Pitt-Greensburg Adds New Courses for Fall 2022

Pitt-Greensburg has added 13 new courses to its selection of classes available to students in the Fall 2022 semester. Students can expect to see new additions to the Fall 2022 course catalog in education, English literature, history, philosophy, and Spanish.

Dr. Franklin Wilson, assistant vice president of Academic Affairs, said that the new courses coming to campus will focus more on interdisciplinary instruction between students’ selected majors.

“If I create a sociology course, for instance, it’ll be well-received if it’s a course that I can show is [also] useful in political science or history or psychology,” Dr. Wilson said.

One such interdisciplinary course, “Freedom, Liberty, and Democracy,” will be the first ever Honors-only course coming to Pitt-Greensburg. Dr. Wilson will be cooperatively instructing the course with Dr. William Pamerleau, a professor of philosophy.

“Students who take [the course] can use it for a variety of requirements on their Distribution of Credits (DOC),” Dr. Wilson said. “We tried to think of all the possible ways it would plug in.”

When faculty develop new courses, they often expand upon what can be offered in their field of study, but the new interdisciplinary approach is encouraging faculty members to team up when developing their courses.

Christopher Bartley, a professor of music, will be teaching the course “History of Rock and Roll” in Fall 2022 and said he has taught the course for multiple years before under a different name, “History of American Popular Music.” This year, Professor Bartley said the course was renamed to help clarify what he’d present to students.

“The new class is now all about what led to the development of rock, and how rock has influenced decades of music going forward,” Professor Bartley said. “And that allows the other class to become something new, where I can develop some different content there.”

Professor Bartley said he is currently working with Dr. Paul Adams, an associate professor of political science and the chair of the Behavioral Sciences, to develop the course “Music and Social Movements,” which he said will arrive at Pitt-Greensburg in Spring 2023.

“[The course] will combine a political science perspective and a music perspective about how music can help to be a part of trying to enact social change,” Professor Bartley said.

As for “History of Rock and Roll,” Professor Bartley said the course will appear on the course catalog as “MUSIC 801.” He also said it would be redundant for a student to take the course if they have taken “MUSIC 800,” as both courses cover the same subject matter and are worth the same amount of credits. Likewise, students planning on taking any new interdisciplinary courses should examine the credit requirements they fulfill on their DOCs.

Other new interdisciplinary courses include “Digital Humanities” and “Principles of Data Science.” A full list of the new courses coming to Pitt-Greensburg in Fall 2022 can be found online here.