Post on 10-Mar-2016
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Teaching Digital Writing
The Subject Centre and me
Prizewinning Student Essay
Connecting Teaching and Research
In Conversation with Ben Knights andPhilip Martin
The Good of Criticism
English Subject Centrecelebrates 10 years
ISSN 2040-6754
The Magazine of the English Subject Centre September 2010 • Issue 4
2000 – 2010
WordPlay is published twice a year by the English Subject Centre, part of the Subject Network of the Higher Education
Academy. The English Subject Centre provides many different kinds of help to lecturers in English literature, Creative
Writing and English language. Details of all of our activities are available on our website www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Inside WordPlay you will fi nd articles on a wide range of English-related topics as well as updates on English Subject Centre
work, important developments in the discipline and across higher education. The next issue will appear in April 2011.
We welcome contributions. If you would like to submit an article (of between 300 and 2,500 words), propose a book
or software review (perhaps a textbook review by one of your students) or respond in a letter to an article published in
WordPlay, please contact the editor, Nicole King (nicole.king@rhul.ac.uk).
Views expressed in WordPlay are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the
English Subject Centre.
Website links are active at the time of going to press.
You can keep in touch with the English Subject Centre by subscribing to our e-mail list, www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/english-heacademy.html, coming to our workshops and other events or exploring our website. WordPlay is distributed
to English, Creative Writing and English language departments across the UK and is also available online at
www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/wordplay. If you would like extra copies, please e-mail esc@rhul.ac.uk
The English Subject Centre
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham TW20 0EX
T 01784 443221
F 01784 470684
E esc@rhul.ac.uk
www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
The English Subject Centre Staff
Jane Gawthrope Manager
Jonathan Gibson Academic Co-ordinator
Nicole King Academic Co-ordinator
Ben Knights Director
Brett Lucas Website Developer and
Learning Technologist
Rebecca Price Administrator
Candice Satchwell Liaison Offi cer for HE in FE
Carolyne Wishart Administrative Assistant
Design: John Gittins
WordPlay
Issue 4 • September 2010
ISSN 2040-6754
Recycle when you have fi nished with this publication please pass it on to a colleague or student or recycle it appropriately.
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 01
Starters
02 Welcome
03 Events Calendar
04 News
06 IT Works!
Features
10 In Conversation with Ben Knights and Philip Martin
18 The Good of Criticism The value of literary studies
22 Digital Writing and PedagogyHow do we teach, what do we teach?
26 Making connections: between and beyond teaching and research
Creative Pedagogies
28 The Subject Centre and me
30 A Tale of Two Projects: using technology to change teaching practice
32 A year in the life of Ms E-Mentor
34 English and Creative Writing Student Numbers 2004/05 – 2008/09
Student Perspective
38 Student Competition
Book Reviews
44 Reading Science Fiction
45 The Poetry Toolkit
46 Stage on Screen DVDs
Endnotes
50 Desert Island Texts
52 The Last Word
10 22 3018
02 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
WelcomeNicole King
Anniversary edition
We are celebrating 10 years of the Subject
Centre with this issue and in one way or
another our articles are balanced between
looking back and thinking ahead. Despite
the current uncertain times we feel it is
important to celebrate and capture some
of the stellar work that the English and
Creative Writing subject community has
done around teaching and learning over the decade.
Throughout this issue you will fi nd short 10th anniversary refl ections,
from colleagues who have worked with the Subject Centre from its
earliest days or discovered us more recently. These are gathered
under the heading of ‘The Subject Centre and me.’ We are equally
embarrassed and delighted at the number of responses we have
received and many more can be found in the ‘About Us’ section of
the website, by navigating to the 10th Anniversary page.
You will also notice a new-look ‘IT Works!’ column. With seven years
of writing this column under his belt, for this special issue Brett Lucas
has chosen some of his favourite bits of technology and programmes
which are essential for the subject community. He also bravely
anticipates the technologies and applications that will impact our
teaching, our students’ learning, and on which we will become reliant
in the coming months and years.
The Interview features the Subject Centre’s current and former
Directors, Ben Knights and Philip Martin (now Sheffi eld Hallam
University). Together they refl ect on their own teaching and learning
experiences and ponder what challenges lie ahead for the subject and
for the Humanities in general. If you are curious about the early years of
the Subject Centre and partial to opinionated and erudite exchanges
on teaching in higher education turn immediately to page 10.
Simon Dentith, (University of Reading) continues in a refl ective mode
in an article that reports on a conference he organised last spring,
‘The Good of Criticism: the value of literary studies’. Simon asks what
rejoinder is available to us in English studies when it was always and
remains the case that, ‘the humanities are cast as a supplement to
the more essential business of earning a living.’ Among other points
made he argues that it is ‘a permanent obligation’ for us, as a subject,
to make clear what it is we do, ‘given the changing social and cultural
contexts in which we work.’
Advanced PhD student Matt Hayler explores some of the knotty
theoretical issues attached to teaching digital writing which require
us to think deeply about what makes a book a book. And Alice
Bennett, a ‘newly minted PhD’, writes about the ‘overlapping, and
tricky to reconcile connections’ between an individual’s research and
teaching identities, which are all the trickier for early career lecturers
who often take up contract posts with particularly limited roles (e.g.
teaching only).
The undergraduate student experience is captured with great verve and
creativity in two essays written by Phoebe Bown (University of Glasgow)
and Lara Clayton (Blackpool and The Fylde College) who are the winner
and runner-up respectively of our 2010 Student Competition.
Phoebe and Lara address the notion that they have chosen a ‘soft-
option’ degree and answer the question ‘what is diffi cult about English
Studies or Creative Writing?’
Survey Results
Over the past few months we asked WordPlay readers to participate
in a survey to help us tailor the magazine more closely to your needs
(Is WordPlay what you want?). 83% of respondents appreciate and
see as ‘very worthwhile’ our feature length articles while 64% made
changes to how they teach or otherwise interact with students as a
result of something they read (or possibly wrote) in WordPlay. Here
are three indicative responses:
‘The recent summary of the students’ responses to
undergraduate English has informed curriculum design
at Levels 4 and 5, and our own research into the student
experience. It was good to see it done on a large scale.’
‘It was refreshing to see an article that encouraged effective
pedagogical use of sources found on You Tube.’
‘The recent article about genetic criticism has made me
think about how to involve manuscript analyses in classes
and lectures.’
We were also pleased to learn about ways that readers were inspired
to try new things with their students. Often such experiments involve
an aspect of e-learning. One reader said they were ‘inspired to
develop an e-learning package for teaching poetry in part thanks to a
couple of excellent articles in the Newsletter.’
Survey comments were not without criticism and you urged us to
highlight the fact that WordPlay can be read online, despite the fact
that you voted overwhelmingly to maintain the magazine in print too.
So, please note: every issue of WordPlay, as well as it’s predecessor
The English Subject Centre Newsletter is available as read (or
download) in PDF format or it can be read on our website in HTML
format (great for clicking on links) or in the new e-reader format. We
were also politely informed that we do not run enough articles about
teaching English language or address issues to do with teaching and
supervising postgraduate students. We would welcome articles on
both topics for future issues. The prize for doing the survey goes to
Jess Moriarty (University of Brighton) and thank you to everyone else
who took the time to send us your thoughts. The prize for simply
making us feel wonderful goes to the respondent who captured our
journalistic ambition in a nutshell when they wrote: ‘I enjoy reading
WordPlay: it makes me feel part of a larger community of scholars
passionate about important academic issues which are at stake in the
teaching of English today.’
Nicole King
Editor
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 03
Events Calendar Autumn/Winter 2010-2011For further details about any of these mainly free events please visit our website www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events
English Subject Centre
Subject Centre's 10th Anniversary Celebration17 September 2010, King's College, London
The English Subject Centre is 10 years old this year. To mark our anniversary we are inviting the community to join us at this informal celebration. The evening will include a re-launch of the 'Teaching the New English' book series which the Subject Centre edits for Palgrave Macmillan and a panel discussion on the theme of 'What will English and Creative Writing teaching look like in ten years time?' Do come and join us!
A Study Day on the Politics of Teaching Literature and the Teaching of Political Literature24 September 2010, University of Brighton
What relevance do the arguments that were once so fi erce in literature and cultural studies have in the current climate for academics and students? As educational policy moves towards the teaching of skill sets and research is required to have social 'impact', what are the politics of teaching literature? And how should the curriculum deal with political texts? Literature tutors, educationalists, policy makers, and students are all invited to attend.
Teaching English Literature and Creative Writing: A Workshop for Early Career Lecturers19-20 November 2010, King's College, London
Have you recently begun your fi rst full-time post? Do you teach Literature or Creative Writing? Would you like to discuss and develop your teaching with your peers in English Studies? If the answer is ‘yes’ to these questions, then this two-day event, aimed at new full-time teaching staff with less than two years experience, is for you. The event will also be useful to experienced staff embarking upon their fi rst permanent post.
Teaching Adaptations1 December 2010, The Higher Education Academy, York
Film and television adaptations of literary and other texts continue to prove a highly popular and expanding area of study for undergraduate students, both in the context of literature and fi lm and media studies programmes. An increasing number of modules are dedicated to the specialist study of adaptations, while adaptations also act as valuable teaching aids in the context of period or author-based modules. As an interdisciplinary fi eld of study, adaptations present specifi c challenges and rewards; this study day aims to explore emerging and innovative pedagogic practice in this fi eld.
External Examining in the Humanities13 February 2011, University of Sheffi eld
The object of this one-day networking event is to bring together experienced external examiners and colleagues who are undertaking external examining for the fi rst time. We are working on the principle that external examining is an important and highly valued process, but that its importance is by no means fully captured in the contemporary public rhetorics surrounding standards. Rather, external examining (like all assessment) is a form of dialogue, here one carried on between institutions and programmes.
04 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
News
Good Practice Guide to Online Discussion
This new Good Practice Guide provides a long overdue introduction to the use of one
of the most widely available and easy to use elearning tools – the discussion board.
The Guide provides a wealth of practical advice about how to start using discussion
boards effectively in the higher education and further education contexts. Advice
is given on how to design meaningful tasks, how to moderate the boards to ensure
smooth and effective communication between students. Solutions to the question of
whether and how to assess contributions gets a chapter of its own. The fi nal chapter
deals specifi cally with the use of discussion boards in a Creative Writing context.
The guide will inspire and encourage both you and your department to get involved
in using discussion boards to enrich the student experience.
Available in print from esc@rhul.ac.uk or online at http://tinyurl.com/3y6qeh3
Good Practice Guide to Work-Related Learning in English Studies
This Guide is intended to help anyone introducing, or expanding, work-related learning
in an English degree. It discusses the benefi ts of work-related learning and gives
plenty of practical advice about the costs, collaborating with employers and coping
with assessment. Case-studies sharing the ideas and experiences of those who have
introduced work-related learning into their curricula are also included.
Available in print from esc@rhul.ac.uk or online at http://tinyurl.com/3y6qeh3
Call for PapersLanguage and Literature Special Issue on Stylistics and Pedagogical Research
Language and Literature is known for publishing research on pedagogical
applications of stylistics. Together with Dr Richard Steadman-Jones (University of
Sheffi eld), the English Subject Centre is editing a special issue focussing on the use
of stylistic methods in researching learning and teaching. If you are interested in
submitting a short proposal (deadline 24th September 2010) please go to
http://tinyurl.com/3a3fxqd
NEWS NEWS NEWS NEWS
New Publications
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 05
News
Funding Opportunities
Bringing the Outside In:case studies in environmental engagement
The English Subject Centre is
launching a call for case studies
and a student competition to
encourage students and lecturers
to engage with the environment
beyond the classroom. In order to
enrich both academic learning and
environmental awareness, we want
to motivate staff and students who
teach and learn primarily indoors
to go out and experience the
places which form the context for
the subject of study. So if you are
a humanities lecturer who takes
students out of the classroom and
might consider writing a paid-
for case study, or a humanities
student whose learning has been
inspired by a visit somewhere off-
campus, read more on the ‘Funding
Opportunities’ web page.
http://tinyurl.com/33yszd4
New on the English Subject Centre websiteResource area on Community Engagement
These new pages celebrate and explore some of the ways in which ‘English’
as a subject relates to and works with communities of readers and writers
beyond higher education. The area brings together all the existing resources
throughout the site and contains many new ideas about how your students
can become engaged in work in the wider community. There is also a useful
reference area for additional reading.
Curriculum Area profi les teaching of Victorian Literature
As part of our expanding Curriculum Area, we have just added a set of pages
on teaching Victorian narrative. These pages refl ect on some of the challenges
of teaching Victorian literature and foreground the resources available to
teachers on this site, as well as providing selected links to external sites.
Prison Reading Group
Detail from: 'The Railway Station' by William Powell Frith, RA courtesy of Royal Holloway University of London
06 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
IT Works!
Brett Lucas is the Website Developer and Learning Technologist at the English Subject Centre.
Play all kinds of media without all the hassle
The VLC player is an absolute must on any computer. It is an open-source (i.e. the software and code are freely available) media player that plays DVDs, Audio CDs, DivX movies, in fact, just about any odd, strange or non-compliant video fi le you throw at it! No more worrying about whether a fi le will play or whether you have the right software or code.
Good for: playing all the strange and weird media fi les that no other software seems to like. PC and Mac agnostic.
www.videolan.org/vlc/
Look after your health
We know that long periods of time spent on your computer without taking regular breaks can have serious long-term health repercussions. It is important to relieve your muscles when making repetitive movements when working on laptops or desktop PCs. Stretch Break is a great piece of software that can be programmed to appear on your screen at a predefi ned interval inviting you to take a stretch break. The software contains a series of animated stretch exercises for you to follow. It costs £28.00 (there's a 10-day trial – Windows only)
Good for: saving your wrists from RSI and your vertebrae from collapsing!
www.paratec.com/homepc.htm
Encourage student-centred learning
If you are looking for a web-based collaboration tool for student groups, projects or teams, then you can't beat the ease-of-use of the free online Wiki – PBworks. Use Wikis much as you do a website with easily editable pages, create annotated texts in groups, class or course glossaries, project websites and much more.
Blogs can be used to encourage student refl ection, provide a record of research progress or insights.They are widely used by students, refl ecting on their course content, and academics on their research and/or teaching and personal interests. WordPress can be a blog or a complete publishing platform and there are lots of templates and add-ons to customize it to suit your exact needs.
These two products are leaders in their fi eld and offer free hosted solutions.
Good for: Getting content onto the web very quickly without the need for techies, encouraging refl ection and fostering collaboration.
http://wordpress.org/http://pbworks.com/
In this anniversary issue I look back over past IT Works and select
seven software tools that I can't do without! Then I do some crystal ball
gazing at the next generation of software, apps and technologies that
may just make teaching a lot more fl exible and fun!
IT Works!
Promote group discussion in a novel way
Voicethread is a nifty web-based tool that allows you to post an image, a document or a video into a shared space where other invited users (e.g. your students) can then come and comment on it using a variety of media. e.g audio, video or text. It's a great way to promote discussion across a variety of media to suit individual tastes.
Good for: Running a multimode debate or discussion around a text image, video or idea.
http://voicethread.com/
Save on time and travel with online meetings
Skype one of the pioneers of internet telephony, is a cheap and easy way to communicate with students, research colleagues or project partners at a distance. It is simple to organise one-to-one or group conference calls and the quality is usually very good. If you are looking for a more comprehensive videoconferencing tool try DimDim or BigBlueButton.
Good for: Avoiding the need to travel across the country for a meeting or providing 'offi ce hours' for those students who can't access the campus easily at certain times.
www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/homewww.bigbluebutton.org/homewww.dimdim.com/
Communicate with students in a less formal way
Audacity allows you to record then edit an audio fi le of your voice. This can then be uploaded to your VLE which can be useful when you want to communicate with your students remotely but do not feel that text would suffi ce, or you have a lot to say. English lecturers are also using Audacity to create mini-lectures, provide audio feedback for classes or individuals on assessed work and for providing audio course introductions on external facing websites.
Good for: easily accessible method of broadcasting information in the era of the mobile music player.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 07
Share your bookmarks with students and colleagues
Delicious is a social bookmarking tool. With a small browser app you can save all your favourite websites and connect your own tags to them. Your students could also tag sites into a joint account. The tags or sites can then be shared with others to create a dynamic collection of links.
Good for: keeping track of all your bookmarks from any computer and developing a collection of sites for your VLE course.
http://delicious.com/
Streamline your social networks...
Love them or hate them social networks have taken the world by storm. Many course teams are already using Facebook to connect with incoming freshers, others for group work. Microblogging with Twitter has also come of age recently. Set up a feed to inform your students of news and updates to courses or timetables, set tasks for students to focus on topics (in 140 words), post questions in large lectures then display the twitter feed of their responses on the screen. There are lots more examples online. Try this one for a start: http://bit.ly/WtaV. TweetDeck is a smart desktop application that enables you to simultaneously view, search and post to and from your Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Good for: Quick ways to communicate with students through informal networks. Saves having to login to multiple websites and enables you to feel the pulse of the internet quickly!
www.tweetdeck.com/www.twitter.com
And for some crystal ball gazing...
More
08 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
It Works!
Track all your interests on the realtime web
Personal dashboards or startpages like iGoogle Netvibes or Microsoft Live are the best way to see at a glance what is going on around the internet on the subjects of your choice. You can bring together all of your favourite newspapers, blogs, weather, email, photos, social networks, RSS feeds into one place..then you can share anything from it with your students or friends.
Good for: Bringing all your information and communication together and not having to visit multiple pages when you logon.
www.netvibes.com/enwww.google.com/ig
Access course materials on the move
The next few years are going to see the exponential growth of new access mechanisms for course materials online. Smartphones and Tablet PCs will be linked to VLEs enabling students to work from anywhere. Course readers will be created by educators from multiple sources and downloaded to tablet or e-reading devices and students will be able to annotate texts and store and/or share their notes. The enhanced access potential that these devices provide open a wealth of new teaching possibilities.
Organize and share your research with new audiences...
There's been quite a buzz around this tool which basically connects your research outputs to a growing social network of like-minded researchers from around the world. There's a desktop and web-based component to the software which organizes your research paper collection and citations, along with a bibliography generating tool. You can then access your library anywhere, share documents in groups and much more. The social networking aspect of the program means you can connect easily with other like-minded researchers.
Good for: Generating a conversation around your research. Connecting with colleagues who share your interests and checking out the hot-new topics!
www.mendeley.com/
Create and share your teaching resources
I've introduced you to the HumBox collection of freely available teaching resources which offers a wide variety of inspirational material for educators and students alike. Collections such as these are growing nationally and worldwide and enable both educators and students to access high-quality learning materials for teaching ideas, reworking to suit your needs etc. Alongside these great developments have been a series of free authoring tools that enable educators to package their learning materials into cohesive units. Three UK ones which are growing in popularity are LOC, GLO Maker & Xerte.
