Two English faculty members joined Chemistry Assistant Professor Jennifer Laaser in receiving a 2022 Tina and David Bellet Teaching Excellence Award. Dana Och, teaching professor in Film and Media Studies, and Ellen McGrath Smith, teaching professor in Writing and Composition, were recognized last spring for their contributions to teaching at the University, each receiving a $6,000 stipend funded through the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences by Pitt alumnus David Bellet (Arts & Sciences, 1967) and his wife Tina. Awardees are nominated by their colleagues in the department and complete an application process that includes a full and nuanced teaching dossier as well as letters from former students. Past awardees who are currently on the English department faculty include Geoffrey Glover, Julie Beaulieu, Amy Murray Twyning, Jeff Oaks, and Geeta Kothari.
What follows are interviews with each of the 2022 Bellet Award winners. The first, an interview with Dana Och, was conducted by Fifth Floor Associate Editor Olivia Wyland this past fall. The second, an interview with Ellen McGrath Smith, was conducted by recently retired Teaching Professor Barbara Edelman last spring.
Olivia Wyland: So what do you do here at Pitt? What types of classes do you teach?
Dana Och: I am a teaching professor in the English department and the director of undergraduate studies for Critical Studies in Film and Media. I have been teaching a variety of classes lately. I teach pretty consistently our big online class, which is called Visual Literacy, as well as Television Analysis, which is a “W” course [a writing-intensive course] for film and one of the core courses for the Television and Broadcast Arts certificate.
But historically, I have taught a lot of general education courses like Introduction to Film and Seminar in Composition: Film. I'm also an Academic Foundations professor for First-Year programs, First Approaches to Research, and First Experiences in Research.
But then my actual area is critical studies in politics with a concentration on genre. So I'll teach classes like Film and Politics, Intro to Film Genres, Contemporary Film, Gender and Film . . . a lot of classes.
OW: That is amazing! And such a wide variety of classes. Which one would you say is your favorite class to teach? And why?
DO: Honestly, I've taught here for so long that I go through phases of what is my main class is or what my favorite class is. I "inherited" Television Analysis, and I really do love teaching that. I watch a lot of TV. And I think that television offers, in many ways, a wider variety of opportunities for women and people of color in terms of being able to get a sustained vision out, challenge stereotypes, and break into an industry that famously prefers white men. So I like television because it's more diverse than film tends to be at this point.
But in previous years, I used to love teaching things like Introduction to New Media, and two of my all-time favorite classes I am in charge of are Film Genres, and Gender and Film. I like those because all of my classes are about genre and about gender. To to be able to come in with it in the name allows students to self-select and know that they're going to get a whole course on gender.
OW: For sure. Those all sound like such interesting classes.
DO: Obviously, we don't do film appreciation at Pitt; we do critical studies. Cultural and media studies surround these objects, but I want my students to be engaged, interested, and excited about the stuff that we're working on, even when there are things that are really hard or deliberately unpleasurable. I'm attracted to media like that. I think that the way I approach difficult texts makes it pay off and is enjoyable for students, even when they might not enjoy watching the movie or television show.
OW: That's so great that you're able to lead conversations like. And that is actually my next question. What is your teaching style?
DO: So my teaching style is—I always say I'm chatty. I create a space that's primarily discussion-driven, and I try to have this space where everybody—regardless of their majors, or if they have never taken a film class before in their life—feels like they're on the exact same footing, and I also want it to be a space that values everyone's insights and opinions, whether they're a senior major or a first-year Bio major.
So I'll usually start every class with a Saturday Night Live clip or a music video, something small that allows them to warm up, because the other thing is that I usually teach at nine o'clock in the morning. So I have a lot of people who walk in asleep. I like to show clips, and I bring a lot of energy with me. I perform with energy for my students, so they can feed off of me and rise up in their energy level. And then we'll talk quickly about a video clip and start moving into lecture discussion.
I always walk into class with, like, 15 PowerPoint slides, but I might never even show more than one because, to me, a PowerPoint is just lecture notes that the students can download if need be. But I would rather the students guide the discussion, and then I weave in that material that's in the PowerPoint in a holistic, invisible way. Then, if they go back through later, they can find everything that we talked about.
OW: I love that approach, especially starting out small just to spark conversation. And with conversation, I almost never know where it's going to lead, and that's so exciting to me.
