineering. It took shape “very, very quickly.”

To further enhance the Dietrich School’s undergraduate experience, Hannah Johnson, associate dean for research and faculty recruitment, and Dietrich School Dean Adam Leibovich explored the feasibility of working with faculty outside the English department on Seminar and Composition designs that met its learning goals and cadre of courses.

In spring 2025, Leibovich told the Dietrich School & CGS Showcase newsletter that the program “reinforces our school-wide commitment to undergraduate teaching and learning.” He called the approach a “new and creative way of teaching robust writing skills while offering students an opportunity for multidisciplinary exposure.

“In the years to come, we look forward to expanding the program to include Faculty Fellows from even more departments and disciplines so that a growing number of our students can learn the essentials of composition while focusing on subjects they may want to major in, minor in, or just explore more fully.”

With the Department of English offering about 180 sections of Seminar Composition each year, Keating said, “you can imagine the labor involved in ensuring that we have faculty who are ready to teach this course — one of the very, very few courses required by all of our undergraduate students — with the continued eye toward building out the quality of educational experiences that our undergraduates can have.”

Seminar in Composition, she added, “really is the introduction to the student’s wayfinding through their undergraduate studies.

“Identifying ways for students to be exposed to ways of thinking, ways of communicating and writing in disciplines, in addition to English, is something that was, I think, increasingly attractive to the dean’s office.”

Starting with the engineering school, the Seminar in Composition team “stood up a working committee with faculty from the English Department,” Keating said.

The original eight fellows started teaching their first courses in fall term 2025 are:

Brock Bahler, Religious Studies

Ellen Kelsey, Biological Sciences

Bridget Keown, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies

Vipin Anantha Krishna, History

Michelle Morgan, Chemistry

Stephanie Nygard, Neuroscience

Lucas Riddle, German

Ana Sekulić, History

Bahler, who has been on leave, will teach his first SC sections in fall 2026.

The most recent faculty selected for the Seminar in Composition Faculty Fellowship include:

Gretchen Bender, History of Art and Architecture (HAA)

Joshua Ellenbogen, HAA

Bill Price, Linguistics 

Eugene Wagner, Chemistry

These faculty will prepare for teaching Seminar in Composition this spring and summer and offer their first Seminar in Composition courses in fall 2026.

Open for exploration

Seven of Seminar in Composition Faculty Fellows courses offered in fall 2026 will be repeated the following spring.

“So it’s 13 sections of this disciplinary perspective across 180 sections campus-wide,” Keating said.

The program may be too new to have much useful data or feedback on students’ experiences. However, she anticipates advisors becoming more skilled “in describing the affordances of these classes.”

With more courses on offer in the coming years — including another four fellows coming in, “which means we’ll have 12 fellows teaching next academic year” — that would provide, “between 20 and 24 sections next academic year, with different sections of Seminar in Composition,” she said. “Once we have that type of critical number of offerings, I anticipate … students gravitating toward these versions of the class that allow them to explore a theme that they’re interested in.”

For instance, some non-traditional seminar composition offerings focus on film and education. “We have a little bit of experience in identifying different ways for students to explore interests that are not necessarily going to directly translate into a major, for example,” she said.

The sheer variety creates a strong selling point for new students.

“You can imagine the ways in which incoming first-year students, transfer students might see a theme or subject that’s interesting to them,” she said. “Perhaps it’ll open up a pathway into that discipline as a potential major or minor, perhaps not, but it offers the students a little bit of a framing of what they can expect going into that.”

Noting that it’s too early in the program to gauge its success “in a pithy way,” Keating said she anticipates that something is being created that’s attractive to students while ensuring that “we are getting this skill-development opportunity for any student matriculating in these courses.

“They have the same learning goals across all sections to ensure consistency and stability in the student skill-building for wayfinding through the rest of their undergraduate studies.”

In selling and assessing the program, Keating prefers the under promise-and-overdeliver approach.

“It’s modest program. It’s a small program,” she said. I think it will have an impact, but it’s going to take a little while for us to figure out what that impact is.”

Shannon Wells is a University Times reporter. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.

 

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