By MARTY LEVINE
The Secret Pittsburgh podcast, started last semester by the English department’s Secret Pittsburgh class under faculty member Elise Lonich Ryan, reveals the greatest number of secrets to the very students who are making it.
The students in this popular class in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, Ryan says, “love Pittsburgh but don’t always get much out of the city or much out of Oakland during their time at Pitt.” The class allows students “to explore this place they call home but haven’t seen much of.”
The Secret Pittsburgh class combines reading with exploring the landscape and communities where local events took place and locally famous people grew up, from August Wilson’s Hill District to the Carrie Blast Furnaces, from Rodef Shalom’s Biblical Botanical Garden to the three rivers. In the earlier years of the class, students created their own guidebook. Now the guidebook is taking the shape of a podcast.
Many of the class’s students did not grow up here, of course, but “even students who are from Pittsburgh and the surrounding regions say they don’t know these places exist, and they didn’t know the levels of their history,” until the class introduced them to it, Ryan notes. “Even the idea of what the steelmaking means to the city … especially for people who are in their early 20s, that is not apparent,” she says.
While Ryan picks the main subjects for student exploration, “how students approach the site, the story they tell,” is their choice.
There is no prerequisite for podcasting skills in the Secret Pittsburgh class. But students are happy to look into these new skills of “writing for the ear,” Ryan says, and editing to layer music in with pieces of interviews and students’ own scripts of narration. “Many of them found it to be challenging, certainly, but also exciting. They realized the creative potential in editing” – with the assistance of Pitt studios and audio media experts at the Center for Teaching and Learning and Hillman Library’s Media Center.
Students were pleased, even proud, to learn everything from storytelling skills to figuring out what kind of microphone to use and how to conduct an audio interview. For each episode — there were 10 in the podcast’s first season — small groups of students teamed up to create stories based on each site, choosing roles as hosts or scholars, interviewers or editors.
One of the benefits of the class, and the gateway to fresh podcast subjects, is how the class lets Ryan and her students develop new relationships with community groups. Ryan is hopeful that in fall 2024, during the next class session, the podcast will explore new Pittsburgh places — and some old places in new ways. “There are broader, more layered histories that we have explored, are exploring, will explore,” she says.
That may include, for instance, Westinghouse Park, its nearby Westinghouse museum under development and the underground tunnels that once led from George Westinghouse‘s mansion to his laboratory, in which he worked with Nikolai Tesla for a time.Divider
“I also think that one of the biggest gains of the medium was the depth of interviews students had with people in the community,” she says of the podcast. “They bring students into contact with people who have done and are doing remarkable things” — including some who have lived part of the history reviewed in the podcast. It is, she says, “one of the biggest wins of this project mode: the podcast extends the world of Secret Pittsburgh.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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