Good for: Creating professional online learning experiences without sophisticated technical knowledge
http://loc.llas.ac.uk/www.glomaker.org/www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/
Access and manage all your notes
Do you have random notes spread around pieces of paper, notebooks, diaries and bookmarks? Evernote helps you organise information from multiple sources in one central web-based location. Imagine it as a place where you store sticky notes with all the things you want to do, your favourite weblinks, documents a quick cameraphone image of a book you like all categorised the way you like (by subject, date, tags etc.). There is a nifty web-clipping service too that works through a browser plugin. Built-in OCR software means that text in images is also searchable across your notes. There is a free version but if your fi le sizes start to grow they have paid for editions.
Good for: Managing all the bits and pieces we collect, notice, need to do ... in one place
www.evernote.com/
And fi nally ...
Teaching the New EnglishAn invaluable series for new and more experienced teachers alike
Teaching the New English is an innovative series concerned with teaching English at degree level in the UK and elsewhere. The series considers new and developing areas of the curriculum as well as more traditional areas that are reforming in new contexts. It is grounded in an intellectual and theoretical concept of the curriculum, but is also concerned with the practicalities of teaching in today’s higher education classrooms.
Published in association with the English Subject Centre | Series editor: Ben Knights
978-0-230-52074-5
FORTHCOMING
978-0-230-00348-4
NEW
978-0-230-53781-1 978-0-230-20233-7 978-0-230-22485-8
PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED
978-0-230-01937-9 978-1-4039-9476-9 978-1-4039-8827-0
Save £5 on all paperback titles already published in the Teaching the New English series (RRP £18.99)Just use the code WTEACH10a when you order online at www.palgrave.com
978-1-4039-4930-1 978-1-4039-4495-5 978-1-4039-4493-1
10 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Features
Professor Philip Martin was the fi rst person in his family to go
to university and describes his entry into the profession as ‘an
accident.’ In contrast, Professor Ben Knights describes himself as
a ‘cradle Leavisite,’ having grown up, as it were, with University
English as his father was a professor. While both Martin and
Knights had other ambitions before and during university (for
Martin it was art and for Knights it was history) each has devoted
their working lives to higher education and are passionate
advocates of English and the Humanities. Their paths literally
converge at the Subject Centre. As former and current Directors
of the English Subject Centre respectively, it was my pleasure to
interview them together for this anniversary issue of WordPlay.
What emerged from our conversations at Martin's former
university, De Montfort, was a fascinating history of experiences
with various collectives of academics, their perspectives on the
work of the Subject Centre, and their opinions on the challenges
which lie ahead for English studies and higher education. What
is diffi cult to capture in this print version is the lively exchange
between the two of them, the shared laughter, and the genuine
pleasure each took in listening to the other’s narratives.
Martin began his career as a lecturer at Exeter while Knights
started out as a college lecturer at Cambridge, quickly followed
by a long stint in the Department of Adult and Continuing
Education at the University of Durham. I asked if, at the start of
their careers, they had imagined they would be in the leadership
roles they now occupy. Martin responded, ‘No, absolutely not.
I think when I began my career I just thought I would be a teacher
and a lecturer for life, really. That is what I aspired to and I think
there is still an element of regret or loss whenever I have close
encounters with an English department – I think what a great
place to be. In a sense my fi rst instincts and my aspirations when
I started are still somewhere inside. To be an academic, to be
somebody who writes, engaged with the subject and teaches –
seems to me is a very fi ne aspiration. I just kind of wandered down
various by-ways at various points and bumped into opportunities
that I didn’t expect to come my way. I found at some point that I
was reasonably good at organising things. And I guess that’s how
I fell into being the director of a programme and the head of a
department and then a dean and a research director, and then the
director of a subject centre and then another dean, and then a pro
vice chancellor, which is how I got here.’
Remember Adult Education Departments?
Knights agreed, stating that the very idea of the Subject Centre
being around at the start of his career was ‘almost unimaginable’
because the university world he entered in the late 1970s was just
such a different place. He explained: ‘One of the diffi culties in
comparing these things in one’s mind, among other things, is the
different cultures. But I do think, for all sorts of 1968ish reasons,
In July Nicole King interviewed Professor Ben Knights (Director, English Subject Centre) and Professor Philip Martin (Pro Vice Chancellor for Learning, Teaching and the Student Experience at Sheffi eld Hallam University).
In Conversation with
Ben Knights and
Philip Martin
Knights: How does a subject that spends its time brooding on words cope where the model of knowledge is the rapid transfer of information?
Ben Knights
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 11
Features
I think I went into it all with a kind of idealistic and radical and,
as we’d now say, “outreach agenda,” which is why I fairly rapidly
made my way into Adult Education. And one great thing about
Adult Education, in those days, before university Adult Education
was closed down, was it was one of the places where, to a limited
extent, people did actually study higher education, they studied
teaching. So big Adult Ed departments like Leeds, Southampton,
Leicester, were places where people did actually think about
and talk about and study, and write about education. And so
one of the things I was able to do with colleagues from very
different subject backgrounds – because one of the joys of it was
that it was a multi-subject department so one was working with
archaeologists and biologists and historians and so on – was that
we actually set up a seminar on adult education at a meta level.
So in a curious way we were trying to invent something, it wasn’t
a subject centre, but it was about how you teach and it was
about pedagogy. We were inventing or working together on the
idea that pedagogy wasn’t just about the idea of transmission, it
wasn’t just about more effective ways of getting knowledge from
A to B, but pedagogy was actually an intellectually respectable
and generative thing to be involved in. And I suppose that thread
has remained for me, constant all the way through.'
Knights’ discussion of working in Adult Education prompts Martin
to recall his own early teaching experiences as a part-timer at the
Open University. ‘The OU was a very, very rewarding teaching
environment. And I think actually, as the OU went on, it was
a place that took some aspects of teaching, and in particular
marking, very, very seriously, so I was marked on my marking and
marked on my feedback.’
‘The system is still catching up with what the OU invented in
the 70s’ adds Knights. ‘Yes,’ agrees Martin, ‘what happened to
the aspirations of and the way in which universities understood
their responsibilities? … What happened to all of that? Well we
know what happened to it because of the fi nancial constraints
but actually that was, in a sense, a thin end of a wedge, that
really began to understand education in a purely utilitarian
and fi nancial terms, without understanding, without realising
perhaps, or without wanting to realise that the broader benefi ts,
if you like, the social and individual benefi ts of learning – were
just not considered to be as important or relevant – maybe just
something you could do on your own.’
English – where scepticism begins at home
Martin was the fi rst Director of the English Subject Centre (2000-
2003) and Knights has been in the post since then. Did they have
particular expectations of the role? What were the challenges they
encountered? Both men highlighted the intrinsic wariness that
English studies people have regarding university management (as
opposed to departmental management) and quality assurance.
‘When I took it on at the beginning,’ confessed Martin, ‘I was so
anxious to win the confi dence of English departments that I wasn’t
necessarily terribly confi dent about what we were doing in the
Subject Centre. But actually now, having seen what can be done,
and certainly having seen what’s happened in recent years and
the way that the Subject Centre is recognised as an important
resource, I think that I would have been more confi dent about
what it is that we could do at that time. There was quite a lot of
suspicion around at the time: What is it? Who are these people?
What are they doing? And, most commonly, are you something
to do with the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA)!? So I spent a lot
the time trying to win the confi dence of people, largely by saying,
“we are not the QAA but we may be able to help you with that!”
There was scepticism and I understand fully the reasons. English
academics have always been seen as independent-minded, very
independent-minded. Their resistance, if you like, to centralism
and to Management with a capital M, is often well-founded. It is
well-founded I think because those people who are closest to the
scholarship of the subject and the students themselves carry not
only a massive kind of commitment but also the best knowledge
about what they are doing. And actually the way not to manage
is to have somebody come and tell you what to do. The Subject
Centre facilitates ways in which people can share the knowledge
that they themselves have and are producing in that generative
way that Ben referred to earlier on. And that’s one of the things I
learned at the Subject Centre. It’s to do with dialogue. And I carry
some of that stuff with me that Ben does, from our early careers,
Martin: I think that we are entering a far more utilitarian understanding
of higher education – I mean this time we really are.
Philip Martin
12 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Features
and that is that you do see education as
being a transformative thing, a form of
liberation, a way in which individuals fi nd
themselves and fi nd their way around
complex situations and cultures.’
Taking the Subject Centre forward/the status of teaching
Knights agreed emphatically about the
Subject Centre’s approach and reminded
us of the different political and fi nancial
environment that saw the launch of
the Subject Centre in 2001: ‘It was the
moment wasn’t it, when universities were
benefi tting enormously from the post-
Dearing settlement and the amount New
Labour was willing to shell out –‘
Martin: ‘Absolutely –‘
Knights: ‘And now we’re suddenly realising
that the tap is being turned off so that the
Subject Centres, like the National Teaching
Fellowships and all the other initiatives of
that period were in a sense riding a wave,
weren’t they?’
Martin: ‘They were.’
Knights: ‘There was something exciting
that was happening, but it was also being
funded.’
Martin: ‘That’s right, absolutely right.’
Knights: ‘I think our challenge in this
present moment, and for obvious reasons,
we talk about this a lot, is how to continue
when the assumptions of that era no
longer hold. So my experience of taking
over the Subject Centre, as it were, was
that it was working, it had recognition,
people had an idea of what it was. There
are still people who are suspicious.’
Martin: ‘And that’s how it is and will
always be, it’s kind of a generally healthy
scepticism of “the tribe” of English,
people have that scepticism about them,
it’s just an intrinsic and important part of
their training and their understanding of
how things are – nothing is quite what
it seems to be’ quipped Martin, ‘which
is actually the persistence of practical
criticism!’ which makes us all laugh. ‘It’s not
what you think it is, it’s something else – ‘
‘There’s a subtext you can get at if you
spend long enough with it – bring out its
ironies, its ambivalences’ added Knights.
‘– its internal contradictions!’ chuckles
Martin.
Starting out, before the Subject Centre
Joking aside, there are several threads
I want to try to pick up, especially in
terms of each man’s entry into English,
which they had both mentioned was an
unexpected pathway. After a young Martin
acknowledged that he couldn’t draw and
therefore Art College was not on the
cards, he started looking at the possibility
of reading English.
‘I discovered, of course, that in terms of
A Levels and O Levels as they were called
then, GCSEs now, I didn’t have the right
combination: I didn’t have Latin, I didn’t
have a modern foreign language at O
Level and that meant I could apply for
hardly any universities to read English at
that time. Quite seriously, the restrictions
and the assumptions about the cultural
capital you had to bring with you were
such that I ended up applying to to a
very new university, Stirling in Scotland.
So my fi rst degree is in English with
Sociology. It was the making of me really.
I spent four happy years as an undergrad
learning about English literature and in
that time the scales fell from my eyes.
Something happened and I sort of woke
up academically or intellectually and I
just couldn’t get enough of it. After that
I didn’t really know what I was going to
do, I’m terrible at planning, I had no idea,
couldn’t think of anything else to do, I
Knights: My favourite metaphor for the way the RAE and now the REF regimes work is putting
nitrogen fertilizer on an Alpine meadow
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 13
Features
just thought I might go and do a PhD
but I went and did a PGCE before that.
I thoroughly enjoyed teaching children
in schools but I wasn’t very good at it.
So I went and did a PhD. But, again, not
necessarily believing that I would become
an academic, but I did, very gradually,
one step at a time. I’ve always felt a bit
of a fraud and somebody would fi nd out
that I wasn’t really supposed to be doing
this stuff: I remember my fi rst class at
Exeter, feeling very nervous and saying
to the students, “Well the Seventeenth
Century really isn’t my period’ and one of
them said “Well don’t worry it’s not mine
either!” Which I thought was wonderful.’
Knights, on the other hand, read
Modern History at Oxford, and didn’t
make the switch to English until after
his undergraduate degree but he cites
similarities with Martin, like a lack of
planning: ‘Well yes,’ he mused, ‘the
sense that things happened, and then
not knowing subsequently whether the
narrative that emerges is subsequently
imposed or whether there was really
something that was unfolding in history
the whole time. In some senses I grew up
with university English, and I spent some
time Oedipally trying to shed it by going
to do things like reading history instead
of English which was a silly way of getting
out because it obviously wasn’t getting
out. I wanted to teach in schools, or so I
believed, wrongly, and Cambridge at the
time was offering a one-year postgraduate
certifi cate, and Raymond Williams was
running this post-grad diploma on
Literature and Rural Society. That was an
amazing conversion experience from being
a historian to being an English person. I
think I still have trouble with that because
you have a different view of data and text.
I had Tony Tanner as a supervisor for the
dissertation I did, and it was while doing
that that I got hold of, with Raymond’s
help, the subject of the Clerisy in the
Nineteenth Century. I got hooked, went
and did a PhD and then went into Adult
Ed and it goes from there. I guess in some
curious way, and we read these things for
irony, but having fought, as it were, to
get out of English, I end up as one of its
national guardians!’
You don’t have to be an English subject person to be a leader, but it helps
We all laugh heartily at this, but also note
that there is a great deal they have each
carried over from their early university
experiences and interactions with
dedicated teachers and, in particular, ways
of seeing, evaluating and questioning the
world that inform their own careers as
lecturers and as champions of the craft
of teaching.
Martin: ‘Getting back to that sense
that what you have to do in English is
read beyond the surface- that has been
massively infl uential for me. The situations
which seem simple or appear to be simple,
those things are usually illusions. Beneath
every apparently simple issue there lies
a complexity that is made up of people,
usually. So I would say I don’t pretend to
be any kind of terrifi cally subtle analyst
in terms of what I do but understanding
the complexity of things, defi nitely. Most
things need some kind of subtle approach.
And I think I have developed quite a lot
of patience in having to develop and
to recognise that other people in other
subjects doing other things – academics
and administrators and other people who
work in the universities – if you have the
curiosity of mind to work out what it is
they do, you will work much better. I am
not saying that in order to be a successful
leader you have to be an English subject
person but there are things in the subject
that train the mind, that seriously train
the mind.’
Knights: ‘Of course this is also related to
what we were saying about sceptics in the
profession because we, all of us I think,
probably share an intolerance for things
that look prescriptive, –‘
Martin: ‘Yes!’
Knights: ‘– for taxonomies,’
Martin: ‘Yes!’
Knights: ‘For big large polystyrene labels
that haven’t been examined, you know,
strategic plans, strap lines, it just brings
out irony in us at 500 metres!’
Martin: ‘It does, it does’ [we are all
laughing now] ‘It is quite hard working at
corporate level in universities now because
of the predominance of those things,
although I think we might be winding
back a bit.’
The challenges which English faces
Our conversation moved on to the current
climate for higher education and what
Martin and Knights felt the subject should
brace itself for in terms of challenges
and shifts in the fi nancial and ideological
landscape.
Martin: ‘I think currently the demand for
English is still high but I think the fi nancial
disincentives may grow and that worries
me because I think that we are entering a
far more utilitarian understanding of higher
education – I mean this time we really are.
This coalition government is hard to read in
that respect because it carries within it both
sides of the coin. It carries within an old-
fashioned and rather pleasing high regard
Martin: what you have to do in English is read beyond the surface
14 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Features
for traditional academic values ... but it
is a government driven primarily by the
bottom line with an emphasis such as we
have never seen before. So, for example,
in terms of policy, the recent funding
council consultation document on funding
raised the possibility in my mind that there
might be no funding at all for Band D or
classroom-based subjects from the Funding
Council. Now I don’t think that will happen
but there is a sense in which you could read
that document and think that was what
it was saying: Government will only fund
those courses which it sees as quick routes
into offi ce-ready employment or whatever
the ghastly term is now. But, of course,
there are inherent contradictions in this,
the biggest one being we need graduates
for the knowledge economy, we need
graduates with fl exible understanding,
who are quick and creative. We need, at
least they are saying at the moment that
we need to keep participation rates up,
but then at the same time there are people
standing there with banners saying there
are 70 graduates applying for one job every
year. So I think what I am trying to say is it is
shot through with all kinds of contradictions
at the moment.’
Knights: ‘Yes, well I think I agree with
all of that. I think [English] is and always
has been a contested subject, I think
the economic pressures are immense
and those would be interpreted through
parents, peer groups, sixth form teachers,
whatever. I think there are simultaneous
pressures and I also want to bring the
web into that and social networking and
general web savvy-ness. How does a
subject that spends its time brooding
on words or taking time on words, cope
where the model of knowledge is the rapid
transfer of information? One thing that
worries me very much is the notion that
we might see – particularly with English
literature and I think less so with Creative
Writing and English language – is the
balkanization and sector-ization whereby
literature fl ees to sort of high ranking,
high-prestige institutions. Where it attracts
generally well-heeled students who can
afford to take risks with careers because on
the whole they are going to land on their
feet or mummy or daddy will help them.
Where literature ceases to be everything
we were talking about in terms of Adult
Education and the wider public and
community readers and all the things that
are to some extent delineated in Jonathan
Rose’s book The Intellectual Life of the
British Working Classes (2001). That could
happen; I don’t think it has to happen. But
I do think that tendency for literature to
up-market itself is to some curious extent
colluded with by the current research
funding culture and greater selectivity in
research. My favourite metaphor for the
way the RAE and now the REF regimes
work is putting nitrogen fertilizer on an
Alpine meadow: a whole lot of things grow
big and lusty and succeed but they then
take the living and shut out the light from
all sorts of lesser and more interesting
things that might have grown under them.
That RAE and REF money and the whole
architecture of applying to the AHRC, all
the kind of competencies and skills that
go with those ambitions – okay they are
very good for the professions as such –
but they do, I fear, tend to squeeze out,
block the light out from all kinds of other
things. And I fear if that all emigrates into
a relatively few high-ranking institutions
then all of the things about word study,
literature study and cultural study we’ve
been mentioning are then drawn away
from a wider access population who are
given the employability stuff. I see one
role for the Subject Centre as going on
fi ghting for English as a democratic subject
not as an elite subject. I actually rather
passionately believe that.’
Building on the idea of English as a
democratic subject, I ask if there was
anything that heads of departments and
Deans of Humanities could be doing
to pursue an agenda for increasing the
democratization of the subject, given that
English studies is currently a subject taken
by mostly white, middle class, female
students. Their answers strike at the heart
of the utilitarian education argument:
Martin: ‘I think it’s very diffi cult. I think it’s
something all heads and all deans think
about. One of the diffi culties is, and this
is a diffi culty that I think the subject and
organisations like CCUE and the English
Association have discussed for years and
that is, do you take on the language of
government and policy and, if you like,
utilitarian philosophy, do you take that on
and argue quite cogently and coherently
that actually English is a useful subject
Knights: what the subject has to do, to gain a wider constituency, is something to do with how it teaches and how it interacts with its students
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 15
Features
and may be a useful subject. Do you take
that on and argue on those terms or do
you stand by the principle that actually
education is a value in its own right,
the benefi ts of which can’t necessarily
be traced in short-hand terms? In other
words, once you take on the terminology
of the language and the vocabulary so you
might also compromise and concede. My
own position is that I am a pragmatist so I
am prepared to do that. I am aware of the
risks and dangers in so doing as equally I
am aware as a pragmatist that if you just
stay on the outside all the time you will
isolate the subject and you can’t afford to
do that, it’s not responsible.’