DO: It is! And if they want to go somewhere else, they go somewhere else. I always tell them our class isn't linear, that we'll just come back around in circles and go off on different divergent paths, but then everything's definitely related.
OW: How do you connect teaching to your personal goals? How does teaching reflect who you are?
DO: Whenever I started out my education, I thought that I was going to go into psychiatry, actually. Partially because when I was a child, I was obsessed with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, who are a famous musical duo from the thirties. I watched these old films on television with my grandparents, and there was a movie where Fred Astaire is a psychoanalyst. So I decided that I wanted to be a psychoanalyst. Once I went through undergrad and then into graduate school, I discovered, no, I just really wanted to talk about movies. I came from a family that, strangely I suppose, mediated everything through film and television. Even as a kid, if I was in a fight or if I was being a brat, they would throw movie lines at me like, “No one ever said life was fair, Christina” [from Mommie Dearest]. And so it actually makes sense that I see the world through media representation and media tropes and genres.
If you can even see behind me [gesturing to her office setup behind her], it's all media things: Baby Yoda, Frankenstein, Killer Klowns from Outer Space. This is actually what I spend almost all of my time doing: watching or talking about media. Except if I'm roller skating. And that's the only other time. But, honestly, my love of roller skating is because of an Olivia Newton-John movie called Xanadu, which deeply shaped my idea that roller-skating is the coolest thing that you can do in the history of the world. Thanks to [the late] Olivia Newton-John!
OW: Yeah, I was gonna say I love your Zoom background, by the way. It's so cool to look at. And I also love roller-skating.
DO: Do you know that movie? Xanadu?
OW: I did a mock trial a while back in high school. There was this fictional place called Xanadu, like the Olivia Newton-John movie. I’ve been meaning to watch it since then, so maybe this is my sign.
DO: Okay, I’m gonna warn you is that it's not good. It's terrible, but I don't think that a movie has to be good to be pleasurable. The good, fun parts of it are seared into my brain and bring me joy, even if I can watch the movie now and realize that it is a bit of a mess. But it does star Gene Kelly, from Pittsburgh, and he's old, and he roller-skates in it.
OW: Oh, that's awesome. I definitely will. And going to my next question: Obtaining the Tina and David Bellet Teaching Excellence Award is a prestigious thing to accomplish. What were your first reactions when you learned that you were nominated?
DO: I was very honored. But also, to be frank, the application process can be stressful. So I debated whether I had the time to do the application but then decided that it's such an honor to be nominated that I would find the time to do it.
Yeah, so it's a lot, and that's not even counting all the letters that they have to get. It is an eight-part application, with cover letters,, teaching philosophy, really detailed breakdowns of assignments and examples from your classes and your courses. And then on top of that, they have to get letters from a variety of former students, and that can be people who have graduated and people from different majors. I also teach online courses for the College of General Studies, which includes non-traditional students, returning students who are adults and have other jobs.
OW: And that was actually going to be my next question: One of the award’s criteria is that you're able to communicate subject matter to students of various backgrounds and skill levels. Can that be difficult, or do you like trying to balance between lecturing on what you're focusing on and making sure those lessons in class are conveyed to students?
DO: Pitt doesn’t have a lot of pre-requisites for our classes, so we end up with seniors in the major and then someone who has never taken a class in the program. In general, this is the way that humanities work at Pitt. And that requires a different way of teaching, because we can't assume that there's a common concept that everybody understands. So in all of my classes, I have to make sure that the materials, as I'm working through them, are accessible and rewarding for every level of student.
One of the ways that I try to do this is by being so conversation-based on the first day. I invite students to interrupt me. Stop me. I move fast. Just tell me, and I'll slow down and go through it. But sometimes what I'll do is ask students who are advanced students in the majors to define a concept. That's a teaching technique right there: The students who are explaining the concept are actually learning how to teach other people.
But if nobody wants to do that, then I know that I have to go through quickly and give the background. In my classes, I actually always tell them that I assume that they've actually done the readings because we are in college. I use our lecture discussion to actually fill in the background on ideas. If someone in the class doesn't have that background to understand Laura Mulvey's concept of the male gaze is, I can use class time to give a deeper or thicker understanding of the concept, whereas they just read about one aspect of it in the reading.
OW: It's really interesting to hear how you plan for that.
