Beth Newborg is Pitt English through and through—from undergrad through master's through PhD comprehensive exams through a 30-plus year faculty career. A published poet, professional communicator, and women's studies scholar and activist, Newborg began as an adjunct and is now retiring from the position of teaching professor.
But Newborg, as someone whose entire adult life has been steeped in Pitt's Department of English, has boldly gone where few of her colleagues have gone before: Pitt's Swanson School of Engineering.
At the beginning of this century, Newborg developed a first-year writing curriculum for undergraduate engineering students that challenges them to critically explore their majors, invites them practice the writing conventions of their proposed fields, and allows them to meet their writing requirement in a way that approximates the kind of writing working engineers do. For two semesters, freshman engineers write as a way to truly understand what it is they hope to do with their love of math, science, and design. They receive scaffolding and other support from English writing instructors, all while thinking about where they fit into the ever-expanding engineering fields.
As director of the English-Engineering Composition Program (EECP), which includes both Seminar in Composition: Engineering and Engineering communication in a Professional Context, Newborg has collaborated for 20 years with Associate Professor Dan Budny of the School of Engineering (SOE). Together, they have been committed to guiding students into academia and the engineering fields. At the end of their first year, these students work together to write and present conference papers related to sustainability—and gather for an actual conference, with all the posters, catered food, and formalities associated with professional conferences.
Along with Budny, Newborg has shared their pedagogical insights all over the U.S. and abroad in places like Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Where engineering can often be taught from a mostly technical standpoint, they encourage other educators to teach the whole person. For example, one of the papers they presented at an American Association of Engineering Education (ASEE) conference bears the title "It Takes the Whole University to Instruct the Whole Engineer: Narratives of Collaboration."
Newborg's interdisciplinary turn, one which has made a significant difference, came at a time when the School of Engineering was looking hard at its first-year curriculum. Having taught courses like Written Professional Communication, Writing Arguments, and other composition courses—as well as worked both as a Writing Center consultant and outreach director—she knew well the different demands of different writing situations. The curriculum she helped to develop also reflected her experience as a writing consultant for professionals in business, science, and law.
I've known Beth since my years as an adjunct just after completing my MFA at Pitt in the early 1990s. We shared a kind of cool office space on the third floor of the Cathedral, one that actually had stone apertures that allowed us to see and hear the Commons Room down below. In those years, Beth was a leader in demanding equity for adjuncts, as well as a cheerful presence with a fantastic sense of humor. We workshopped poems together, and it's a testament to the versatility of Beth's mind that she can toggle in-between writing poems that appear in national journals like Southern Illinois University's Crab Orchard Review and California State's Ghost Town magazine and developing rubrics that articulate what makes for good technical-professional writing. This is not to say that the worlds of technical writing and poetry writing are on opposite poles, though we generally make that assumption. Whether speaking to a first-year engineering class or training English writing instructors to evaluate student work, Beth reminds us that, if we only let our disciplinary down, we may be surprised at how much overlap there really is between these two writing worlds.
I watched Beth's children, Anna and Jimmy, grow up. She watched my daughter grow up; when my eight-year-old was going through a fashion design phase, Beth became her first and only "customer," commissioning a white satin doll dress patchily stitched together. When I taught Professional Editing in Context for the first time, both Beth and her husband—Pittsburgh attorney John Newborg—contributed to our class's core project, Re: Writing, an e-book full of essays by student editors and experienced professionals about writing and editing that I still use in the course over a decade later. And when Geeta Kothari, director of the Writing Center, asked me to help plan and facilitate our first-ever week-long "boot camp" for doctoral dissertation writers, I was happy to hear that Beth would join me on the project: her institutional savvy and team spirit helped us launch a program that, more than a decade later, lives on in the form of week-long and day-long camps and workshops for graduate students at all stages of their work, with in-person and remote options.
It's difficult to see people who have become so deeply familiar move on from the department, a reminder that I, too, will (eventually) retire. Retirement itself conjures mixed emotions: Who am I if not my job title? How do I know it's September if my inbox isn't flooded with emails from students? But also: Reading without needing to carefully comment in the margins! Experiencing the month of August as just . . . a hot, muggy winding-down of summer! Picking up and taking a trip in the middle of the week!
This latter perk of being retired seems to me to be one that Beth will most enjoy. She's a seasoned traveler known to do what she can to find sunshine in the dead of a Pittsburgh winter. And, at risk of sounding cliché, she's been that sort of sunshine for many of us at Pitt.
—Ellen McGrath Smith
Ellen McGrath Smith is a teaching professor in the Department of English, where she also serves as editor of The Fifth Floor.