Over two decades ago, when I was an English major, nothing excited me more than this time of year. My professors had each given me two or three prompts for my final papers. I would add up the total number of pages I had to write for all of my courses and would proudly announce that number to my parents when I returned home for the brief Thanksgiving break. They would feign astonishment—50 pages of papers by mid-December, wow!—and I would burrow into a corner of the library and start drafting my essays in notebooks. I’d eventually head over to the computer lab, type them up, print them out, and turn them in. After that, nothing stood between me and winter break, and I felt seriously accomplished.
But there were some real flaws in my experience—flaws that our department here at Pitt has addressed in ways that most other English departments nationally still have not. First and most important: Those essays were read by one single human being (the professor), and I never saw them again. All of that work, the mass of pages I’d been so eager to produce on a topic given to me by the professor, transformed into nothing more than a simple letter grade that appeared on my transcript some weeks later. Then it was on to the next semester, where I’d repeat the entire process.
When we restructured our majors in the English department, and when we launched our new joint Digital Narrative and Interactive Design major with the School of Computing and Information, we thought seriously about what we ask of students. This generation of college student has been creating publicly visible content since they were able to type—most often on social media. The idea that one would write a paper for one professor only, and that its singular goal would be to answer a question asked by that professor, makes little sense to the current student body. Moreover, they want to write for bigger purposes: for professional communication, for curated online presences, for narratives in gaming worlds, for grants and foundations—the list goes on.
Thanks to the hires we have made over the years, we now have the capacities to meet the students where they are, then to lead them farther down new paths they had not yet known existed. Our students have coded novels, produced online poem generators, authored public policy proposals, scripted screenplays, and much, much more. Our majors have jettisoned the old top-down model in which professors were the only consumers and arbiters of student writing. Instead, we seek to empower students to harness their intellectual curiosities in order to solve human problems with their research and writing, whether those problems are manifested in medieval poems or in hashtag-driven commentaries on racial injustice.
Our students bring more to the table—and to classroom discussions—than I did back in college. I’d never seen a newspaper from another area, nor experienced the process of creating any kinds of text other than basic poems and journal entries. I learned how to write the standard college essay, but little more. The question I was asked then, “What are you going to do with an English major?”, was a fair one. We think we have a wide range of answers to that question now, and they are embodied in what are students are doing already, before they graduate. As we continue to grow our department and revise its majors, we’ll always have an eye on this question, because no matter the spheres our students enter after graduation, great research, great writing, and great strategies for synthesizing evidence and conclusions will be vital to all they do.
—Gayle Rogers
Editor's Note: Read Nick Trizzino's feature on exciting new media and digital curricula here.