Knights: ‘I also think it is a problem the
clerisy has struggled with for 200 years
now. But in its own particular form in our
moment, yes we do have to be pragmatists
but I think it’s not just a question of what
we as, so to speak, leaders in the subject
might do in terms of collaboration and in
getting involved in the ‘impact agenda’
but I think the larger question is also about
teaching, actually. And that in terms of what
the subject has to do, bit by bit, to gain a
wider constituency, is actually something to
do with how it teaches and how it interacts
with its students. A lot of the signs at the
minute are of narrowing – the people who
can now afford to do an MA, therefore
the people who can afford to stay on to
become post grads – after a period of
gentle expansion outwards socially, English
is actually contracting again. I think there
is countervailing tendency, a potential
towards hyper-gentrifi cation.’
Can technology save us?
Both Knights and Martin noted the rather
ominous implications of English being
relegated to elite territory and refl ected
upon the democratising impact of digital
technologies within higher education and
the way new technologies have been taken
up by English.
Martin offered this: ‘I think technology
has revolutionised research in the subject
and it has taken away, to some extent,
the tedious boring and sweaty business
of searching through texts for particular
words, themes, subjects, and whatever
because you can actually instantly fi nd
them’ he snaps his fi ngers. ‘You don’t
have to spend fi ve years writing an article
about Wordsworth’s use of the word
virtue or beauty, because you can just’
(snaps fi ngers again). ‘And so I think
that undergraduates can now do rather
wonderful things outside of the classroom
and outside of the library where previously
they couldn’t.’
Knights agreed, ‘People can get at
archives in a way that only a handful of
research students or scholars could in
the past,’ but cautioned that the national
situation regarding innovative pedagogy
and the use of technology in English
departments reveals ‘huge variation’
between institutions and disparity
regarding how students are helped to use
the digital archives and the concordances
and even VLEs. He adds, ‘The more
worrying thing to me does go back to
something about the nature of reading in
an information society. I still entertain what
is now a very old-fashioned idea about
the materialities of reading and dwelling
in books and slow reading and that
something about deep processing may
be (though this starts to get into ‘decline
of the west’ territory) being lost through
the click, click, click, continuous partial
attention society we live in.’
As if to underscore this last comment,
when I ask each of them to tell me a
personal teaching anecdote and reveal
their favourite text or author both Knights
and Martin gravitate towards that which
was diffi cult and time consuming: both
remembered teaching failures that
ultimately improved their pedagogy and
humbled their approach to students and
both named deliciously long 19th Century
novels that suggest each was always
destined for literature: Anna Karenina
(Knights) and Middlemarch (Martin).
Martin: in a sense my aspirations when I started are still somewhere inside: to be an academic, to be somebody who writes, is engaged with the subject and teaches
16 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Beyond the Workshop: The Creative Writing MA and the Market 24 February 2010
This symposium, hosted by Edinburgh Napier University, and organised by Sam Kelly (Edinburgh Napier University), the English Subject Centre, literaturetraining and the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), set out to explore the tension between student expectations and the realities of what MA courses in Creative Writing do and what they can deliver. As both an MA student in Creative Writing and an Adult Education tutor I shifted between these two roles as I compared my
teaching and student experiences with that of the other delegates. The symposium centred around three provocations and a keynote address, punctuated by multiple small discussion groups.
David Miller, Director of Rogers, Coleridge & White Literary Agency offered the fi rst provocation: ‘Achieving a Balance: The Craft and Business of Writing’. Addressing the question of whether people outside universities were infl uenced by the fact that a writer has done a Creative Writing course, Miller suggested that fl edgling writers could just as well work in a literary agency or spend their fee money on subsistence living while writing. Rather than counting on a course to open doors to publication Miller exhorted students to simply write a book that demands to be read. The discussions which ensued were polarised between those who felt that students should see their fees as an investment in learning for the sake of personal development and those who felt that students needed professional skills (editing, abridgement, adaptation and reviewing) in order to make their way as writers after the course.
In ‘The Student Experience’, Andrew Cowan (University of East Anglia) warned that students’ expectations of an MA course, often fuelled by the advertised success of alumni, have to be managed so that publication is not seen as a defi nite consequence of taking the course. Students can be advised about this at interviews and encouraged to see that an MA offers a hospitable ‘climate’ for a year in which to take writing seriously amongst other writers. Cowan admitted to having been a ‘disgruntled graduate’ of the same programme in which he now teaches. (Read more about this in ‘The Anxiety of Infl uence’ in WordPlay 3.) Delegates considered recruitment strategies and programme identity, effective teaching, creative pedagogy and issues of aftercare once students have graduated.
In the fi nal provocation, ‘The Workshop and Beyond’, Graham Mort (Lancaster University) returned to the idea of the student experience with a focus on distance learning. Mort’s experience of teaching students in nine African countries via the internet, made him realise that Creative Writing and literature can re-negotiate particular social conditions and relationships. The epistolatory nature of the exchange between student and tutor keeps the text ductile and interventions are possible in real time. Mort compared this process to a music or art teacher looking over the student’s shoulder and making suggestions for trying things in a different way. The distance learning programme at Lancaster encourages ‘transculturality’ and interdisciplinary work and in doing so it challenges the entrenched modes of delivering ‘English Studies’ in Literature departments. The discussion afterwards revealed that while some lecturers are reluctant to spend more hours in front of the computer others saw real advantages to the immediacy and effectiveness of online feedback.
Professor Sean O’Brien (Newcastle University) who prefers the term “writing” to “Creative Writing,” delivered the keynote speech, artfully weaving together the debates and discussions from earlier in the day. Not only do MA students need a climate where they can test the extent of their abilities and learn about being a professional writer, he asserted, the most important lesson for new writers to learn is that the world is indifferent to their labours. Workshops should be about students and lecturers thinking together about how writing works. Students’ writing should be subject to a critical response within the course just as it will be outside the course. He argued forcefully that the MA should be just as academically rigorous as any other course, that students must read more widely and deeply and, as lecturers, we must tackle student reluctance to study form which can be wrongly attached to a fear of elitism.
Although the day was primarily about the student experience, it was clear from all the discussions that Creative Writing lecturers need more support if they are to deliver that experience with confi dence.
Alison Summers, Edinburgh Napier University
Want more? Read Alison’s longer event report at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events/event_detail.php?event_index=276
Graham Mort in a small group discussion
English Subject Centre
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 17
XXXXXXXXCreative Pedagogies
T3 is the Subject Centre’s popular database of teaching tips contributed
by and for English and Creative Writing lecturers. Browse this stimulating collection of pithy seminar ideas and then add an idea of your own.
Contribute to T3 and earn up to £50 for your teaching ideas!
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T3 is at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/t3/index.php
Add a new ingredient to your teaching
18 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Features
The Good of Criticism The value of literary studiesUsing the context of a conference held at the University of Reading in March this year, Simon Dentith considers the effects of serious engagement with the idea of 'impact' in relation to English studies.
Simon Dentith is Head of Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Reading where he contributes to modules on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and convenes a module on William Morris. He is a member of the English Subject Centre Advisory Board and his most recent book is Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge UP, 2006).
A conference aimed at ‘articulating the public value of literary criticism and scholarship’ – readers of WordPlay won’t need to be told that the need for such an ambition is as great now as it was a year ago, in the summer of 2009 when the conference was planned: the Public Spending Review and the massive downward pressure on public fi nances have only added to the sense of urgency that informed planning for the event. The aim was not without an element of hubris; yet it seemed to the conference organisers that we could jointly fi nd ways of expressing the value of what we do that might have some purchase on the world beyond the English or Humanities Departments of the academy. There’s no denying also that the most public and managerial form of public accountability for what we do, the ‘impact’ requirements of the REF, played a part in our thinking about the event, though we were determined not to limit our discussions to this. At our most hubristic we hoped that some kind of check-list of arguments – like New Labour’s famous fi ve promises in 1997 – might emerge from the conference so that we could all call upon them when challenged to justify the value of criticism and literary studies.
The organisers were also conscious that many of the issues facing us in English press equally strongly on the Arts and Humanities more generally. If there is a case to be made more explicitly and publicly in relation to English in all its forms in the academy, then the same needs to be said about other subjects – let us say those which currently fall under the aegis of the AHRC. And it’s not as though ‘English’ itself is monolithic, as readers of WordPlay will be the fi rst to point out. We all know that what we do is very diverse, draws on very different intellectual and cultural histories, and takes place in very different institutional contexts with very different students.
So our decision to focus on the ‘good of criticism’ gave a necessary focus to the conference but also infl ected the debate in particular ways. One such infl ection was towards the changing perceived value of criticism in a world in which widely diffused forms of criticism take place daily in the apparently non-hierarchical blogosphere: clearly criticism cannot have the same authority in such an environment. This was the aspect of the conference agenda picked up by the (very welcome) report in the Times Higher Education. Yet it seemed to us that a range of interrelated issues were illuminated by our particular stress on criticism.
Several themes in the event dominated the conference discussions, partly anticipated by the conference organisers, but partly of course emerging in unplanned ways over the course of the two days with the input of the speakers and the other delegates. One theme was the extent to which claims for the value of criticism – and of literary study more generally – depends on an intrinsic notion of literary value itself. Another concerned the ways in which the canon itself has been transformed by criticism conducted in feminist and post-colonial guises. Yet another theme of the conference was no less than the value of a literary education in itself, necessarily mediated by criticism in all it forms. Speakers and delegates naturally addressed these interlocking topics from different ideological but also institutional positions; the effects of different locations within the academy, in situations of greater or lesser stress, were evident in many of the contributions.
The title of the fi rst session, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, indicates at least one question for debate: how far an Arnoldian or post-Arnoldian rationale for what we do can be maintained in the incessantly market-driven and in that particular sense more democratic contemporary cultural world. Papers by Stefan Collini, Ben Knights and Ronan McDonald naturally suggested different answers, and to some extent informed subsequent discussion at the conference. The fi rst speaker in particular was sceptical of that fond ambition of the conference organisers, that it would be possible readily to articulate a sense of what we do that would have real purchase in the public sphere beyond the academy.
It is necessary to think hard about what we do so that the public articulation of its value can be more securely grounded
Features
The question of literary value partly informed the second session of the conference, which sought one answer to the good of criticism in the transformation of the canon over the last thirty years or so to include marginal and silenced voices, defi ned in the usual shorthand as the colonised, women, sexual dissidents, and the labouring classes. ‘Literary value’ has been notoriously diffi cult to manage in relation to the non-aesthetic urgencies that have informed that transformation. Papers by Jo McDonagh, Elleke Boehmer and Patrick Williams revealed especially strongly the sometimes bruising institutional pressures that can weigh upon these debates.
Derek Attridge, Isobel Armstrong and Helen Small were the speakers for the next session, which asked to what degree the value of criticism is related to the 'value' of literature. An especially powerful and even moving paper by Derek Attridge dwelt on the value of the literary-aesthetic experience itself, the particular act of attention which is specifi c to the experience of reading. Helen Small’s account of the act of criticism partly concerned the ways it seeks to mediate between the private act of reading and more generally shared experience, while Isobel Armstrong made a characteristically powerful case for the value of ‘perlocutionary’ ways of understanding the reading process.
Another set of issues were broached in the following session, ‘the self in civil society’: issues to do with the capacity of literature, as articulated in criticism, to provide stories or models which allow readers to understand themselves as social beings inhabiting particular societies at particular times. Dinah Birch, Jeff Wallace and Simon Dentith presented papers which argued in different ways for the value of an education based on other than utilitarian grounds, though the very use of the word ‘utilitarian’ and its antonyms can suck us in to inhabiting one side of a dichotomy that we might rather hope to overcome.
A fi fth session on ‘Living together: culture and community’ returned the conference to the issues relating to the contribution that criticism can make to communal self-knowledge and mutual understanding: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Susheila Nasta and Alison Donnell gave papers addressed to this theme, with both historical and contemporary dimensions. Literature surely has a capacity to speak beyond the confi nes of social being understood narrowly as an affi rmation of identity; this familiar insight took on a particular polemical edge in the context of both contemporary identity politics, and in Sushelia Nasta’s fascinating account of the AHRC project in which she is engaged, ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad 1780-1950’.
The fi nal formal session was addressed to the one topic that actually features in offi cial documents relating to the value of the humanities: the quality of life. Edna Longley, Andy Mousley and Santanu Das gave papers with very different takes on the meaning of this elusive phrase. Perhaps its elusiveness is to do with the antinomy to which its usage testifi es: its very use recognises that not all of what universities do can be measured in quantitative terms, yet it seems necessary to persist in such measurements anyway.
Important perspectives were provided on all the joint sessions of the conference by two free-standing ‘case studies’, led by Regenia Gagnier and John Mullan. The former provided an essential international dimension, showing how Chinese understanding of the work of John Stuart Mill had transformed the concepts which informed Mill’s work; while the latter
provided an entertaining account to the meeting of academic literary criticism with journalism and broadcasting.
A fi nal session sought to bring all these different strands of the conference together. In what already seems like a different world, ‘Peter Mandelson’ was the metonymy around which many anxieties about public funding for the universities, market-driven university education, and a perceived utilitarianism driving government policy, seemed to condense. I leave readers to replace this fi gure with any other which now seems appropriate. But even in this changed environment, the question addressed remains salient: how far is it possible or even worthwhile to add
to the current ‘heap of words’ that currently surround what we
do? You will perhaps not be surprised to hear
that no consensus was reached upon this. Nevertheless, I hope that the conference made some real progress towards clarifying the participants’ thinking on the
challenges that face us.
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chchchhhchchchchchhhchhhcccc alalalalalalaalaalaaaaaaa leleleeleleeeengngnggggggnggggnggesees tthahah t tttfafafafafafafafaffaffafaaacececeeeceeeececcceceece uuuu s.sss
British social reformer and philosopher, John Stuart Mill.
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 19
20 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Features
The ‘impact’ agenda of course presses directly upon the value
attached to our research. But a wider utilitarianism in relation
to education equally challenges what we do; after all, it was
Britain’s most famous utilitarian who famously failed to see
any difference in value between poetry and push-pin. In that
context, the conference was addressing challenges that have
been made to the humanities for a long time, though the point
of the conference was to address them in the particular forms
which they take now. If it is possible to distinguish two different
kinds of answers they would be these. On the one hand there
were a group of papers which sought, in one way or another,
to explicate more fully the intrinsic value of the literary itself,
or the range of ways literature might act upon readers. This
emphasis may not address the superiority of poetry to push-
pin, but it certainly seeks to explicate the value of the activity in
itself. Another kind of paper sought to explicate the social value
of criticism, in articulating more fully the conditions of mutual
social understanding, especially in relation to the transformations
of British and world society. One big question left hanging by
the conference, for this delegate at least, was how these two
kinds of answers might be related. Since these are some of the
oldest questions in aesthetics, no conclusion was likely. But the
conference brought home to me at least how some of these
familiar questions have re-posed themselves in the particular
urgencies of the present moment.
I think we all recognize the kind of argument which asserts that
the problem is one of ‘communicating’ more clearly what we
do – an argument that is complicated for those of us who work in
the academy by the distance in idiom (to put it no more strongly)
between us and other areas of the public sphere. But it is also the
case that this kind of argument can sometimes be an evasion, of
the necessity to think hard about what we do so that the public
articulation of its value can be more securely grounded. The
knot of issues in relation to criticism, education, literary value,
the canon, personal development, social good, mutual social
understanding, and the quality of life need careful and constant
address to be disentangled ‘at the present time’ – a time so
unlike that which faced Matthew Arnold, Cardinal Newman, John
Ruskin, John Stuart Mill and others one hundred and fi fty years
ago, when they pronounced so powerfully some of the founding
tenets of our discipline. As one of the conference organisers, I
was deeply grateful for the seriousness and engagement which
the speakers and delegates brought to the conference, and I
found the discussions to be remarkably suggestive. I do think
that the conference managed to re-articulate some crucial
aspects of what we do in our work in English, and, to a real
extent, in the Humanities more generally. I don’t think we were
re-inventing the wheel, or were suffering under the delusion that
we were announcing to a breathless world truths which were all
along familiar. We do nevertheless need to re-articulate a sense
of what we do in the changing social and cultural conditions in
which we work; I presume this to be a permanent obligation for
us. Our responsibility in this respect is especially important if we
feel that we cannot continue to express the importance of what
we do in terms ultimately derived from the great nineteenth- and
twentieth-century creators of our subject, and yet feel that the
work on which we are engaged is important and indeed deserves
public support. Even resort under pressure to those Arnoldian
pieties perhaps no longer carries the conviction that it once did,
certainly not for us and not for our interlocutors either; or to put
it another way, since it was always the case that the humanities
were cast as a supplement to the more essential business of
earning a living, the rejoinder to a case made now in a time of
perceived economic crisis was always at best going to be that this
is a luxury that for the moment we cannot afford. That indeed
would be the most depressing conclusion to be drawn from a
conference such as this: that the positions in which we might
conduct our discussions are already laid out and that everything
we can say has got a rejoinder in waiting. But actually this was
not the sense with which I emerged from the conference; quite
apart from the extraordinary articulacy of its list of contributors I
was struck by the wealth of argument that is available to us. Yet
these are arguments that need to be made; the conference may
not have produced a landslide of New Labour proportions but it
at least contributed to articulating a crucial set of arguments.
It was always the case that the humanities were cast as a supplement to the more essential business of earning a living
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 21
WorkshopsDirectEnglish Subject Centre internal workshops for academic departments
If you would like to take advantage of this opportunity, please email esc@rhul.ac.uk by the 24th September giving:
1. Your name, department and contact details2. The theme of the workshop you would like and what you would like it to cover.
It may be helpful to give any contextual information, such as a requirement to respond to NSS scores.
3. Roughly when you would like us to run the workshop (nearest month).
• Assessment and feedback• Student writing• Student study groups• Work-related learning
• Innovations in seminars and lecturing
• Inclusive teaching• Teaching effectively using the VLE
Is your department looking to diversify its assessment practice, introduce some innovations in small group teaching or offer a form of work-related learning?
If so the English Subject Centre could run an internal workshop on these and other topics to get you started. As part of our programme of activities and services for the 2010-2011 academic year, will be running a limited number of workshops within departments to help staff enhance their teaching. These workshops are free of charge, but applications must be received by the 24th September 2010.
We will consider providing an internal workshop on any theme where we have staff expertise, but particularly welcome applications relating to:
More details are available on our home page: www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
22 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
how do we teach,
what do we teach?
Digital Writing and Pedagogy
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 23
Features
This article, originally presented as a paper at the Subject Centre’s Teaching Digital Writing event (2010), seeks to explore what a university level tutor might appropriately include in teaching digital writing.
