Pictured from left to right are Craig Morehead, Dana Shiller, Dawn Smith-Sherwood, and Heide Witthöft.
Dawn Smith-Sherwood (professor of Spanish) and Heide Witthöft (associate professor of German), Department of Language, Literature, and Writing, presented at the fifty-seventh annual convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association, hosted by Gannon University (Erie), on March 5–8, 2026, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Smith-Sherwood proposed and chaired the roundtable session “First-Year Experiences: Where Humanists Go to…Thrive,” which, in addition to interventions from Smith-Sherwood and Witthöft, also included those by two English faculty colleagues, Craig Morehead of Elon University (Elon, North Carolina) and Dana Shiller of Washington and Jefferson College (Washington, Pennsylvania).
In Witthöft’s intervention, “Renewing a Passion for Teaching and Collaboration through FLY (First Learning Year) Courses,” she reflected on how teaching first-year experience helped her to renew a passion for teaching and engage with colleagues outside her discipline. Witthöft’s students and colleagues became co-creators of her classroom interactions. She argued that, by leaving programmatic silos, faculty colleagues learn along with their students the value of cross-campus connections.
In Smith-Sherwood’s intervention, “Big Picture, Small Teaching: How James Lang’s Lessons in Learning Brought Me to First-Year Experience,” she reflected on the last 10 years of her professional life in the context of Lang’s Small Teaching (2016) construct, focusing on his concept of inspiration in support of teaching a first-year experience course. Occupying spaces between administrative and academic roles, Smith-Sherwood has readopted a learner’s mind: studying higher education’s big picture while practicing first-year experience small teaching.
Witthöft and Smith-Sherwood, currently serving as director of Liberal Studies and First Learning Year, served as instructors of the inaugural general offering of UNIV 101 in fall 2025.