DO: One of the things I think that often ends up happening, especially in humanities classes, is that students don't realize that the kind of circular discussion-based model is on purpose. And so sometimes, like in teaching evaluations, people say that humanities professors are disorganized, or seem to be teaching "off the top of their heads.” It seems like it's off the top of your head, but trust me, none of your professors are teaching off the top of their head. They have a plan. They know what they're going for. But the question is, what's going to take the most important position? Is it the material? And then we read off of a PowerPoint? Or is it you the students? For me, the students take priority. And then I can work the material through our discussions. But I don't want you to feel as if you are a passive learner. I want you to be an active learner.
OW: My last question for you is, how has winning this award affected your career?
DO: One of the nice things about winning the award was seeing the other people who won the award and hearing about their teaching styles to get an idea of how everyone who won the award this [and the previous] year had student-centered teaching approaches that highly value being inclusive. A lot of times, whenever people talk about inclusion, of course we talk about gender and race. One of the things that can fall by the wayside is socioeconomic class—especially as Pitt itself has moved to having more wealthy students over the past 15 years and is trying right now to increase its working class population. It's really important that we make sure our working class [and first-generation] students feel seen, feel welcome, and feel like they deserve to be here, too. Even if they come, they don't have some of the family knowledge of things about the university.
I'm working class myself. So I just come at it from my own experience, because it ends up making it more comfortable for students if they know they are not the first person who has felt this way. I felt that way, too, that there are pressures on these students that people don't realize. So, seeing how that works, seeing all the winners and how we all do that in different ways, reaffirmed to me that this is something that more people need to do; it needs to be an important part of the way that we think about diversity and inclusion in our classrooms.
That's one of the reasons why my classes are so discussion-based. It highlights that we don't experience media in the same way at all. Of course, we can figure out that that has to do with age, but it also has to do with geography. It has to do with family background. It has to do with religion and class. My teaching gets all of those voices on equal footing in the classroom.
OW: Yeah, all of that is really great to think about.
Is there anything else that you can think of that I should include or just any last thoughts?
DO: I'll be honest, winning the Tina and David Bellet Award is knowing that people actually see what you're doing—including former students and colleagues. I find, a lot of times, that teaching is pushed to the side and that research seems to be the only thing that matters. So it's nice, really amazing, to actually get to hear how what you're doing is affecting students in their path in life, long term.
Olivia Wyland, who served this past year as associate editor for The Fifth Floor as well as being a regular contributor since 2020, graduated this past December with a major in Public and Professional Writing, and minors in History and Writing (nonfiction).
Barbara Edelman: Congratulations on winning the Bellet Award! And thanks for taking the time to reflect on these questions. I’ve worked with your students over the years, either in class or in the Writing Center, and I’ve gotten to see both their enthusiasm for your teaching and some of the ways they’ve learned from you. So I’m excited that you’ve won this award. What does winning the Bellet mean to you?
Ellen M. Smith: Teaching for me has never been easy. Some of that has to do with my hearing disability. Some of it has to do with having been a first-generation college student and frequently grappling with imposter syndrome. After decades of doing this, it's still a challenge, mostly because I'm super-focused on wanting my students to get tangible, measurable value from my courses and from their interactions with me. So my behind-the-scenes experience of teaching feels tense and concerned about getting things right. I change course a lot when I sense things aren't working. Winning the Bellet means that people in my department and across the University see me getting things right at least some of the time.
BE: Considering that teaching is not easy, especially with a 3/3 course load—it’s impressive you can give it such commitment without backing away from other pursuits. Reading your CV kind of blew me away, for the range and depth of teaching, service, conference work, and publications—both scholarly and creative—and for the ways you incorporate diverse interests into your work with students.
EMS: A lot of what I've done has been cumulative, over decades. After I defended my PhD dissertation and went on the job market, I had to make a choice whether to invest most of my time in scholarship/criticism or in creative writing. It was a hard call; I loved both, but I decided on the latter. So, while I occasionally write conference papers related to literature or contribute to a journal or critical collection, it's not central to my work now. Disability Studies work actually came from the creative writing side of things; my growing acquaintance with other disabled poets led to my growing interest in DS. Developing a Seminar in Composition course that centers DS grew out of that, too, and I was fortunate to find a good deal of support for that in our department, which has been actively working to develop a certificate program in DS.