Matt Hayler is a fi nal year Ph.D. student at the University of Exeter where he primarily teaches Level 1 courses in Criticism and Theory. His thesis, Resisting the Digital: Technology, Books, and Bodies, is an investigation into popular discourses of resistance surrounding the digitisation of the written word. His most recent article, 'Translating to Digital,' will appear in a PEER English special edition in 2010. You can fi nd more of his work at www.4oh4-wordsnotfound.blogspot.com.
I work in an English department, mostly teaching critical theory, and in this paper I’d like to look at a deceptive question, one which I’m going to increasingly face in the discipline I’ve chosen: ‘how do we go about teaching examples of digital writing?’ Now this is not a simple question. Before we can get to the ‘how’ of teaching something, we need to at least approximate what it is we are about to teach, if only to propose an appealing course. I’d put it to you that many students are just not certain what a digital text is, or what digital writing is, not really, and yet I feel that the worst thing we can do, as tutors, is attempt an exacting defi nition.
Now this might seem oxymoronic, but what I actually think it is, is potentially exciting. Digital texts, digital literatures, digital writing, these still somewhat ineffable things represent a rare chance for us to teach the ‘contemporary’ in the thick of it. English Studies has only rarely been about hunting for, or rote-learning, the proscribed meaning of texts. Often, ideally, it has instead existed as a way of identifying the jumping-off points where written texts allow us to explore our own state of being-in-the-world - how we might think, how we might understand, how we might strive. Unlike contemporary English literature classes I’ve both taught and attended, which seem to think that the ‘contemporary’ must end in 1960 if we’re to have any chance at critical distance, ‘digital’ offers another way, and I would say a compelling way, for our students to see how their subject wraps around them, to feel that they can live what they learn, and to think that ‘contemporary’ can actually mean ‘right now,’ and ‘tomorrow,’ as the story of the way we receive written material unfolds before their eyes.
In this spirit I would like to consider a number of disciplines which I believe the digitisation of the written word opens up to the English classroom. This doesn’t represent an attempt to defi ne the borders of the subject, but instead to ignore past delineations and see where productive exploration, symbiosis, and downright theft might allow us to teach better, and to get students feeling and realising what is being taught.
To begin then, how might we sketch a defi nition of digital work? If I hear the words ‘digital text’ then the frenzy of images that spring to mind, the substance of what I’d like to teach remember, leaves me baffl ed – are we talking about any written work which appears on a screen? And any screen? Will a television or a mobile phone do? Or must it be a computer? Is a Kindle or an iPad enough of a computer to qualify? And why? Do we really read differently on these things? And once we’ve settled on a carrier medium does a digital text include scans of a paper document? .pdfs? Photographs of existing texts? And are we just talking about Katherine Hayles’ (2008,
passim) ‘digitally native’ literature here, works made on, and for reading on, a pixelated screen? Because that seems to include most things now that we’re all word processing every document we produce, and then consuming a lot of it online. And what of books about digitisation, or that use digital forms remediated back into print? Or instead are we talking about books, any books, which interrogate, or have shaken off their material bodies… Ah! But that seems to hit somewhere closer to the nail’s head doesn’t it? It’s this change in bodies which is causing all the fuss after all. Because if popular media has taught us anything about digital and digitised books, it’s that they don’t ‘smell right’, and that they don’t ‘feel right’, and that you certainly can’t read them on the beach or in the bath.
For the record that last one’s actually not true. Jeff Bezos, the founder and president of Amazon.com, apparently reads his Kindle e-reader in the bath. He puts it in a one gallon see-through zip-lock bag. The touch screen works and everything (Solomon, 2009).
But the body of the book, and we might as well talk about the book because that’s what the majority of the popular debate surrounds, the body of the bound paper book, the codex, is changing, and the new forms we are experiencing are not the product of a kindly received metamorphosis. There have been increasingly frequent attempts to begin ‘e-reading’ over the last ten or so years, prior to the watershed of the Amazon Kindle’s release in late 2007, and numerous commentators have lined up to warn us of the dangers of digital, particularly its lowly status in comparison to print. Sven Birkerts is perhaps the totemic example here, with his exhortation in the Gutenberg Elegies, that: ‘this may be the awakening, but it feels curiously like the fantasies that circulate through our sleep. From deep in the heart I hear the voice that says, “Refuse it!’’’ (1994, p.229).
What should we make of Birkerts’, and others’, resistance? I’m not sure. But we should teach it. We should teach it now, and we should teach it when all the journals are online, and when all the books are online, and we should continue to teach it when every student is doing their homework on a digital device. Because this resistance, whilst presumably futile, is all about bodies, those bookish-bodies holding books, and those bound-book bodies being held. And bodies books certainly have; books have chapters, from the Latin for head, ‘caput’, whilst pages have feet for their footnotes. The book’s body has a spine, and their contents can have an appendix. Even references to sections being ‘above’ or ‘below’ rather than ‘shallower’ or ‘deeper’ within the text suggest that it should be standing on its feet.
24 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
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And where there are bodies there are interactions; nothing knows it even has a body until it starts to resist the world. Birkerts, in an article for The Atlantic, discusses codex reading as existing as part of such an interacting system. He describes the system of libraries and fi ling
that have grown up around the bound-book form, but he also describes how our bodies gain access via participation: ‘[t]hat system,’ says Birkerts, ‘stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly’ (2009). He knows what it means to touch a book. I don’t think he expresses it that well here, but he is beginning to get to the root of all the ‘it just doesn’t feel right’ type of arguments.
Birkerts suggests that we can interact with ‘the labour and taxonomy of human understanding’ haptically, via our tactile interactions with objects. This seems to ring true; we interact with the world via touch, and always have. From primates becoming one with the forest canopy as they travelled, each brachiating limb extending out and amalgamating with the drooping liana, to the invention and mass deployment of hammers and other simple hand tools which extrapolated the skills of the naked arm, our species’ evolutionary history is based around touch and what the neurologist Frank Wilson describes as ‘incorporation’. To incorporate something into ourselves requires that we treat an external object as if it was part of our fl esh. Heidegger would have called this ‘ready-to-hand’; the sociologist Andy Pickering might describe it as a temporarily stable interaction between two subjects in a ‘dance of agency’; an evolutionary cognitive psychologist like Merlin Donald might look at how ‘incorporated’ objects allow us to actually extend our cognition; and a philosopher, such as Andy Clark, might even see it, at times, as an extension of our minds.
Andy Clark and David Chalmers demonstrate how our interactions with objects might alter the focus of cognition from a place inside our heads to somewhere out there, in the world, forming a ‘coupled system’ between human and object ‘that can be seen as
a cognitive system in its own right.’ In a very simple example they discuss the use of pencil and paper to jot down lecture notes, to do a hard sum, or to take a long list, all tasks which the human mind alone could not perform accurately. Cognition, at this point, is spread onto the paper
and pencil, it forms an extension of the brain’s own short term memory. For Merlin Donald, if the notepad is a prosthetic short term memory, then a library represents much more long term storage.
Along with these extensions it is important to note that our hands’ interactions and brains’ contemplations are intimately linked. Frank Wilson’s study in The Hand, is an excellent entry point to this fi eld, but contemporary research into gesture and pedagogy has provided compelling evidence of this symbiosis in action. Psychologists from the University of Chicago studied a class performing basic mathematics problems such as 3+2+8 = BLANK+8. The students had to learn to resolve the equation by fi nding the single digit which is equivalent to 3+2, i.e. they must understand the concept of ‘grouping’ – adding numbers together to produce an analogue which balances the sum. In order to teach this act of ‘grouping’ tutors were getting students to draw a little ‘v’ shape with their fi nger under the 3 and the 2, physically tying them together. Sure enough students understood the concept signifi cantly faster than when the technique was not deployed. But the researchers also found, over the course of the study, that it didn’t matter where the students drew the ‘v’ at all, it was the very act of making the gesture which introduced and sublimated the concept (ScienceDaily, 2010).
So our touchings of the world can have a profound effect. Both Clark and Donald suggest that what makes humans distinctive is not consciousness, per
se, but cognition offl oaded, cognition, to use Edwin Hutchins’ term, in the wild.
Part of what Birkerts, and others, might be mourning then, is that it may seem that we are taking our hands out of reading through digitisation, removing our ‘tactile observation’, as it were. We see the most important aspects of our world with our hands, our skin. No wonder that so many avid readers, so many holders of printed books, feel that they must speak out – perhaps they subconsciously fear that the new technology might make us haptically blind?
It’s not my intention here to lay out how we should respond to these changes in the book form, whether we should receive them in a positive or negative light, whether we should receive them at all. But I do want to say that we should start to take these kind of changes seriously, not writing off any resistance as doom-mongering or Ludditisim, and certainly not saying what might actually amount to such, that these changes will never come, that the book will always remain in its present comfortable form. This last assertion seems the most problematic of all in some ways; it does a profound disservice to the rich studies of book history and textual criticism, disciplines, incidentally, which should certainly be used to contextualise the digital, which have demonstrated the profundity of the changes the form has experienced over the course of its 2000-some years of evolution. But it also ignores, once again, the contemporary experience of interacting with the written word; as Stuart Moulthrop has said: ‘[t]he book
if popular media taught us anything about digital books, it's that they don't smell right
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 25
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is already ‘dead’ (or superseded) if by ‘alive’ you mean that the institution in question is essential to our continued commerce in ideas’ (1991, p.698).
We are, potentially, on a road to no longer needing books, which is why we need to be able to articulate just why we might want them. When we are talking about what they do best, when we are teaching how the words on their pages are different to their words on the screen then we need to fully appreciate aspects of the form that we have often previously taken for granted. The page space, its borders and typography, its footnotes and endnotes, its indexes and contents lists, the covers which separate it from the world, the opacity of its leaves, its linear order, all of which make up the book as we have come to accept it, are reconfi gured into articles to discuss, rather than invisible facets of the gestalt we know as the codex.
Now, it seems I’ve said a lot in defence of the traditional book form here, but what I really wanted to emphasise is that digitisation reinvigorates our discussions of the materiality of texts. When we take seriously the fact that books, digital or bound, have bodies, then we can start to get to the heart of the effects of the changes which we are seeing. If, as humans, we have extended our minds onto our artefacts in the past, then isn’t it likely that we will continue to do so? What better way to try to understand how we might put aspects of ourselves into digital reading, than to consider how we have used the bound-book form to do the same thing?
In this way a course on digital writing could very well be based, ironically, around the bound book, taking a part of its anatomy each week, and then exploring it and seeing how digitisation might turn the effects of each element upon their heads. The footnote could be paired with the hyperlink, linearity with the internet, or codexical materiality with a perceived digital incorporeality that Matthew Kirschenbaum’s forensic studies might certainly justly refute (2008, passim).
Although I’ve tried to gesture toward a number of disciplines which I think have a logical place in the digital writing classroom, I’ve consciously resisted the term ‘interdisciplinary’. Interdisciplinarity suggests, or I think should suggest, the adoption of alternative discourses, something which only comes either from embedding yourself within a discipline which differs from that in which you have previously trained, or by collaborating with a practitioner from another discipline and allowing your voices to merge. At this point it is perhaps not appropriate, at least as far as teaching these changes is concerned, to attempt either, and for the most part this stems from the sheer range of disciplines required to interpret these events; to be interdisciplinary at this time, for these changes, would necessarily be to attempt polymathism.
However, specialisation is the privilege of established discipline, and we do not yet have that luxury, either in the Digital Humanities or in whatever subsection of such digital reading may provoke into existence. Any discussion of digital reading devices and their associated texts can no longer afford to ignore the diversity of fi elds required to begin mapping the effects of these early days, and whilst the study and pedagogy might not be truly interdisciplinary, it can be outward looking, generous, and deferential where appropriate.
I have alluded here to Philosophy, Evolutionary Cognitive Psychology, Biology, Neuroscience, Forensic Investigation, Copyright Law, Sociology, Textual Criticism, and Book History. All of these, for me, seem a natural, and logical fi t alongside English Studies as it comes to focus on the objects and bodies of digital and digitised reading. Devices such as the iPad and the Kindle represent potent sites which, without a discipline of their own,
at least as yet, must mark a coming together of scholarship, and a concomitant adjustment to our pedagogy. Students can then begin to contribute to a variety of fi elds after an exciting period of education, the tools of which they can very swiftly put into practise, instantaneously in the case of observation and refl ection on the story which is unfolding around them.
We obviously can’t teach everything, but that’s always been true. A large part of university English study is about opening doors to new ways of thought via literary works. The same is true when we encounter digital texts, but the doors to more disciplines, whose effects might then be felt in all aspects of English Studies as we relearn the materiality we so often neglect, become, perhaps, easier and more logical to open.
ReferencesBirkerts, Sven, 1994. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber.
Birkerts, Sven, 2009. ‘Resisting the Kindle’ [Online] (updated 2 March 2009) Available at: www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903u/amazon-kindle[Accessed 30 June 2009].
Clark, Andy, and David J. Chalmers, 1998. ‘The Extended Mind.’ Analysis, 5, pp.10-23.
Hayles, Katherine, 2008. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 2008. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Moulthrop, Stuart, 1991. ‘You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media.’ The New Media Reader. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, pp.692-704.
ScienceDaily, 2009. ‘Gestures Lend A Hand In Learning Mathematics; Hand Movements Help Create New Ideas’ [Online] (updated 6 March 2009) Available at: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090224133204.htm [Accessed 9 July 2010].
Solomon, Deborah, 2009. ‘Book Learning’ [Online] (updated 2 December 2009) Available at: www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/magazine/06fob-q4-t.html?_r=1 [Accessed 2 July 2010].
a course on digital writing could very well be based, ironically
around the bound book
26 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Features
Making connections: between and beyond teaching and researchAlice Bennett considers the forces that mould teaching and research identities today.
Alice Bennett is a part-time tutor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, where she contributes to modules on the novel and on modern drama. Her most recent publication is "Anticipated Returns: Purgatory, Exchange and Narrative After Life", Oxford Literary Review 31.1 (2009).
This was a paper originally presented as part of a round
table discussion in the context of a conference given at Durham
University for teachers of English Literature at GCSE and A Level. The
context here is important, with the discussion being predicated on the idea
that the audience were teachers and the panel were researchers, introducing and
exploring the topic of the movement “from research to teaching”. As a newly-minted PhD,
whose role in my department is solely as a teacher, this was a rather awkward dichotomy for me, and prompted me to start considering the relationships between my identities and activities in teaching and research.
From my students’ point of view, their fi rst introduction to me is probably as a researcher. If they look up my departmental web-profi le before meeting me for the fi rst time, they will fi nd out about my research and recent publications. When we meet face-to-face, I introduce myself by talking about my research interests and how these relate to the module content. In some ways, therefore, my classroom identity (and my classroom authority) is based on my identity as a researcher. The corollary to this, though, is that introducing my own interests becomes a way of asking the students about their interests; the periods, forms, concepts or authors which excite them, and urging them to draw out threads of connection between them. Expressing my identity as a researcher becomes a teaching tool for engendering this identity in students. However, at this post-doctoral point, I also do not get paid for my research, so my professional identity is as a teacher.
One thread in my research interests is issues of temporality, so the temporal relations attached to teaching and research are particularly intriguing for me. We framed our panel discussion as a movement ‘from research to teaching,’ and the characterisation of research as primary or originatory is something that is easy to slip into. There is a sense in which the research that takes place in the university becomes,
later, the material which is taught, not just in the universities but
in schools as well, as the knowledge somehow trickles down to be taught by other people in the classroom. Is one of the functions of my research to inform not just my teaching, but the teaching of others? In the context of the teachers who attended the conference at Durham, the time spent hearing about current research was additional to their ordinary teaching roles; something extra, perhaps for enrichment, or even an unrewarded obligation. In this sense, research comes after teaching, as something secondary and also supplementary.
The status of the link between teaching and research is a highly charged topic, with the implications of separating the two meaning different, and potentially damaging, identities for individuals and for whole institutions. The English Subject Centre is very clear on its position, and has previously offered well-evidenced and persuasive arguments for the inseparability of research and teaching, and against concentrating research in a smaller number of institutions. One of the observations made by Ben Knights on the English Subject Centre website illuminated the issue quite powerfully for me, when he observed that researchers who were taking on more teaching activities at the expense of research “will want to go on reading and debating their subject. That is what humanities academics do, though of course they largely do it in ‘their own’ time” (Linking Teaching and Research). This is a state of affairs that is by no means confi ned to humanities academics. From traditionally female (often caring) professions being paid less because of an unspoken assumption that women would ordinarily do this work for free, to the expectation that today’s new graduates should be prepared to undertake unpaid internships to secure one of a decreasing number of graduate jobs, there is a pervasive expectation that doing something you would do if you weren’t paid means that it is acceptable for your labour to go unrewarded.
The other factor associated with the potential for humanities research to be conducted as a supplementary activity in our ‘own time’ is the force
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 27
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of the internet as a power for making information freely available. This ‘free’ information is of the same order in some ways as the researcher’s ‘free’ time. Digitisation of resources, ideas and materials, however, also substitutes a model of connections for a unidirectional fl ow of information from research to teaching.
In terms of research, digitisation has already changed scholarly practices, through things like digitised archives, databases and searchable texts. The channels for the fl ow of research out of the closed group of researchers are wider, with open access journals, academic blogging and even social networking making new associations between people more fl exible and
diverse. It is easy to overplay the levelling potential of the internet,
though, and suggest that accessibility
automatically means access to scholarly material. If we think of the internet as an enormous text to which we are all contributing – editing, reading, writing – then the opportunities and responsibilities for us both as researchers and as teachers of text become almost overwhelming. The quantity and variety of information online also reinforces the need to teach research skills in processing and synthesising ideas, as much as locating and recording information.
As part of the process of thinking about the place of research in my teaching, I have tried a few experiments with my classes. The example I want to give here is of a class that I taught in spring 2010 on E.M. Forster’s Howards End. The context of the class was a second-year group on a course called the Literature of the Modern Period, which takes in a range of early-twentieth century writing. One of the things I have been trying to develop in my own teaching this year has been to make some distinctions in my approach depending on the stage of the students. Perhaps because my research background is in narrative theory, fi rst-year classes often tend to involve hammering home points about how texts are working and achieving their effects, and I was trying to think of a way to make the approach different and to nurture some new ways
of approaching texts, particularly for the students who had signed up for a second year of tutorials with me.
This led me to thinking about what satisfaction I get from my own research, and whether there was anything there I could do to identify and reproduce the processes and also the pleasures of research for my students. As well as teaching research skills, I wanted to be able to demonstrate how research actually feels.
