There’s not a lot I could say about the pandemic year that hasn’t already been said—and said better than I could say it. It was a difficult year for many reasons, and I don’t simply want to rehearse all of those. Instead, I’d like to focus on why I’m filled with gratitude right now. There are so many people to thank for having helped us through this extraordinary and exceptional year, and I hope that our alumni, our retired and emeritus faculty and staff, and our broader community members might join me in thanking them.
It starts with the office staff, who helped keep everything running even though 526 Cathedral of Learning remained virtual for the entire year. Sarah Baumann, Jesse Daugherty, Kristin Hopkins, Andrea Laurion, Jennifer Ridge, and Emily Woody were the glue of our enterprise and managed a very large department’s novel and varied needs with professionalism and aplomb.
I’m also grateful for the many things our faculty did to keep us feeling like a community that was engaged in a collective effort during the pandemic. Several of those many efforts—too many to name—include the extensive online pedagogical resources developed primarily by our directors of undergraduate studies and program directors. They helped our faculty navigate Canvas, the University’s new learning management system, and Zoom—with which we’re all now familiar—in addition to tools like Panopto, lecture recording and streaming software that enhanced access to course content for students. Our directors and other instructors also held many pedagogy sessions and drop-in virtual office hours to troubleshoot and improve remote teaching for all our colleagues. It took a village to make great online pedagogy a reality, and indeed a village pitched in.
We realized, too, that we had more to learn, and more colleagues who could teach us—including many who have been unable to attend department meetings regularly because they teach at several local universities on contingent contracts. So we started the contingent faculty workshop series, in which we learned about everything from enhanced Zoom methods to using the department’s dedicated SoundCloud channel for teaching. This series trained all of us even more in skills we’ll take with us well beyond the pandemic.
Remote life was only one feature of the pandemic, and the pandemic was only one feature of 2020, bound up with a larger set of issues of which racial injustice was the most salient in American life. And so, in the fall, came the Black Study Intensive from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP). The week-long series of events brought in guest speakers whom a large number of instructors assigned in their courses. Students were able to engage with cutting-edge poets and artists, and to write responses to their work that were then featured online.
This year brought us closer together intellectually that many of us ever expected. We learned new things about one another’s work and classrooms. We had a virtual celebration of all the books published in the past year, against all odds, by our brilliant and industrious colleagues, and we even had simple hangouts because we missed our hallway and “water cooler” encounters. None of us are sure what life will look like when we return to normal, or what “normal” will even look like or resemble. But we know that we’ll find ways to continue our community.
That community extends deeply into our network of alums, including those who came back (virtually) to visit our classrooms, speak on panels, and help our students understand important elements of life after college. Once again, I find myself filled with gratitude. The alumni of Pitt English are—no surprise—spread all around the world. By our best count, there are about 7,000 out there right now. They cover every field, every profession, every state and country one could imagine.
My hope—and one for which I’ll feel even more gratitude, if and when it’s a fulfilled hope—is that we can find more ways to bring our alumni community closer to our department after the pandemic. I’d love for our alums to tell us what they benefited from in our department, to hear where things are with us, and to develop some new relationships that can emerge from our remote experiences into a new mode of being. I’ll be thankful for that day.
—Gayle Rogers