BE: Yes—kudos to all involved in initiating that certificate program. In your work in DS and gender studies, and judging from material you’ve shared for other courses, a commitment to social justice seems to underlie all your teaching. Do you face challenges in introducing politicized issues into the classroom?
EMS: I hope that I create a safe space for a variety of viewpoints and that I emphasize the need to provide evidence to support those viewpoints. At the same time, viewpoints that involve hate or the unnuanced curtailment of others' fundamental rights should not be validated. It's a challenge that is even greater in recent years—with reactionary anti-intellectualism being amplified all over social and other media—but it's important to educate, not indoctrinate, toward progress and equity. Engaging with a variety of texts is one way to keep us grounded in the classroom, so that there's room to look closely and critically at written work, even when we may agree or disagree broadly with the viewpoint. We can look at the choices a writer makes and consider the effects and implications of those choices. And we can think about how representation—in writing and other media—shapes as well as reflects our values and lived experiences. People often simply assume that it reflects those attributes. But it's important for students to recognize that it works in the other direction too, in a kind of feedback loop, because that is where all of us have a role to play that is both empowering and freighted with responsibility.
BE: In your own poetry, too, you engage resonantly with political issues without resorting to an attempt to indoctrinate. I think you succeed in part because your work is both deeply personal and deeply informed. I taught your 2016 collection Nobody’s Jackknife in a Reading Poetry section—so it was an introductory lit class, mostly non-poets, non-majors. I feared the students would find the book too complex, but I underestimated them. They were drawn to the language and found such emotional hooks in the narratives that they were inspired to grapple with the book’s complexity. I’m looking forward to your chapbook coming out from Seven Kitchens Press. Can you say something about the new collection?
EMS: The chapbook, Lie Low, Goaded Lamb, is part of a long-term project of poems based on the first lines of Shakespeare's sonnets. The poems gathered in this chapbook were written during the Trump era, in a kind of "code" that registered the threat of toxic masculinity in the air, both personally and politically. I was distressed, like many people in the world, by the Trump administration’s attack on laws, norms, institutions, and groups of historically marginalized people, but it was often hard to voice this distress in ways that didn't sound like my Twitter or Facebook feeds. So I constructed a form: I write every line of the poem with words that begin with the same letters as those that begin the words of Line 1 of a given sonnet, following the exact word order. Here's one of the shorter poems in this chapbook, working with "If thy soul check thee that I come so near," the opening line from Shakespeare's sonnet #136:
In Trump’s speech, condemnation throbs. Talking is clobbering, sins number
in thousands; secrets, cruelly tipped toward irascible crowds, stand naked.
I try soothing chamomile tea, try ignoring calls, some notifications,
inventing terse statements, cf., “The Truth Is Clear, So No.”
Is this social karma, these toxins infecting (the) country’s sacral nerve?
This exercise was so hard that it forced a degree of invention and distance into the poems that felt fresh and new to me. Luckily, Ron Mohring of the Seven Kitchens Press agreed, and he chose it to be part of the press's Keystone Series.
BE: Congratulations! Your invention of the exercise as a way to approach difficult and, of course, politicized material is fascinating. It’s also very teacherly. How do you feel that your work as a poet and your work as a teacher feed one another?
EMS: The reason I love this job is that my writing and my teaching constantly feed one another, both consciously and unconsciously. My students teach me so much, and that informs my writing. For instance, in my work with Project Camp (formerly Dissertation Boot Camp), we share a lot of ideas and resources for goal-setting and time management, and that in turn puts a fire under me to make time for my work.
BE: I also want to say I’m pleased your work will be included in a Keystone Series, which centers Pennsylvania poets. You grew up in Pittsburgh and write about the city with such texture. You’ve also been active in countless projects for the Pittsburgh literary community. What does it mean to you to work in a city where you have deep roots?
EMS: It means so much! I know that in this profession people expect to relocate, sometimes multiple times. Being a native "yinzer" on the Pitt faculty means that I can bond with students who stayed close to home, of course, and who sometimes feel the need to apologize for that; it also means that I can help those who've come from other places understand the city's quirks and its past. I remember "stinky" Pittsburgh, having come of age just at the moment the steel industry died. Because of my past work as a publicist for the City of Pittsburgh Parks and Recreation department after college, I know something about nearly all of its neighborhoods. And, of course, I live close to most of my very large extended family. I feel tremendously fortunate.