Appropriately enough for the text we were discussing, the main pleasure that I identifi ed for myself was the moment of connecting concepts and synthesising unexpected ideas. So this was what I identifi ed as what motivates my
research: things fi tting together unexpectedly
and maybe not even very comfortably, but suddenly being
able to explain and conceptualise something in new terms. When I had read Howards End for the fi rst time, I’d come across a passage when Leonard Bast sits down to a pretty horrendous meal of reconstituted soup and pineapple jelly, which comes to signify a whole tangle of changes associated with modernity; mass production, homogenization, gender roles, offi ce work, imperialism, time, capitalism, urban life and so on. In the context of my research interests on time and narrative, this jelly square was something I stored away for the future, as a useful metaphor for thinking about temporality and modernity. This concentration of so many important contemporary factors into this one image opened up the text in a new way for me, and I set out to reconstitute this research experience for my students. When I came to class with a real packet of jelly they were fairly tolerant, and they did seem to reproduce the experience I had, using this single concept as a way of uniting lots of disparate ideas in one place, and exposing points of friction and lack of cohesion. They even went on and analysed the syntax of the passage in terms of jelly
cubes, and the novel itself as a synthetic substitute for real life, offering a critique of nineteenth-century realism.
The class went pretty well, and everyone went away enthusiastic, and I didn’t get fi red for using jelly as a teaching aid. However, the more I refl ected on this, the less self-congratulatory I felt, and the more this pineapple jelly ended up suggesting some of what I had tried to achieve with the class, but couldn’t actually realise. I had created an artifi cial situation for my students to experience something of what research meant to me, but which was really more of a synthetic version of research; a copy that reproduced my own experiences afterwards and at one remove. I had set
the parameters,
and identifi ed the questions they were going to address, even if they did some pretty surprising and impressive work of investigating them. My attempts at teaching research are always going to come after the research experiences I have at fi rst hand myself.
When it comes to the complexities of the relationships between teaching and the research – as with the new permutations of research and teaching engendered by the internet – saying “only connect” is not really suffi cient. These connections are overlapping, unwieldy and tricky to reconcile: their origins and destinations are obscured or misleading, and they are dependent on shifting identities. There is no way for us to get outside teaching and research, and our attempts to understand the links between the two are always going to have to come, at least in part, from personal experience, refl ection, and transformation.
ReferencesKnights, Ben ‘Linking Teaching and Research’ (2010) English Subject Centre website. www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/linking/index.php [Accessed 1 July 2010].
28 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
XXXXXXXXX
Mary McNally University of DerbyI'd like to wish the English Subject Centre all the best for the future and thanks for all you've done for me, personally, over the past ten years. I've really appreciated the day-schools you've organized—they've helped immensely in my day-to-day practice. Particularly useful and memorable ones were Teaching Tudor Literature, Teaching Shakespeare, Teaching Renaissance Literature, Computer-Aided Assessment in English, Networking Day for Admissions Tutors and the excellent Renewals Conference in 2007. I also remember Thinking Outside the Box: English Film and New Media at Hull in 2005 where I was able to publically showcase my e-learning module Shakespeare Today. I received lots of useful feedback from Brett Lucas, in particular, and the module has gone from strength to strength ever since! That colloquium helped to sharpen the focus about how I could improve my module by adding specifi c types of technology-enhanced learning, like wikis and blogs, in order to make the module more interactive.
I've always been keen on the way ESC events are informally set up to include everyone and to encourage the sharing of ideas; no-one need ever feel left out. I've liked, too, that if you suggest a topic for an event, it's always acted upon and you feel as if you can be an active part of a widespread, yet committed, teaching network. Here's to the next ten years - you're an invaluable resource!
Arran Stibbe University of GloucestershireOver the last fi ve years I have been involved with the English Subject Centre in a variety of ways – I have written up my teaching practice in case studies published in the Centre website, written a feature article on Education for Sustainability for the newsletter, and was lucky that a member of the Centre staff came to facilitate an away day for our course team. My involvement with the Subject Centre has been extremely helpful in giving an extra sense of legitimacy to my teaching innovation. In a sector that can be quite rigid in reproducing disciplinary identities and quite intolerant of those who question whether those identities are appropriate in the changing conditions of the world this has helped me
gain acceptance for new ways of doing things. There is always the question of whether institutions like the Higher Education Academy exist to mould the academy to the badly thought-out
whims of the government, and this is a danger I recognise. My experience, however, has been that there are enough layers of academics between the government and actual
lecturers on the ground to minimise this danger, and the Subject Centre has acted as a catalyst for refl ection on practice, evaluation of teaching methods
and carefully thought out innovation that responds to real needs. The English Subject Centre, and the Academy's Education for Sustainability
Project which I have also worked closely with, have helped me change my professional identity. I have moved from being a researcher who occasionally disseminates research fi ndings to students, to a refl ective educator where my research and educational practice are integrated. I now approach the deep question of what my role as an educator is under the conditions of the 21st century with as much rigour as I approach the research questions in my specialist area.
In celebration of our birthday we have asked some of the academics we’ve come to know over the years to refl ect upon their engagement with the Subject Centre during the last decade. Although we carefully archive events, publications and projects on our website, often ‘outcomes’ are intangible and the ‘impact’ of talking about teaching with colleagues is signifi cant but protracted and iterative. The narratives below go some of the way towards capturing those more elusive interactions and successes and they also provide an unexpected trip down memory lane. Here, and throughout this edition are a few of the responses we received; you can fi nd more on the anniversary page of our website: http:// tinyurl.com/2w8a4nn.
2000 – 2010
The English Subject Centre......and me
I'd like to wish the English Subject Cpersonally, over the past ten years. Ihelped immensely in my day-to-dayTudor Literature, Teaching Shakespein English, Networking Day for Admremember Thinking Outside the Bopublically showcase my e-learning mBrett Lucas, in particular, and the mhelped to sharpen the focus about technology-enhanced learning, like
I've always been keen on the way encourage the sharing of ideas; notopic for an event, it's always acteyet committed, teaching network.
Arran Stibbe UniverOver the last fi ve years I have beehave written up my teaching pracarticle on Education for Sustainabstaff came to facilitate an away dbeen extremely helpful in giving that can be quite rigid in reproduwhether those identities are app
gain acceptance for new waylike the Higher Education
whims of the governmbeen that there
lecturers oacted a
and cEng
Prmo
Creative Pedagogies
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 29
Creative Pedagogies
Teaching English Grammar 3 July 2010
It was a beautiful summer’s day in Winchester. The town centre was buzzing with the magic and
excitement of the Hat Fair, and Argentina was about to play Germany in the World Cup. That 22
teachers, lecturers, researchers, and postgraduate students chose to spend the Saturday indoors at a
symposium bears witness to the drawing power and relevance of the subject: Teaching English Grammar.
The day had developed out of a perceived lack of communication between different levels of education and across different
disciplines, and its main success was the opportunity to ‘build bridges’, as one of the participants named it. In particular, the
breaks and the fi nal round-table gave delegates the opportunity to talk to ‘professionals from other sectors,’ gain insight
into other linked areas, and ‘listen to other perspectives’. Participants and speakers played an equal part in this ongoing
discussion, with voices from English Language Teaching via English Language and Literature in sixth-forms and at universities,
as well as other disciplines such as sociology, and concerns such as widening participation. The discussion was motivated,
directed, inspired by the presentations of the day.
Three talks in the morning introduced us to issues concerning English Grammar in different teaching environments: Shaun
O’Toole (Itchen College) spoke for the sixth-form colleges. He noted the challenges which subject criteria and assessment
objectives present and how these can be mastered within a sixth-form teaching space. His practical examples demonstrated
how fruitful the exchange of good practice can be, and he opened the general discussion with a list of issues that were
reiterated throughout the day (i.e. do students get bored of grammar? Is it just for the language subjects?). Devon
Campbell-Hall (Southampton Solent University) spoke for the HE sector, but from the perspectives of widening participation
and as a teacher of English Literature. If the previous presentation focused on grammar as a means of analysis, Campbell-Hall
considered it as tool for language production, leading straight into the third presentation by Peter Watkins (University of
Plymouth) on English as a Foreign Language. The necessity for some form of grammar has lead to much experience within
this fi eld, but even here we fi nd very different perceptions – from those students who complain if they are not taught enough
to those for whom the word ‘grammar’ better be avoided.
Whether grammar is a ‘bad’ word
or should be positively embraced
by us and thus stripped of negative
connotations remained another
of the main points of discussion
throughout the day. Our fi rst
afternoon speaker, Colette Gordon
(Royal Holloway, University of
London), used Milton to bring the
importance of this issue for other
subjects to our attention and raised
the question whether unpopularity
of grammar spreads to unpopularity
of subjects in need of it. Bas Aarts
(UCL) and Dan Clayton (UCL)
introduced us to a new platform
which uses the International Corpus
of English for fun and effective
grammar exercises.
Overall it was felt that one day was not enough. So watch this space for Teaching English Grammar 2 or join the TEG mailing
list at http://bit.ly/bPnl0K. Thank you to the English Subject Centre, the University of Winchester’s Learning & Teaching Unit
and its Centre for Research into Language.
Carolin Esser,
University of Winchester
English Subject Centre
Participants at the event
30 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Creative Pedagogies
A Tale of Two Projects using technology to change teaching practice
The Subject Centre was the partner in two projects over the last year that have focussed on the use of technology to change the way a department has traditionally operated. At Bath Spa University, the Creative Writing team have been experimenting with an online collaborative writing tool used in real-time to enhance the workshopping of students' stories and screenplays. At Blackpool and The Fylde College, a small team drawn from HE English is developing a set of VLE materials to assist the transition from Further Education to Higher Education. Both projects present new pedagogical approaches, tackle the scepticism of colleagues towards technology in the classroom and develop new assessment criteria.
After receiving a small amount of seed funding, each project took advantage of the ‘Change Academy’ framework, a well-established programme and support system offered by the Higher Education Academy. ‘Change Academy’ has been successfully used in institutional benchmarking and Pathfi nder projects. It involves a formal approach to the development of project plans, assembling a team, completing a risk analysis and includes consultancy support from the Subject Centre and a 'critical friend' based at another HEI for the lifetime of the project. Participation in a series of events, including two residentials, helped each project team to think through how the planned changes would affect staff, students and the wider ecosystem around the courses themselves. Change Academy 'CAMEL' events also provided the teams with an opportunity to interact with peers doing similar projects and have proven to be an integral and valued part of the research process.
Bath Spa University, Project Leader Steve MayCreative Writing: Using Technology for On-Screen and Online WorkshoppingWorkshopping, the standard model for the teaching of Creative Writing at all levels, involves intensive use of paper, printing and making multiple copies of student work (which is then annotated by peers and tutors). This process is limited in the interaction between participants: generally speaking only the student whose work is under scrutiny will see all the comments. Others will be "blind" to all input but their own. The Bath Spa project explored new and more fl exible ways of workshopping, involving online and on-screen sharing of documents.
The project has piloted use of the document sharing tool Etherpad (http://etherpad.org/) with a group of year 3 undergraduate script-writing students and later with an MA group. The results have been positive: the undergraduate students immediately took to the technology, and quickly developed their own protocols for its use. The postgraduate students were initially more suspicious and not as wholly convinced of the superiority of the method over use of paper, but did report positively on the speed of editing and the extra level of feedback. You can fi nd out more about this project on the Subject Centre website: http://bit.ly/atSL8IBath Spa University's Newton Park campus.
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 31
Creative Pedagogies
Blackpool and The Fylde College, Project Leader Candice SatchwellDeveloping online materials to support progression from FE to HE English Programmes
Blackpool and The Fylde College has an excellent record in students progressing from FE onto HE programmes incorporating English. The College has delivered a BA (Hons) English Language, Literature and Writing programme for over 10 years, and more recently has developed a BA (Hons) in English: Communications at Work, and a Foundation Degree in Writing and Media Production. All of these courses are validated by Lancaster University.
Although the College is clearly successful in encouraging students to progress, there are still issues which present problems in relation to progression, particularly from level 3 to level 4, and from Foundation to Honours level. The team has an understanding of what these issues are, and recognise that the issues are common to many HE in FE institutions. However, the College has not yet developed a comprehensive means of addressing the problems in a practical sense. The Blackpool and The Fylde Change Academy project is developing online materials that will be made available for students throughout their time at the College, but targeted at problematic transition periods in their learning career. For example, the project will provide supporting materials to provide a bridge into English language study at level 4 for students who lack an English language/linguistic basis at level 3. Similarly materials will be developed for those who have studied English language but not English literature, or for those who have not studied Creative Writing previously. For some students this may comprise a compulsory unit to be completed before the course begins; for others it could be an optional revision activity.
Project materials are being written by subject specialists from the College, who have an understanding of the students’ diffi culties, supported by teaching and learning specialists and learning technology experts from the College, the English Subject Centre and JISC. Find out more about this project on the Subject Centre website: http://bit.ly/cKVsnG
Brett Lucas,English Subject Centre
Students at Blackpool and The Fylde College participate in focus groups to inform the development of the materials for the project.
32 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Creative Pedagogies
A year in the life of Ms E-MentorMany readers may remember that we profi led the role of Rosie Miles, senior
lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, in WordPlay 3. Rosie, who had
been one of our highly successful e-learning advocates and is also one of the
co-authors of the English Subject Centre Good Practice Guide to Design,
Moderation and Assessment of Online Discussion, was taking on a new role
providing bespoke workshops for English departments as well as regularly
updating a blog charting a year in the life of her work as an e-tutor on
courses where she had incorporated a discussion forum component.
In all Rosie visited seven English departments
with a variety of teaching contexts including 2 FE
colleges teaching HE English Courses: Exeter, Surrey,
Yeovil, Cumbria, Falmouth, Blackpool and The Fylde and Winchester. All of these
departments were new to her, in the sense that she had had no previous contacts
on an e-learning front with colleagues there. Certainly the offer of someone coming
(for free!) to discuss e-learning within English in a very practical way seemed much
appreciated, and the call for expressions of interest from departments in the
autumn term was taken up very quickly by some.
Rosie has agreed to continue her consultancy role into the academic year
2010-11. This means she will continue to update her popular blog and will carry out
a limited number of departmental visits from January onwards.
If your department is seeking some ideas about how to develop online activities
using a Virtual Learning Environment or is interested in seeing 'live' VLE use in an
HE English course, has some questions about what is or isn't working in terms of
e-learning in your classes or for other colleagues in English, then a visit from Rosie
might just be what your department needs.
For more details, see the English Subject Centre's e-learning pages: http://tinyurl.com/3a798xy
or Rosie's blogsitewww.english.heacademy.ac.uk/mse-mentor
e
2 FE
'Rosie has produced
some excellent assessment guidelines
and criteria which she discussed on the day and then sent round as an e-document – these are
really useful as a basis for future development on
our own modules.'In a
w'Staff
are already suggesting ways
of adapting the good practice that was made evident through the
presentation, and were really thrilled
to meet you.'
201
a'We very much enjoyed
the session and all involved found it
extremely interesting. It has already begun to
infl uence our ongoing development of the
programme.'
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 33
Creative Pedagogies
Chris Hopkins Sheffi eld Hallam University(Member of the Subject Centre Advisory Board from 2003-8)
On the 1st January 1991 I was appointed to my fi rst full-time lectureship in English, at Sheffi eld City Polytechnic. By the 3rd of January I was also responsible for a new fi rst-year English module laconically named 'Skills', which, I gathered, arose from a well-intended institutional policy. When I enquired what the content of 'Skills' was, I got the distinct impression that no one was very certain. Nineteen years later and I'm still module leader for what is now called 'Introduction to English Studies' at Sheffi eld Hallam University. I do think it's a much better module than 'Skills' ever was, but it still does, indeed, try to help students understand and deal constructively, practically and intellectually with the transition between school / college and degree level learning and simultaneously with the transition between A Level / Access English and University English. This double-focus on how learning works (or might work) at university and on what and how we learn when we study English is the key development from Skills days.
One of the things which intervened in the twenty years between the naivety of 'Skills' and the still unfi nished project of Introduction to English Studies was the English Subject Centre's establishment in 2000. There must surely have been places to discuss such things in 1991, but on the whole I don't think I knew about them. The English Subject Centre provided me with a forum over the period where I and colleagues could test our conclusions about what and how we should be teaching fi rst-year English students and compare our strategies and problems with other people's in other departments. Thus in the period between 2000 and 2008 in particular, I attended in one capacity or another numerous English Subject Centre Events or related events which fed and informed what was now a minor obsession with teaching fi rst-year English students. The English Subject Centre through encouraging speaking and listening at events, and inviting writing for its newsletter or web-site, has helped English academics not only to share and borrow theories and practices on specifi c English topics such as this one, but also to develop their own partly subject-specifi c ways of thinking and talking about learning and teaching, discourses which have been used to articulate and refl ect on current practices and assumptions and to develop better, or try alternative, practices (as well as to resist or refi ne overly-generic institutional expectations).
Christopher Ringrose University of NorthamptonWhat the Subject Centre means to me: (a) two fi ne Directors over the past decade (Philip Martin and Ben Knights) possessed of energy, integrity and ideas; (b) a great team, always quick to respond to queries; and (c) a fund of ideas for developing English and Creative Writing. Personally, two things stand out. The Centre’s E-Learning Advocate Project was based on the premise that the way to develop technology-enhanced learning was to recruit small teams oflecturer- enthusiasts, get them together with Brett Lucas to share ideas and techniques and learn some new ones, and then have them encourage others in their home institutions. It has had lasting infl uence at those universities, and more generally through Rosie Miles’s entertaining and informative Blog on the Centre website, and the recent Good Practice Guide to Online Discussion. The Renewals International Conference at Royal Holloway in July 2007 was another highlight, full of inspiring ideas, and with a memorable plenary talk from Richard E. Miller. In fact, thinking over ten years of the English Subject Centre sent me back to its website. Each year it is hard to see what one might squeeze in there that has not already been covered in some way – but it keeps generating new angles. One can discover in T3 new ways of approaching texts one is teaching, or read one of the excellent good practice guides, from Part Time Teaching to Work Related Learning. You can also order Why Study English? , an unassuming little pamphlet that ‘fl ies off the shelves’ at university Open Days, or something from the scholarly and up-to-date book series (‘Teaching the Gothic... Teaching Children’s Fiction etc.). But for me the Centre is more than a bank of professional materials; through its meetings, one-day events and project teams it has helped me to meet up with English lecturers from all over the UK, and share ideas about learning and teaching that don’t often fi nd a space in standard academic conferences.
The English Subject Centre......and me2000 – 2010
ome new t those
ntre website, at Royal alk from ebsite. me way – eaching, ng. You ersity aching h
34 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Creative Pedagogies
The table below was commissioned by the English Subject Centre from HESA in order to provide a breakdown of all English subjects as identifi ed through JACS codes. (In the public data on the HESA website only the single heading ‘English studies’ is used.) It also gives the fi gures for Creative Writing (JACS code W8 ‘Imaginative Writing’ which includes script, poetry and prose writing.)
The table below updates by one year the one published in WordPlay Issue 3 (table 7 on p.32), which contained a transposition error in the 2007/08 fi gures for Imaginative Writing, an error which also affected the data in table 8.
There is a larger version of the table below on our website at http://tinyurl.com/3932usr which shows student numbers by origin (EU, UK, non-EU) and by gender. HESA warns that it is possible for some institutions to code certain subjects generically at this level of detail. For example, some students studying Q321 ‘English Literature by Period’ may actually be classifi ed as Q300 ‘English Studies’.
