My first memory of Laura Dice: Many years ago, in the early 1990s, when Pitt English administered composition placement essays for incoming Pitt students, we were a group of faculty and grad students gathered in the old 501CL to read stacks of handwritten responses to the prompt given. These readings happened in the summer months, so we tended go a little overboard in catching up and enjoying one another's company. And, okay, sometimes being silly, as when my colleague Jeff joked that he wanted to ask all the young writers who used “as a human being” as an introductory phrase what they felt about the issue “as a camel.” Good times, and we got paid! Laura, also a grad student then—completing her PhD in Critical and Cultural Studies—was in charge of the placement readings and, as she always did when she ran the sessions, kept us on task without being a jerk. I don’t know how she did it, since we were being borderline jerks. Once we got down to business, of course, we were diligent in figuring out from handwritten essays which Composition course was the best fit for our students.
Laura has always been devoted to Composition. Her MA, also earned at Pitt, focused on Composition, and her teaching over the nearly three decades she has been with us has been Composition-centered. She believes in its important role in a liberal education—a belief she took with her when she moved over to Thackeray in 2001 to become assistant dean and director of First-Year Programs for the Dietrich School. With several years of teaching and academic advising to her credit, she played a major role in creating a “small liberal arts school” feel for new students attending a large, urban research university. From the formation of academic communities, in which groups of new students take up to three courses together, to the development of the one-credit Introduction to the Arts and Sciences, which helps students make the transition to university life with the City of Pittsburgh as its campus, Laura set the foundation for a first-year experience that has proven valuable for student retention and success.
It’s been a ton of work for Laura over there. I know, because I worked with her in developing one of the early First-Year Seminars. Some of these seminars fold the one-credit Introduction to the Arts and Sciences into a customized Seminar in Composition course. Laura welcomed my plan to teach a Literary Pittsburgh Composition course as a First-Year Seminar. In the seminars, we supplemented our course materials with activities designed to engage students not only with the content but with Pittsburgh and its neighborhoods. In Literary Pittsburgh, we read August Wilson, then gathered for a soul food dinner followed by a presentation by Associate Professor of History Laurence Glasco, whose depth of knowledge about Wilson and the Hill District where he set so many of his plays enhanced our understanding of both the play Jitney and the city we lived in. We went to poetry readings at the City of Asylum on the North Shore. All of these outside-the-classroom experiences brought me closer to my students, taking me, as a teacher, out of my comfort zone behind the lectern. And they presented logistical challenges that Laura and her staff, particularly Russ Maiers, longtime assistant director of First-Year Programs, made feasible. Though I’d often taught freshmen before this, teaching in this program reminded me how vulnerable yet open to new learning a first-year student is. Laura’s work as associate dean and director of First-Year Programs shows that she took that as a premise for building a program that simultaneously nurtured and challenged these students.
Laura introduced the idea of a “common text” that first-year students read before beginning their Pitt undergraduate studies. Even when I wasn’t teaching within First-Year Programs, it wasn't uncommon for me to read some of my students’ takeaways from these common texts in the essays they wrote in my classes. For a time, that book was Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (Penguin Random House, 2003), a speculative novel set in a post-plague world that piques the interest of those in STEM as well as those in the humanities (I’m sorry to admit that, though I may have promised Laura at one point to read it, I haven’t yet). The common text is just another way of creating community among minds ready to take learning to the next level. This has been Laura’s core focus since she entered deandom, and it has produced lasting dividends.
First-Year Programs has been instrumental in giving students the opportunity to take on teaching-assistant and research positions early in their undergraduate careers instead of waiting until the last years of their studies to build their resumes and forge mentoring relationships with faculty. Before Laura’s time, for instance, the idea of undergraduate teaching assistants in the classroom was far less common. Now, in nearly every course I teach, I am able to have students who have formerly taken my course assist me; they don’t do what graduate teaching assistants do because they aren’t paid, but they work with me to determine how they can best serve as liaisons between me and my class members. I’ve benefitted tremendously from the contributions of my undergraduate assistants and have mentored many of them beyond graduation. I know a lot of people, including Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of English John Twyning, have been involved in making these opportunities for undergrads happen, but Laura is the one who first comes to mind because it was when I taught my first First-Year Seminar that I caught the UTA bug. Teaching assistants were built into the seminar's inital template.
The First-Year Programs that Laura directed also introduced research assistant opportunities for new students, an initiative that has blossomed into the Office of Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (OUR), which matches students with faculty on longer projects and provides resources for students on research methodology, resume writing, and other skills that help them to apply their learning in innovative and professional ways.
While choreographing all of this, Laura, an expert on science and speculative fiction, has developed and taught First-Year Seminars of her own. The course titles are tantalizing: Science Fiction and Mythology; Science Fiction/Science Fact; Humans and the Apocalypse; Science Fiction and Religion; and Robots, Androids, and Us. This fusion between the humanities and the sciences is on-brand for Laura. When I’ve seen her heading across campus, she’s always looked busy, because she was, though she's never withheld her hearty sense of humor, even in passing. Sure, we could joke about freshman boilerplate phrases but only if we went on to take their writing—and their lives—seriously. As Laura did.
ˆ—Ellen McGrath Smith