BE: One reason I’m excited about the recognition of the Bellet is that you’ve been such a helpful and supportive colleague. Are there teachers and colleagues who have particularly helped or inspired you?
EMS: Jeff Oaks, who directs the undergraduate Writing program, inspires me always to keep it real and remember that, when we teach Writing, we are teaching the whole person. Professor emeritus Toi Derricotte, with whom I keep in touch, is a constant source of inspiration and support, and what she has done to open up and energize the literary landscape has enabled me to widen my own teaching materials. The Composition program is a rich and supportive community of colleagues, too; they were great midwives to my creation of the Seminar in Composition: Disability Studies course, as was the Writing Institute's Jean Grace.
I have had such amazing teachers every step of the way that to begin naming them would lead to some omissions. As a first-time TA at Pitt, I learned a lot from Joe Harris in Teaching Seminar, who was super-well read not only in pedagogy but in theory. The foundation laid by Dave Bartholomae's work in composition—with an emphasis both on close reading and on academic writing as an "acquired language" none of us comes to naturally—has been invaluable.
In creative writing, I was inspired by [Professor Emeritus] Lynn Emanuel's openness to a range of poetry and poetics. I still remember a workshop in which some students voiced irritation with a particular book of poetry we were reading. Lynn's response was that we could learn as much—if not more—from reading work we disliked as we could from reading beloved texts. That has stayed with me, and I'm grateful to her for instilling in me a sense of openness to poetic styles that I'm not fully onboard with. Just this term, I told my Readings in Contemporary Poetry students that I didn't necessarily love all the books I'd selected for the course and that it was okay if they didn't either, as long as there was a baseline of respect for different poetries. I honestly don't see what the benefit would be in my only choosing work I loved and felt comfortable teaching. At least not in terms of my being with my students in the experience of reading, making meaning, and locating the value in what we read.
In my PhD studies at Duquesne Dr. Linda Kinnahan, my dissertation chair, was definitely a source of inspiration for developing assignments that merged creativity with criticism. She constantly modelled the interdisciplinary study of literature and writing for me. Just this year, she won an award from the MLA prize for a collaborative project that makes the work of modernist poet Mina Loy available on the web. And in my undergraduate years, I was blessed with a mentor at Seton Hill University (back then it was just a humble college). Her name was Dr. Lynn Conroy, and she was the person who told me that I was a poet, that I could be a poet.
And undergraduate poets at Pitt do give us lots of new "poetries" to consider. They are an ongoing source of surprise!
BE: Yes, and insight. That brings me to my last question. You’ve mentioned a few times that you learn from students. That reciprocal learning is certainly one of the joys of teaching. Can you share a few examples of what you’ve learned from students?
EMS: I had a student at Duquesne who was murdered in New York a few years after graduating. His name was Gerry, and he was very punk rock. He was the first to show me what Frost's "The Road Not Taken" was really about—about how we revise our life stories in retrospect to make our often-arbitrary choices carry more significance and purpose than they had at the time. Before that, I tended to just blow through the poem the way most people do. In Gerry's memory, and for the sake of close reading, I continue to burst people's bubbles about that poem!
From my students with disabilities, I have learned about different ways of learning, different ways of communicating, and different ways of teaching. They have been the impetus for my implementing flexibility into teaching in ways that also benefit nondisabled students.
For instance, this past spring there was an undergrad who was singer/writer/performing artist in my Readings in Contemporary Poetry course, which focused on voice in poetry. When I assigned a midterm digital voice exploration, he ran with it and did what he does best—finding beats, adapting published poems to lyrics with "hooks"—in short, reading voice in ways he is best equipped to do that. He's made amazing and sophisticated digital adaptations of work by Natalie Diaz and Sonia Sanchez that I will cherish forever.
And then there are the "difficult students," the ones who ditch class or get writer's block or run us off track in discussions? Those are definitely teachers of teachers. No teacher grows without them!
Teaching Professor Emeritus Barbara Edelman is a poet whose most recent collection, All the Hanging Wrenches, came out this past fall from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Edelman will give an in-person and livestreamed reading to launch the book on January 14, 2023, at Pittsburgh's White Whale Bookstore.
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