All HE Students with a specifi ed subject of study by academic year, subject of study, mode of study, level of study, domicile and gender 2003/04 to 2008/09
Academic year 4 digit subject of study Total HE
StudentsFull timePostgraduate
Full timeUndergraduate
Part timePostgraduate
Part timeUndergraduate
2008/09 (Q300) English studies 37958 2243 28292 1554 5869
(Q310) English language 4124 246 3312 121 446
(Q320) English literature 13104 574 7654 465 4412
(Q321) English literature by period 593 287 1 82 223
(Q322) English literature by author 100 22 0 15 63
(Q323) English literature by topic 265 91 2 121 52
(Q330) English as a second language 3721 83 1783 13 1841
(Q340) English literature written as a second language 1 0 0 0 1
(Q390) English studies not elsewhere classifi ed 143 60 56 10 17
(W8) Imaginative writing 6149 705 3268 1142 1035
2008/09 Total 66158 4309 44369 3522 13959
2007/08 (Q300) English studies 42608 2547 29184 1414 9464
(Q310) English language 3754 227 2968 123 436
(Q320) English literature 12033 434 7361 543 3694
(Q321) English literature by period 296 155 3 72 67
(Q322) English literature by author 103 24 0 18 61
(Q323) English literature by topic 584 81 15 126 363
(Q330) English as a second language 2336 54 1113 24 1146
(Q340) English literaturewritten as a second language 9 0 5 0 4
(Q390) English studies not elsewhere classifi ed 184 55 96 23 11
(W8) Imaginative writing 5414 547 2778 959 1132
2007/08 Total 67322 4123 43522 3301 16376
English and Creative Writing Student Numbers 2004/05 – 2008/09Jane Gawthrope, English Subject Centre
Jane GawthropeEnglish Subject Centre manager
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 35
Creative Pedagogies
2006/07 (Q300) English studies 43050 2609 30142 1536 8762
(Q310) English language 3162 145 2409 65 543
(Q320) English literature 10522 471 5746 521 3785
(Q321) English literature by period 258 163 6 87 3
(Q322) English literature by author 183 13 0 8 162
(Q323) English literature by topic 202 52 3 91 57
(Q330) English as a second language 1605 147 615 10 833
(Q340) English literature written as a second language 55 0 52 0 3
(Q390) English studies not elsewhere classifi ed 136 60 27 35 15
(W8) Imaginative writing 6397 504 2503 855 2536
2006/07 Total 65570 4162 41502 3207 16699
2005/06 (Q300) English studies 42999 2769 30420 1788 8021
(Q310) English language 2916 124 2251 48 494
(Q320) English literature 9398 362 4975 166 3896
(Q321) English literature by period 287 134 8 86 60
(Q322) English literature by author 169 11 0 18 140
(Q323) English literature by topic 207 34 3 66 104
(Q330) English as a second language 1252 113 724 6 410
(Q340) English literature written as a second language 0 0 0 0 0
(Q390) English studies not elsewhere classifi ed 171 53 55 38 25
(W8) Imaginative writing 5791 458 2249 671 2413
2005/06 Total 63190 4057 40685 2886 15562
2004/05 (Q300) English studies 43627 2526 30622 1852 8626
(Q310) English language 2640 111 1948 45 537
(Q320) English literature 8957 337 4386 166 4069
(Q321) English literature by period 370 193 9 87 81
(Q322) English literature by author 204 9 0 18 177
(Q323) English literature by topic 166 35 4 57 70
(Q330) English as a second language 1373 51 741 2 580
(Q340) English literature written as a second language 0 0 0 0 0
(Q390) English studies not elsewhere classifi ed 138 70 24 29 15
(W8) Imaginative writing 5121 369 1791 605 2356
2004/05 Total 62596 3700 39525 2860 16511
Source: HESA Student Record 2004/05–2008/09 HESA does not accept any liability for any inferences or conclusions derived from the Data by the Client or any third party. Copyright Higher Education Statistics Agency 2010
Note: It is possible for some institutions to code certain subjects generically at this level of detail, eg some students studying Q321 'English Literature by period' may actually be classifi ed as Q300 'English Studies'.
'Postgraduate' includes both PG taught and PG research students.
Academic year 4 digit subject of study Total HE
StudentsFull timePostgraduate
Full timeUndergraduate
Part timePostgraduate
Part timeUndergraduate
36 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Creative Pedagogies
Matthew Day Newman CollegeHow do they do it all? Hosting international conferences on pedagogy, supporting projects on e-learning, organising topic-specifi c conferences, hosting events for Heads of Subject and early-career lecturers, disseminating Teaching Tips from the academy, publishing Good Practice Guides and disseminating pedagogical research through its Teaching the New English volumes are just some of the more formal ways that the Subject Centre advocates and actively promotes excellence in the subject. Yet, useful indicator as it is of the opportunities the Subject Centre provides just listing the events, activities, publications and projects that it actively promotes doesn’t do justice to its vital role in enriching the teaching and learning of English across the academy. That’s because the impact of the Subject Centre transcends the immediate activity, event or publication.
Some examples help to manifest this. The e-advocates scheme brought together academics interested in promoting e-learning within our own institutions. Yet we ended with not only research-led pedagogy within institutions but also across organisations of different ilks as our networks developed and then diversifi ed. The impact of the project went well beyond – and continues to do so - its offi cial ‘completion’. My colleagues who attended the Early Careers Lecturers Conferences speak not only of the value of the event itself but the long-lasting and ongoing relationships they have established with colleagues who are at a similar stage in their career. Other lecturers in our team have returned to the department invigorated and enriched with ideas from attending subject-specifi c events. They share with other team-members the new examples of good practice they have seen in relation to their own research specialism and their new knowledge and expertise are applied to a much wider spectrum of staff and specialisms than the conference theme ever envisaged.
The diversity of the Subject Centre’s approaches, its carefully targeted and well-organised events, its understanding of the way academics work and are enthused and encouraged have meant that student learning and staff teaching have been enriched in ways that exceed the merely measurable.
Jan Jedrzejewski University of UlsterRemember the Subject Review? Back in 2001, with the RAE just out of the way, it was perhaps the hottest topic of discussion in university common rooms the length and breadth of the UK. Feared and loathed in equal measure, the Subject Review caused many of us sleepless nights, not least because English departments, with all the diversity of the teaching we offered and with the discipline-specifi c spirit of critical questioning informing everything we did, not to mention the almost proverbial eccentricity and sheer bloody-mindedness of some of our colleagues, particularly when faced with what they considered to be a bureaucratic encroachment upon their academic freedom, were never going to be easy to bring into line with what the QAA expected.
At this diffi cult point, enter the Subject Centre: the four Subject Review seminars, three in London and one in Glasgow, were, for many of us, the fi rst taste of what the Centre was to stand for over the years: a place where we could discuss the practicalities of what we did in our day-to-day work, be reassured that we were not the only ones who faced problems, get useful tips from colleagues who may already have found ways of dealing with this or that diffi culty or addressing this or that issue. And it is, to this day, this sense of collegiality and sharing that provides the most important feature of what the Centre does: it is a place where you can always drop in, whether to participate in an event or as you visit the website; an academic home from home where you can be sure of meeting like-minded people who can help you deal with whatever aspect of your pedagogic practice you are trying to do something about, whether you want to update the range of electronic resources you recommend to your students, or get tips about devising a format of assessment for that rather unusually structured module you are planning to introduce, or fi nd an external examiner for that new course you have just developed. The Subject Centre is therefore, above all, a community - it is there for us, but it could not exist without us, and we need to ensure it remains with us, for another 10 years and beyond. Ad multos annos!
The English Subject Centre......and me2000 – 2010
and one a place we were d ways of collegiality ou can
om home of your
of electronic hat
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 37
http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord/
Do you have any of the following related to Old English and Anglo-Saxon history, art, archaeology, and culture?
• a photograph of an Anglo-Saxon building (e.g. the church at Deerhurst)
• a photograph of an Anglo-Saxon 'site' or reconstructions (e.g. West Stow)
• a photograph of an Anglo-Saxon object (e.g. the Bewcastle Cross)
• a reading list used in teaching
• a set of slides used in a lecture
• a workbook of grammar exercises
• an article on Anglo-Saxon England or Old English
• a video of a re-enactment from the Anglo-Saxon period
• an audio recording of some Old English
• a work inspired by Old English
• and so on ...
Would you be willing to share any of this with other lecturers and teachers?If so please visit Oxford University’s Project Woruldhord and submit your material online. Deadline for submissions: 14th October 2010
This is an academic initiative led by Oxford University Computing Services, to gather together and preserve, in digital form, digital objects to do with the understanding, teaching, and research of Old English and the Anglo-Saxon period. It is an example of a community collection whereby all the items collected will be submitted by the international community (e.g. the general public, historical groups, learned societies, school teachers, academics, collectors, etc). We will then make these digital objects freely available on the Web for teaching and research in schools, colleges and universities, both in the UK and worldwide.
Project Director: Stuart LeeProject Researcher: Anna CaugheyProject Submission site: http://poppy.nsms.ox.ac.uk/woruldhordNews about the Project: http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord/Contact: woruldhord@oucs.ox.ac.uk
38 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
The Student Experience
The English Subject Centre’s student competition, now in its 5th year,
was a great success with fi fty entries, a new Subject Centre record!
This year's topic really enlivened students.
Congratulations to Phoebe Bown (University of Glasgow) who wrote
the best essay submitted by an English Literature, Creative Writing or
English language student. You can read her essay below followed by
runner-up Lara Clayton’s (Blackpool and
The Fylde College). They each won £300
and £200 respectively in gift vouchers.
The competition is an annual Higher
Education Academy event in which all
Subject Centres participate.
STUDENT
COMPETITION
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 39
The Student Experience
WINNERPhoebe Bown, University of Glasgow
I dimly remember that wonderful
time before I was an English literature
student. I would sprawl in the garden
in summer or on the sofa in winter with
a book always on the go, my constant
entertainer and guide. Eagerly I followed
every plot twist and obediently absorbed whatever lessons had
been prepared for me while scattering the pages with biscuit
crumbs. How long ago those days seem now, as I sit enclosed in
my labyrinthine stacks of books, literary journals, print-outs and
notes, armed only with my trusty highlighter. Before me the Text
lies, taunting me with its apparent docility. Around me critics
whisper in my ears, each suggesting a different tactical approach
to beat it into submission. I begin to advance warily, but
suddenly the looming, omnipotent fi gure of the Author appears
with a whoosh and starts pushing me this way and that, waving
contradictory notes in my face and laughing at my confusion.
Struggling, I manage to shake free and frantically begin to write.
Hours later I emerge, panting. My complexion is pasty, my
clothing dishevelled and my lips sticky with Red Bull and
chocolate, but none of this matters because before me lies the
Essay: 3000 words of clear, logical insight and orderly analysis.
With head held high and a small smile of satisfaction on my
face I stand in line with the other sleep-deprived students, the
combined smell of our unwashed bodies somehow suggestive
of glorious battle. I hand in the Essay with proud nonchalance
and retire to regain my strength. A week later the Essay comes
back to me. ‘Not bad.’ The marker writes, ‘Although your focus
on feminist critique has made you neglect some of the relevant
contextual issues. Maybe next time you could spend longer
on secondary reading. And planning. And re-editing. But well
done.’ Beside me, the Text sniggers quietly.
It is after such struggles that the idea of English being a ‘soft
option’ seems particularly ludicrous. As an English Literature
student, reading is not a pleasant piece of escapism. Contrary to
what fresh young fi rst years may think (as I, too, once thought,
before I had developed writing calluses on every fi nger and a
disbelieving squint on encountering daylight) you cannot simply
let the author take you by the hand and lead you on a little
adventure, then write gushingly about what techniques they
used to enthral and enrapture you. Unfortunately for us, English
is not a subject with a simple set of rules that you can learn and
then measure a book up to; there is nothing so simple as good
and bad, right and wrong. Rather, you have to navigate through
a mess of confl icting ideologies and approaches, somehow
fi nding and, even more daunting, explaining the route you take.
As such, reading becomes a means of engaging with the wider
world. You are taught to examine not only the explicit messages
of the text but also some of the implicit ideological assumptions
it makes. In the course of my degree I have been repeatedly
forced to reconsider some of my own and society’s unexamined
beliefs on topics such as gender, religion, capitalism, colonialism
and race while unpicking the attitudes towards them expressed
by the texts. These subjects, so easily reduced to single catch-all
words, open up into a vast and complicated living entanglement
when examined in literature. For example, science fi ction
works such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed or George
Orwell’s 1984 allow us to see fl eshed out models of otherwise
abstract philosophical or political ideas, as well as exploring the
importance of language in shaping our thought. Comparative
questions and themed modules encourage us not to look at
these texts in isolation as defi nitive works, but to compare and
analyse a wide range of approaches.
The evaluative skills that we laboriously acquire over the course
of many botched essays are undoubtedly useful. Albert Einstein
said, ‘Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too
little falls into lazy habits of thinking.’ It seems to me that English
Literature as a discipline teaches you never to use reading as a
substitute for thought, but rather as a stimulus to it in ever more
robust forms. Indeed, it might cheer the detractor of English
to know that even the value of the subject itself is routinely
scrutinised, both through theory and in the texts themselves.
I am currently studying Nabokov’s Pale Fire in which critical
analysis and the ‘reader’s interpretation’ are twisted to construct
an entire novel through the deranged explanatory notes to a 999
line poem, making analysing these notes a curiously self-aware
and shaky process. As well as this constant analysis of the texts,
literary theories and of one’s own methods, there remains the
challenge of self-expression; presenting any insights attained
in a way that is clear, thorough and persuasive. Thus you are
forced to turn your developing critical faculty inward as well and
constantly reappraise your own style.
So what is left at the end of all this decidedly un-soft work?
Hopefully, the years of effort and practice turn us into clear-
sighted, open-minded thinkers whose skills would be welcome
in most workplaces. But that is not all. Although this critical
approach to literature may at times seem completely at odds with
the simple ‘love of reading’ which we seek to instil in children
and which can bring so much pleasure and comfort, I’ve found
that studying English has brought other benefi ts. True, there
have been a few favourite old books which I have fl ung to the
fl oor, disillusioned at what I now see, but the amazing thing is
that anything that remains, any fragment or voice or image that
still speaks to me, or speaks now for the fi rst time, is all the more
valuable for doing so because it appeals to my brain and not just
my heart. Those moments of revelation are worth the struggle.
40 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
The Student Experience
RUNNER-UPLara Clayton, Blackpool and The Fylde College
Nine hundred and twenty-eight days ago I made a decision. It was different from the other decisions I’d been making, or rather not making... This decision was about life, reclaiming it and proving people wrong. I wanted to be somebody else, to hide
the labels that had been pinned upon my skin since I was sixteen, and to not be judged or pitied for my past. There was a box on the UCAS form I could have ticked; I paused... and left it blank.
Nine hundred and twenty-eight days ago I took a diffi cult step. My legs wanted to be an unmovable tree stump; roots sprouted from feet, burrowed into the carpet and planted me fi rmly within the soils of hesitation. An erratic butterfl y was caged within my chest, dusting bloodstream with doubt and pumping the poison directly into mind. It would have been easier to have taken a step backwards; the existence that waited behind me didn’t include expectations, essays or exams, but it was also void of purpose. And never to fi nd my meaning scared me far more than the door that led into a lesson about stylistic analysis... My hand shakily depressed the handle, pushing against uncertainties, deracinating feet and forcing self to enter the English Language, Literature and Writing degree.
Nine hundred and twenty-eight days ago my life was allowed to begin. However, none of those days has been simplistic or uncomplicated; each has been a challenge both emotionally and intellectually. There were moments when I considered quitting, but that would have meant I was choosing the soft option, while staying, studying and making it to the third year – 101 days until graduation – was an option that required me to climb a mountain, covered in hawthorn bushes, that never promised to be effortless, pain-free or unproblematic.
Over the last nine hundred and twenty-eight days I’ve completed twelve essays, eleven exams, four writing portfolios and one dissertation. I’ve written over 75,000 words, and have spent an uncountable number of hours reading and studying and worrying...
And then, 75,000 words are threatened by unsubstantiated comments, and generalisations that attempt to shadow English studies and Creative Writing in cynicism. Individuals standing on the outside of the English degree, believing they have a right to judge, to deem the subject pointless, and to label it as a “Mickey Mouse” course. The Feminist Critics I have studied, would revolt at such a claim: fi rstly, they’d probably wonder why Minnie Mouse was missing and then secondly, like anyone who has studied or is currently studying English, “What?” would transcend with bitterness and hurt from their mouths.
I’m not studying Language, Literature and Creative Writing because I believed it would be easy; it means something to me, so important in fact, it feels like an assault upon my own identity when individuals cast negative assumptions upon its merit. When it is inferred that Literature is inferior in stature to Mathematics, that Language isn’t as benefi cial as the Sciences, and that Creative
Writing has little academic value, my ideas and thoughts suffer the same branding: They’re inferior, meaningless and without value.
However, I have spent the last nine hundred and twenty-eight days learning. I have been taught by lecturers who believe in their respective subjects, and who have the ability to inspire minds with their knowledge. And I’ve listened to them; taken notes and read every handout I’ve been given. By the second year, my lounge had unintentionally transformed itself into a study; academic books had started to build themselves into towers, and I now gaze upon a cityscape of textbooks. Amazon no longer recommends works of fi ction, but instead suggests books about Deconstruction, Pragmatics and Poetics. Its recommendations are frighteningly accurate, highlighting that English isn’t just about improving one’s collection of ‘great’ literature, and that as English students we need to acquire skills that extend beyond an ability to read. I’ve been asked to discuss, analyse and consider – thinking and questioning, while ensuring I can validate ideas with appropriate theoretical models. Therefore, this degree requires my time, attention and commitment, not just during lessons but outside of them as well, and thus, it has affected my priorities and my life.
Nine hundred and twenty-eight days ago I entered into an unwritten agreement, and I have given every hour possible to ensuring that it’s fulfi lled. I’m cursed (or maybe blessed?) by perfectionism, which demands and expects more than I feel capable of giving – but I try. The nights are usually wide eyed; a chance to use hours that others dreamily waste. I’ll sip coffee at 3am, searching an essay for mistakes as an internal voice insists, “It’s not good enough... you’re going to fail.” The voice has a tendency to provide narration to accompany my studies, pushing me to discover that independent thought that might enable me to reach the higher classifi cations. It forces me to produce an excessive amount of drafts for a poem or a piece of prose; fi rst drafts are merely a myth. Good writing is only attainable through constant rewriting, causing drafts always to be more substantial in volume than the fi nished 5,000 word portfolio.
During the last nine hundred and twenty-eight days I’ve waited and worried for grades to be returned. I’ve sat there as though a judge has just passed sentence on my life, convinced I will soon stare failure directly in the eye... Thus far our eyes haven’t met, but the relief doesn’t remain. “You’ll have to achieve that mark again, you’ll have to better it,” says the internal narrator, and I become concerned by ‘What if...?’ A panic attaches itself like a barnacle to a rock, waves of doubt batter and then the tide fails to ebb; they all think I’m waving. Perhaps they haven’t read Stevie Smith’s poem...
However, for nine hundred and twenty-eight days I’ve been determined to climb the mountain. I’ve been accompanied, for most of the days, by self-doubt: worrying I’d fail, that I was incapable of achieving the expectations I had placed upon myself, and scared that I wasn’t strong enough to make it. But as the days progress closer to the summit, to the day when I hold three years of hard work in my hand, I realise that the things we fi ght for are far more important than those that have been acquired without struggle.
And when somebody asks: “What’s diffi cult about English and Creative Writing?” I refl ect upon the last nine hundred and twenty-eight days, and I think to myself: What’s easy about it...?
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 41
Networking Day for Subject Leaders of English and Creative Writing 22 April 2010
The sixth annual Networking Day for Subject Leaders of English and Creative Writing, took place at a moment of unusual uncertainty and stress in the sector. Structured around small group and plenary discussions one of the main goals of the day was to explore the dimensions of the role—the nature of subject leadership at this historical moment and the possibilities for infl uencing change contained within that role. Another goal was to facilitate the exchange of information among peers and help them
to form a richer picture of what is happening across the sector. There was signifi cant agreement among the 28 delegates as they spoke of similar frustrations in their role as balanced by similar motivations and joys. On the up side people spoke of the satisfaction they derived from helping colleagues and students to progress with research and promotion and the gratifi cation gained from being involved and actually working towards change and improvement within their departments, sections and schools. One delegate described the quiet pleasure he felt when every once in a while someone thanked him for his work as subject leader. These positives were counter-balanced by a host of negatives: leadership skills and abilities for strategic thinking and planning are woefully underused because so much time and energy is spent by subject leaders on administrative matters (often carried out by the subject leader in the absence of suffi cient or indeed any administrative support). Rather than working towards improving their degree programs, subject leaders frequently fi nd themselves tasked with the problem of ‘how can I make this degree cheaper?’ While perpetual reorganisations have left many subject leaders weary and worse off (reorganisations are often the moment admin support staff disappear or are spread across too many subjects to effectively help any of them), some delegates offered canny advice, such as hiring postgraduate students to do some of the administrative work, or guiding new Deans hungry for ‘small wins’ towards re-instating subject specifi c administrative support teams.
In the course of discussions subject leaders acknowledged how the current work environment is characterised by top-down management regimes but also recalled that it wasn’t always this way. While avoiding nostalgia for ‘the good old days’ some discussion dwelt on the earlier custom of faculty fora and academic senates where the entire academic staff of a HEI had the ability and motivation to be far more involved in the strategic direction a university might take.
After discussions devoted to leadership and the impact of funding cuts at their institutions, delegates were given the opportunity to nominate the topics/themes they most wanted to discuss with one another. Consensus evolved around the following six topics: assessment and external examining, coping with big change and leadership, curriculum and programme content, research issues (including balancing teaching and research, and encouraging colleagues’ research efforts), institutional engagement (particularly above subject level) and fi nally, student engagement and the NSS.
Feedback forms confi rmed that participants really appreciated the opportunity to meet colleagues, compare notes and share experiences and the Subject Centre plans to run a similar day next year.
Nicole King, English Subject Centre
English Subject Centre
The Why Study English postcard with eye-catching metallic fi nish is great for Open Days.
Copies are available free by emailing esc@rhul.ac.uk
42 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Some examples of the more than 1300 individual resources now available in the HumBox collection...
A PowerPoint presentation on Creativity and Theory from Matthew Sauvage, University of Winchester
A PowerPoint presentation and lecture handout for Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855) from Will Slocombe, Aberystwyth University
Seminar outline for HST115: The 'Disenchantment' of Early Modern Europe c. 1570-1770. Includes a handout/presentation on the printing press and associated photographs from Matt Philpott, University of Sheffi eld
Classical rhetorical devices - a quick 'ready to use' list from Lesley Coote, University of Hull
www.humbox.ac.uk
HumBox is an open collection of teaching resources that makes it easy for Humanities lecturers to publish, share and store their materials online.
You can upload things like seminar activities, lecture slides, podcasts and photos and download and adapt resources contributed by others. It’s all about sharing ideas, approaches and resources and saving you time.
Sharing made simple.
Why Contribute to HumBox?
• Showcase and share your learning resources with colleagues, potential students and the wider world.
• Enhance your reputation and that of your institution.
• Benefi t from allowing others to extend and enhance the resources you develop, and to suggest different ways in which they may be used.
• Create an archive of your work. HumBox is a safe, secure and easily accessible place to store resources.
• Become part of a growing network of Humanities colleagues sharing and re-using resources.
Why Download from HumBox?
• Don’t reinvent the wheel – if someone else has already developed a learning resource similar to the one you need, then adapt it.
• Diversify your teaching repertoire – use different approaches from your own and other subject areas to add variety to what you do.
• Find a resource to help you cope with those little teaching emergencies.
And above all...
• It’s free!
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 43
Teaching Digital Writing 23 April 2010
The Subject Centre’s fi rst event devoted entirely to teaching and doing digital writing was organised in collaboration with Kate Pullinger and Sue Thomas of the Faculty of Humanities and the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University and held at the state-of-the-art Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre in Leicester.
Thomas and Pullinger’s Transliteracy Research Group (TRG) unites communities of writers, librarians, practitioners and educators involved in developing teaching and defi ning the type of writing and reading that happens on screens large and small. Transliteracy, Thomas told the audience, is: the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, television, radio and fi lm, to digital social networks. Thomas also spoke of ‘encouraging our colleagues and students in transliteracy’ as a key to making sure students in higher education leave with the necessary skills to navigate the digital world with high levels of critical thinking and knowledge. Pullinger, an academic and highly regarded digital author, sees ‘cross-media story-telling’ and the project of ‘connecting writers to readers’ as one of the particular missions of any digital author whose text is often more fl uid and malleable than those which are paper-based. Pullinger also spoke of the potential diffi culties of monetizing digital writing in an online world where 'free' is still the common model. Another digital author, Tim Wright, who joined Pullinger as part of the panel, ‘Doing Digital Writing’ emphasised the appeal of ‘mashing up’ classical texts for students who might otherwise roll their eyes in dazed boredom when presented with the prospect of reading a text like Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. Wright, created ‘Kidmapped’ by going to Scotland and literally walking the terrain of the text, reading passages out loud and allowing the world to do the journey and the reading with him via the internet.
Digital writers explore what stories can be for readers by involving them in the process of creating and recreating them. They close the gap between author and reader by relinquishing control over certain areas of the text and inviting their readers to participate in the text’s creation or encouraging readers to become writers themselves by taking the original text as a starting point. Delegates pondered whether or not digital writing should be understood as literature or multi-media, and the consensus seemed to encompass both, with the greatest resistance being voiced about restricting digital writing to a narrow category as it borrows elements from gaming and fi lm among other forms. One person commented that the presentations and discussions ‘reconceived my sense of Digital Writing’.
A workshop led by Tim Wright emphasised the enormous number of ‘platforms’ we read and gain information from in the course of our daily routines, from our mobiles, laptops and radios, to shampoo bottles, cereal packets, and billboards. These are all texts digital authors can think about exploiting, exhorted Wright, as he talked about writing for smaller and smaller screens. The afternoon panel devoted to case studies about teaching digital writing featured Matt Hayler (University of Exeter) [see page 23], Will Slocombe (Aberystwyth University) and Ruth Page (University of Leicester) and her former student Hannah Chapman (Birmingham City University). Moving through the theory, the structuring of and the delivery of university courses devoted to digital writing, this panel raised questions about the sensory perceptions that are activated or possibly lost through digital writing, the challenges of both creating community and developing appropriate assessment mechanisms (which can contradict a notion of collaboration), and how digital writing may be the ideal mechanism through which to introduce students to literary theory and ‘ways of reading.’ In short, ‘teaching digitally’ raises all sorts of pedagogical issues of voice and style, assessment, plagiarism, and how students learn to conduct research and analyse online resources with sophistication. The spectre of a practice and theory divide (those who create digital writing versus those who teach it) led to calls for English departments to offer more creative modules and insure that our students learn a range of writing modes not just the essay. One delegate commented, that they ‘gained some exciting ideas for my pedagogy and my own writing practice’.
The keynote address was delivered by Henry Volans head of Digital Publishing at Faber and Faber. Volans highlighted a different divide: as innovative and challenging as much of digital writing is, the challenge for publishers is, quite simply, the profi t margin. E-books and the devices being designed for us to read them on are just one component of the discussion. As a business publishing is perhaps necessarily more conservative than the Creative Writing community itself. Volans did offer sound advice to any student hoping to work in digital publishing by suggesting that they balance their literary skills with coding skills, as job candidates with both of these assets are currently quite rare.
During the day there were thought-provoking questions raised about how to prepare teachers for transliterate students, the issues of uneven access to technology, new mobile publishing platforms and involving students in content creation.
Teaching Digital Writing is the sixth Creative Writing event sponsored by the Subject Centre over the past two years and specifi cally follows on from our ‘Creative Writing: Teaching and Technology’ event held at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2008.
Nicole King and Brett Lucas, English Subject Centre
English Subject Centre
44 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Book Reviews
According to Reading Science
Fiction, Hugo Gernsback
tried to popularise the term
‘scientifi ction’ with the launch
of his 1926 magazine: Amazing
Stories. It was not Gernsback’s
fi rst attempt to coin this
neologism. He’d put the word
in print a decade earlier.
But ‘scientifi ction’ never gained
popular usage. Which is a
shame because, staring at the
word on the page, it comes
across as one of those clever-
yet-clumsy constructions which
combine linguistic brilliance with a structure that borders on being
unpronounceable. Consequently, instead of discussing the exciting and
vocally challenging oeuvre of scientifi ction, we’re left with the more
easily pronounceable genre known as science fi ction.
There is suffi cient anecdotal evidence in this book to suggest that
science fi ction has long been regarded as the ginger-haired stepchild
of literary genres. The authors begin with separate introductions,
each justifying their involvement with science fi ction: as though
enthusiasm, professional interest and personal affection need
qualifi cation. The text contains a variety of deprecatory illustrations
as to how the genre has been repeatedly undervalued and
misappropriated. Kurt Vonnegut, often struggled to have his science
fi ction rebranded as fi ction in order to earn an extra three cents per
word. This was at a time when fi ction was paid at fi ve cents a word
and science fi ction merited a measly two. Contributors Davis and
Yaszek suggest that America’s earliest academic courses in science
fi ction studies were devices, appropriated from English departments,
to resuscitate interest and enrolment within undersubscribed social
science departments during the militant climate of the 1970s.
However, such claims of persecution and misappropriation are not
the exclusive domain of science fi ction. Undoubtedly there are many
exponents of other genres able to cite instances of literary prejudice
and unwarranted social bias against their chosen milieu.
Yet, aside from the minor quibble of its defensive stance, Reading
Science Fiction provides an excellent collection of academic
essays that address key elements of the genre’s relevance to the
contemporary reader.
The editors have been suffi ciently insightful to include
counterbalancing opinions that present a range of diametrically
opposed viewpoints. Gunn expounds on the necessity for reading
science fi ction as science fi ction, stressing the importance of the
reader’s knowledge of specifi c genre protocols, variations on which
he concedes would be applicable to the successful reading of other
genres. Contrarily, contributors Vint and Bould present an argument
contentiously entitled, ‘there is no such thing as science fi ction.’
The book tackles various approaches to science fi ction, including
prototypical narrative structures as well as critical analysis through
gender studies, Marxist responses and the application of postcolonial
theory. The citation of historical precedents, from authors including
Thomas Moore, HG Wells and Mary Shelley lends a gravitas to the
argument that science fi ction is neither new nor wholly undervalued
as a literary genre.
Of additional interest, rather than focusing solely on science fi ction as
a written medium, the collection of essays in this volume address the
genre as a whole, including science fi ction’s representation in graphic
novels, TV, fi lm, video games and the internet: a particularly pertinent
extension given the symbiotic relationship between the genre and its
archetypical presentation of advancements in technology.
Reading Science Fiction addresses the current demand for a serious
critical response to the genre. Edited by James Gunn, Marleen S Barr
and Matthew Candelaria, the title includes contributions from a broad
range of authors who have written, studied and taught science fi ction
at a variety of academic levels. As Gunn explains in his introduction:
“It is our hope that this book will illustrate the many ways of reading
science fi ction and by illuminating its variety and practice will
encourage and deepen its appreciation. What we all want, when
we deal with a genre like this, is to allow new readers to share our
experience of falling in love with this literature of change.”
Gunn’s aspirations are an ambitious hope for any book. However, it’s
certain that this title will have exceptional relevance for those who
are studying science fi ction at postgraduate level. It should also have
a long-lasting appeal to any ardent afi cionado of the genre.
Ashley Lister
Blackpool and The Fylde College
Reading Science FictionJames Gunn, Marleen S. Barr & Matthew Candelaria (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 45
Book Reviews
In the wider world, poems
seem popular: the shops are
full of anthologies with titles
like Essential Poems and
Staying Alive, testifying to a
shared conviction in poetry’s
role as, in the words of arch-
anthologist Daisy Goodwin,
‘the ultimate in self-help
literature’. This is the approach
refl ected in last year’s poetry
season on the BBC and the
hunt for the nation’s ‘favourite
poem’: long on celebrity
enthusiasm and psychotherapy,
short on academic analysis.
According to some accounts, things are different in the academy. A
recent article in English by Bill Overton, based on a survey of lecturers,
paints a gloomy picture: both students and staff are much happier
analysing prose texts; the formal elements in poetry play little part
in syllabi. All this sits oddly with the shift in literary criticism over the
past few years towards a new interest in close reading and prosodic
analysis, a shift exemplifi ed in recent books by Tom Paulin and Terry
Eagleton, both of them aimed at a wide audience and infusing practical
criticism with lessons learnt from literary and cultural theory.
Rhian Williams’s The Poetry Toolkit, which, according to its publishers,
‘offers a practical solution to the diffi culties of reading and writing
about poetry’, might just help bridge some of the gaps between these
contrasting constituencies, introducing both students and ‘general
readers’ to some of the pleasures of academic textual analysis.
The Poetry Toolkit is not the only such primer currently available.
It is, in fact, jostling in a crowded market, and has a lot of different
considerations, expectations and anxieties to juggle with: most
saliently the question of what topics to cover and how to organise
them. There are lots of different types of information useful for tyro
readers of poetry – prosody, genre, literary history, social context,
theoretical approaches – too many, clearly, for any one sensibly-
proportioned book to hope to cover adequately. Twenty years ago or
so, introductory books on poetry tended to focus particular attention
on metre and rhyme. With the exception of books for aspirant poets
(Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled, for example), more recent
examples included a mass of other things: Barry Spurr’s Studying
Poetry, for example, includes a chapter-by-chapter survey of ‘Poetry
through the ages’, movement by movement. There seem to be two
main dangers in combining in one book an introduction to prosodic
technicalities with more reader-friendly material on topics related
more obviously to the subject-matter of poems. Siphoning off prosody
into a single long section, with detailed defi nitions of terms, runs the
risk of isolating it from the other topics in the book, detaching it from
other approaches to a poem. On the other hand, introducing formal
matters more holistically, embedded piecemeal whenever appropriate
into analyses of specifi c poems (Ruth Padel’s method in 52 Ways of
Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey) make it hard for
readers to use the book as a reference source. They will either have
to settle for a one-line defi nition of a given term in a short glossary
at the end or reread a sizeable chunk of argument. John Lennard’s
The Poetry Handbook (2nd edition), probably the most detailed and
sophisticated guide to close reading available, maintains unity of focus
by attaching a series of essays on different methods of analysis (from
punctuation to feminism) to a little gang of set texts. This approach,
however, can give the impression that that each perspective is to be
considered in isolation from all of the others.
In The Poetry Toolkit Rhian Williams ingeniously circumvents these
potential diffi culties, coming up with an internet-inspired structure
of almost Byzantine complexity, rooted in copious cross-referencing.
Part I (‘Introducing Poetry’) consists of a short sequence of essays
on ‘Types and Traditions’ (broad generic categories that some critics
might call ‘modes’): epic, lyric, ballad, love poetry, elegy, pastoral, light
verse. Part II (‘The Poetry Toolkit’) contains a series of similar, slightly
shorter, pieces on more nitty-gritty topics. The subsections are ‘Forms’,
‘Prosody’, ‘Rhyme’, ‘Stanzas’ and ‘Wordplay’. ‘Forms’ here refers to
types of poem more closely associated than the ‘types and traditions’
described in Section I with specifi c prosodic features (e.g. haiku, ode,
villanelle): there are little essays on 16 of these, marshalled into fi ve
categories. ‘Prosody’ zooms in for a closer view of textual detail,
introducing individual discussions of the different traditional metrical
feet with general introductions to stress and metre. The short section
on ‘Rhyme’ includes essays on onomatopoeia and alliteration as well as
on different types of rhyme per se. Part II ends by zooming out again,
with sections on ‘Stanzas’ (essays on 16 different types, grouped by
line-length) and ‘Wordplay’ (short, discursive pieces on nine tropes and
six schemes). Part III (‘Practice’), much the shortest part of the book,
includes some valuable hints on practical criticism, a set of ‘Exercises’
(a short anthology of poems linked to bullet points suggesting possible
avenues of approach) and a couple of dense, slightly overwritten
sample ‘close readings’.
All this makes The Poetry Toolkit sound hideously complicated. In
practice, however, it works brilliantly. Because of its comprehensive
cross-referencing, users of the book do not have to master its
structure. A long list of terms (‘acephalous line’, ‘haiga’, ‘metre’,
‘synaloepha’, ‘vehicle’, etc.) appears at the start of the volume.
Wherever these terms occur in the text, they are in bold type. Bolded
page references for them in the index take the reader to the point in
the text where they are most fully defi ned: bold type thus functions as
a sort of hiccupy (that is, two-stage) hyperlink. This makes it easy for
a reader to go straight to the discussion of a topic they are interested
in and use the bold type to fi nd defi nitions of any other terms of
which they are ignorant. It also means that Williams doesn’t need
to pull her punches: she brings detailed points of social context and
literary history into her essays on form, and steeps her essays on genre
in formal analysis, aware that the structure of her book will never
leave a casual reader feeling abandoned. I found that this worked
particularly well in the sections on ‘Types and Traditions’ and ‘Stanzas’
where Williams consistently produces exciting and fresh readings
(often keyed to the most recent scholarship and criticism) across an
astonishingly wide range of poets, genres and periods.
The Poetry Toolkit Rhian Williams(Continuum, 2009)
46 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Book Reviews
These two productions, admirably captured on three DVDs and
one CD, provide a very good opportunity for teachers to introduce
their students to two well-studied but not often performed classical
texts. The Greenwich Theatre provides lively interpretations of both
plays with a single ensemble cast. This set of resources provides
ample material to instigate a discussion not only about performance
styles in historic texts but also the impact of doubling parts across
the two plays which both employ the same stage setting. Interviews
are provided with the Director, the cast and the production team
to highlight some of the stylistic and interpretive choices made.
Together this set of materials provides a welcome alternative to the
house styles and performance assumptions enshrined in the work of
Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).
It is perhaps useful to look for a moment at the context surrounding
these resources. While the RSC has produced commercial videos
for some time of particular productions, only occasionally have
attempts been made to develop performance recordings specifi cally
for teaching purposes. The Winter’s Tale: a case study/the Complete
Edition is an interesting example to address. The 1999 Barbican
production of this play was recorded for distribution on DVD along
with a series of interviews with the cast and company.
Shakespeare’s Globe has recently joined the rush into the public
market through the cinema broadcast and sale of their 2009
performances of As You Like It, Love’s Labour Lost and Romeo and
Juliet on DVD. The largest and most successful theatrical experiment
is the National Theatre’s NT Live season which, according to the
NT’s website, hopes ‘to open the walls of the National Theatre and
invite cinema audiences around the country and the world to share
in the work we create.’ This cross-pollination of theatre and cinema
is sponsored by NESTA, part of the Arts Council of Britain, which
Stage on Screen: Special Edition Teacher’s PackSchool for Scandal and Dr Faustus(2009)
The impression of richness and diversity that one gets from the book
is due partly to the system Williams uses for citing primary texts. Few
analysed poems appear complete, and, apart from the ‘close readings’
at the end, there are no particularly long pieces of practical criticism:
brilliant aperçus are very much the order of the day. Williams’s
discussions seem to expect (though, crucially, they don’t absolutely
depend upon) their readers taking the trouble to follow things up by
fi nding a text of the poems under discussion for themselves. Many of
the short essays are followed by stimulating suggestions of areas and
texts for further exploration. The clear expectation is that the reader,
using Williams’s bibliography, will be able to stalk most texts to their
lairs, either in easily available print editions or on websites – perhaps
not a completely unproblematic assumption, even today.
A book as wide-ranging as this will always have points a reviewer
can quibble with. I found the treatment of Petrarchism (parcelled out
lumpily between ‘courtly love, ‘conceit’ and ‘sonnet’) peculiar, and
some readings didn’t quite ring true. Williams’s approach to metre
is more problematic, I think. Although she cites Thomas Carper
and Derek Attridge’s Meter and Meaning, she ties her discussion
of prosody religiously to the traditional foot-based system they so
persuasively challenge. (Phil Roberts’ equally iconoclastic How Poetry
Works isn’t mentioned at all.) I could have done with more on topics
such as metrically ambiguous syllables, degrees of stress and the
abstract nature of metre, and less on feet other than iambs, trochees,
dactyls and anapaests.
There are some gaps: no overall history of poetic movements and
traditions (terms like ‘Imagism’ and ‘Romanticism’ barely appear),
and nothing specifi c on literary theory. Instead, the reader is thrust
headlong into the details (and the formal, ideological and literary
implications of those details) of specifi c poems. Perhaps in a book such
as this, this is all to the good. It would be a handy purchase for any
student or general reader of poetry – an excellent source of reference
full of stimulating ideas and nuggets of information – but in a poetry
module it might well need supplementing with other secondary works.
The dependence of the book’s structure on traditional literary-critical
terminology means that many of the examples Williams discusses are
from the 19th century--a period which employed (and subverted) a
very wide range of traditional forms in a myriad of different contexts.
There is less space in this approach for modernism old and new – no
Ashbery, no Prynne and barely a hint of Stevens. Williams nails her
colours to the mast when in the section on free verse she writes:
‘[some] free verse can…paradoxically feel excluding: poems are so
intensely focused on specifi c experiences, on images and symbols
of obscured signifi cance, or simply on resisting all hints at metrical
regularity, that they can feel prickly, dismissive of the reader and
entirely self-referential’ (p.127).
The Poetry Toolkit will be a valued vade-mecum for many readers, both
academic and ‘general’. Every reader will learn something from it – it is
rare to have riches such as this in a single textbook.
Jonathan Gibson,
English Subject Centre
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 47
Book Reviews
already sponsors the National Theatre to quite a large extent. So is
this an example of the centralisation of funding to larger and larger
arts organisations at the expense of the smaller and less well placed
art creators? I would suggest that it might be and it is in this context
that I would like to consider with appreciation the two productions
captured on DVD of the Greenwich Theatre by the Stage on Screen
project.
To my mind the real issue at stake here is what has Stage on Screen
achieved and how have they done it? The DVDs present three quite
different sets of resources. The central resource labeled simply ‘the
DVD of the play’ presents an edited version of the production as
shot from six camera angles. This adaptation of the staged play then
mimics the professional cinema or television adaptation of the plays
that the above examples provide a precedent for. The second DVD in
each case presents interviews with the director and members of the
cast and crew, again quite standard resources that are available with
the other theatres recorded performances. These fi rst two resources
are both useful and illuminating, particularly since they refer quite
often to the two productions simultaneously or as they are related to
one another. So far so straight forward. What differentiates this set of
materials is the third DVD which provides a single ‘Mastershot’ of the
whole production and the ‘Interactive CD-ROM’ which provides all six
camera angles for a single scene of each play.
The usefulness of these two disks is neither explained nor explored
and so I would like to take a moment to think through the
implications of including these additional resources. The ‘Mastershot’
is a standard form of recording theatrical productions for posterity by
the theatre company. Taken from the back of the house from a single
fi xed camera these sorts of recordings are not dynamic but they do
mimic the experience of a single audience member. These recordings
are often not well lit and the sound can be appalling but it is the only
stable record we have of these ephemeral events. Equity (the trade
union representing performers) has long resisted the possibility of
making these resources more widely available since it insists that
the actors are not paid additional broadcast rights for this form of
recording and they do not show its members at their best. Both of
these objections have prevented the wider use of existing recorded
materials. So why include the old standard of theatrical recording
in this Teacher’s Pack? For one thing it opens up the opportunity to
discuss with students the process of capturing a live performance
which would be seen from a single vantage point and differentiates
this experience from creating a television adaptation which involves
various camera angles and close ups of the actors. Undoubtedly this
is a very worthwhile and important classroom discussion to have when
addressing the adaptation of the live theatrical experience.
The ‘Interactive CD-ROM’ however, causes me greater diffi culty.
In providing the user with six camera angles of a single scene the
‘Pack’ presupposes technical expertise and support, as well as
time, that simply do not exist in higher education. While it might
be possible in the school environment to assign the students to
upload these Quicktime fi les into a movie editing programme to
allow the students to create their own edited versions of the scene,
this is not a possibility in many classrooms I have encountered in
universities. But more importantly it seems very questionable what
the outcome of such an exercise would be. Again it is an example of
what is involved in the process of documenting performance rather
than directing performance since all six versions of the scene are the
same and unalterable. It is not the fi rst time that television editing
skills have been confused with the textual interpretive skills of the
director of a theatre production and I marvel at the way this confusion
persists. Clearly the makers of these resources are interested in their
own creative practices and want to engage others in this work. This
is admirable but it is misleading to confuse this practice with the
creative action that goes on in the rehearsal room long before the
play has come anywhere near the stage. Also the activity presented
is not really very interactive at all in that the outcome for each
student would be a slightly different version of the same scene rather
than a radically different interpretation of text by a different group
of people. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding
here about the nature of what is taught in the drama and theatre
classroom.
I am aware that this review has veered away from the usual discussion
of the ‘quality’ of the performance and headed towards larger issues
that are raised by the form of presentation. However, I think it is
essential in reviewing new materials of this kind to think carefully
about what they are suggesting about what and how we teach. The
two productions are lively and engaging. I would suggest that the
modernised and stylised costume and movement which indicate
from the outset who is to be trusted and who is not in School for
Scandal rather undermines the humour of the piece since that is
precisely what the audience is meant to discover on its own. The
forced jovialness on stage in this production means the laughter
that was heard during this usually very funny play did not come from
the audience. The production of Dr Faustus, on the other hand, is
admirably executed and engaged much more audibly the audience in
attendance.
Of course this is the one thing that live theatre has which recorded
theatre can only acknowledge through sound, the response of a live
and present audience. The NT Live cinema presentations highlight
this so that when you enter the cinema you are immediately faced
with the waiting NT audience. If one purpose of creating recordings
of live performances is to provide an experience for home, school
or cinema audiences which is ‘as seen live’ then the response of the
audience present is tremendously important. Why is it that invariably
these resources aim to push the user back into a passive position
which both television and cinema have forced on audiences for such
a long time? If this kind of resource is to truly make the user want
to go to the theatre and understand its processes then there must
be some inkling of what it is that the distant recorded audience
is missing. Making theatre into television is not new and it is not
terribly interesting. If these kinds of resources are to succeed they
should encourage an appreciation of the gap between the theatrical
experience and the recorded adaptation. I would suggest that this
Teacher’s Pack achieves that with the inclusion of the ‘Mastershot’
DVD but then confuses this message with its televisually oriented
‘Interactive CD-ROM’. I would highly recommend these resources
to any teacher if for no other reason than to engage with me in
the questions I pose about the purpose of such recordings and the
implications they have for our teaching of historical drama.
Christie Carson,
Royal Holloway, University of London
48 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Tracey Hill Bath Spa UniversityI think I speak for my whole department at Bath Spa when I say that it’s always been very much ‘our’ Subject Centre. All the projects, events and other activities we’ve worked on together over the years have had that essentially collaborative, supportive dimension. What we have always especially appreciated is the responsiveness of the Subject Centre team, and the ways in which we pitch in together as equal partners. There are many examples I could cite; here’s just one…
A passing conversation with Jonathan Gibson from the Subject Centre back in 2004 about the then-new database of early printed books, Early English Books Online (EEBO), prompted us both to decide it was about time for some sector-wide refl ection on the impact of such online databases. Given that myself and a colleague, Ian Gadd, were already ‘early adopters’ of EEBO in teaching, we thought it timely to try to host an event to consider how resources like EEBO could transform – and indeed, in some quarters, already were transforming – the teaching of early modern literature. I do remember discussing with Jonathan and Ian the need to make our putative event focus on both teaching and research: it was still early days, and we needed the carrot of research to bring in the stick of teaching, so to speak.
Less than a year later, and after volumes of email, considerable liaison with the Subject Centre, with ProQuest (the publisher of EEBO), the JISC, and some extremely helpful colleagues both at our own and at other universities, Ian and I found ourselves launching a two-day event in front of some fi fty delegates from across the UK and North America, including academics, librarians, tech-y folk, postgraduate and undergraduate students, and representatives from ProQuest and – of course – the Subject Centre. I think I can safely say that ‘(de)materialising the early modern text’, as we called it, was a tremendous success: one delegate commented that it was such a good idea that they were surprised no one had ever done it before.
It seems to me that this event serves an exemplary example of what the Subject Centre can bring about: a lively, enthusiastic, ego-free get-together of people with a shared interest in – well, in sharing, I suppose. Long may it continue.
Lesley Coote University of HullBack at the beginning (which seems a very long time ago), I remember that there was what appeared to be a very good idea. And, like many good ideas – of which there were many in the HE sector at that time – I also harboured a deal of scepticism about whether it would take off, or become something less than what it was intended to be.
My own personal ‘interest’ was the use of new technology and media in enhancing the experiences of students and tutors, so it was great to be invited to take part in events on precisely that. At the fi rst of Michael Hanrahan’s C and IT (Computer and Internet Technology) Roadshows I met a small group of other practitioners (most of whom are still, like myself, involved with the Centre) with similar interests and a wide variety of experiences. The development of this area of the Centre’s work owed a great deal to the enthusiasm of Michael, and of Brett Lucas, Michael’s co-organiser of C and IT events.
I was wrong to be sceptical; the idea – of invigorating, inspiring, connecting and supporting practitioners in English Studies – is still, amazingly and invaluably, going strong. Over the years, the ESC has expanded not to exclude, but to embrace, new developments within and without the subject, such as the recent expansion of Creative Writing, the development of new, creative methodologies and the media ‘revolution’. The Centre’s inestimable value is that it retains its original ideals whilst generating new ones, and bringing together practitioners in as many aspects of the subject as possible, rather than becoming exclusive or protectionist. The new interdisciplinary initiatives inherent in the HumBox project are great…more dynamic possibilities, yet still grounded in the quality and integrity of English Studies.
The ESC is still a unique institution, serving a living community. What a great idea it was, how much more it has become, and how great is its potential for the future… long live the ESC!
The English Subject Centre......and me2000 – 2010
es. l,
tioners in nded not to pansion of e Centre’s ther ectionist. ibilities,
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 49
What Works In Work-Related Learning: a networking day for humanities careers advisers
9 July 2010
The phrase ‘work-related learning’ (WRL) covers a diversity of forms of learning which might include the familiar ‘work placement’, but also ‘simulated work environments’, non-essay based forms of assessment and encouragement of group work. Helen Day, (ceth, University of Central Lancashire), author of the Subject Centre’s Good Practice Guide to WRL (see p.4) opened the day, hosted at the
University of Surrey, by introducing some of the varied forms of WRL. Helen recognised that the employability agenda is challenging for humanities lecturers, who tend to be critical of profi t-motivated enterprise and have rarely worked outside the academy. These attitudes are picked up by students: many careers advisers commented in the course of the day about the low take-up of services by English students. Furthermore, academic identities are closely linked to ‘lecturing’: this can discourage adoption of more diverse learning styles. Nevertheless, there is a policy push to incorporate more WRL in curricula, and Helen made a convincing case for how it can be introduced without compromising academic values. The ceth Employability Framework (see p. 28 of the Good Practice Guide) is a good starting point.
Other speakers described how WRL worked in their organisations. Clare Dowding of the Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education (SCEPTrE) illustrated the considerable efforts they put into making the one-year work placement a valuable experience for students. Virginie Grzelczyk, from the University of Surrey Department of Politics, advocated work placements as a way of developing students’ communication and self-management skills and said that placements changed her students’ learning outlook. She also said that work-placements were a strong ‘selling point’ (especially to parents!) when it came to recruitment. Richard Carruthers described how the work placement scheme for postgraduate research students operated at the University of Southampton. This scheme is largely project-based, with the host organisation supplying a project brief and person-specifi cation to which a student is then matched.
Lots of ideas for WRL initiatives were exchanged and tested via a lively ‘lift pitch’ session where participants had 2 minutes to convince colleagues of the value of their idea. (Congratulations to Jo Moyle from Oxford Brookes, who won the prize for the best pitch.) Christina Hartshorn, from the South East England Development Agency, concluded the day by arguing that ‘enterprise skills’ are not synonymous with starting a business, but rather about building something from nothing in any sphere of life. She contrasted the academic skills of ‘describing/analysing’ with enterprising skills of ‘initiating/achieving’ and suggested that we need to give our students more opportunities to engage in the latter through WRL.
Jane Gawthrope,English Subject Centre
* Presentations are available on the Subject Centre website at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events/event_detail.php?event_index=267 and Helen Day’s Work-Related Learning in English Studies: a Good Practice Guide is available at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/careers/report.php. Print copies are available by emailing esc@rhul.ac.uk
English Subject Centre
After EnglishAfter English is a website is for students of English who may be unsure of their future career
direction or panicked by the current doom and gloom in the press about graduate vacancies.
Unlike students studying a vocational subject, the choices facing our students can seem
unclear and challenging. After English has ideas, exercises to try and links to follow to help
them start thinking about future possibilities and ref lect on their hopes and dreams.
www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/afterenglish
50 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Desert Island Texts
Harold Short is Professor of Humanities Computing, with a primary interest in the application of computing technologies in the Arts and Humanities. He has been involved in the development and teaching of new programmes at all levels including MAs in Digital Humanities and Digital Culture & Technology, and the world’s fi rst Digital Humanities PhD. A recent satisfying project was the online publication of Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, featured on BBC2 on 10 August 2010.
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to FreedomMadiba’s life has a special resonance in Southern Africa, and has been an inspiration for millions around the world. His autobiography will provide essential soul food. With a remarkable group of like-minded people, including Desmond Tutu (a King’s alumnus), he made possible the ‘miracle’ of a largely peaceful transition from apartheid to an emerging democracy.
Vera Brittain, Testament of YouthAnother life, a moving companion in its own terms as well as standing in some sense for the war poetry I might have chosen. Its selection is also in tribute to the phenomenon of Virago, and the substantial body of women’s writing it has brought to public notice. A strong contender in this slot was F Tennyson Jesse’s remarkable A Pin to See the Peepshow, which I would not have discovered without Virago.
Willa Cather, The Professor's HouseWith my American background I might have encountered Willa Cather without Virago’s help, but that’s nevertheless how I met her, and this book is selected as North American counterweight to Vera Brittain, with its articulation of the fractures in US society after the First World War. It’s a particular favourite, or I might have chosen One of Ours, whose Nebraska protagonist is so reminiscent of my Kansas grandfather.
Doris Lessing, Children of ViolenceActually I could have chosen almost anything by Lessing. Although I fi nd her a far from elegant writer, her engagement with the human condition is profound. The fi rst four books in this series portray a colonial society still very recognisable as I was growing up there. If I have to choose one volume, it would be the fi nal one – The Four-Gated City – with its disturbing exploration of western post-colonial culture.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall ApartThis may be a ‘cliché’ text, but it was seminal and my own introduction to imaginative explorations of identity and culture in a colonial context; it is still widely studied in schools throughout Africa. In my Joint Honours degree, our special subjects were ‘African Literature in English/French’ respectively, and this was a foundational text.
Since I can’t imagine life without Shakespeare, I hope to fi nd his Complete Works on the Island. And what about reference works – perhaps this island has internet access... Reluctantly I’ve excluded books not written in English, even in translation, and there's no poetry or philosophy, and almost no history... sigh.
WordPlay • Issue 4 • September 2010 51
Desert Island Texts
Tom Stoppard, ArcadiaNo Shaw, Synge or any of a dozen current or recent playwrights? Stoppard would be in my list anyway, but this play is particularly resonant in its exploration of the intersection between science and culture, embodied in the life of Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace who is the likely inspiration for Thomasina Coverley in Stoppard’s play. (Lovelace is regarded by some as the fi rst ‘computer programmer’ for her work with Charles Babbage.)
George Polya, How to Solve ItThis was an important book for me not only for its practical approach to problem-solving, but in helping me understand that questions are much more interesting than answers and process more important than product, principles of considerable signifi cance in my thinking about the Digital Humanities. (If I could smuggle in some books of mathematical puzzles I would certainly do so, to keep the mind alert!)
C J Sansom, Dark FireThere are any number of proper works of historical scholarship I’d like to include. What I’m choosing, however, is an example of historical fi ction, with the imaginative licence it offers to the author, who must nevertheless carry out real research. In this case, the setting – London – and the period – 16th Century – are of particular interest.
John le Carré, Smiley’s PeopleI read a lot of crime fi ction, and might have included Dashiell Hammett not only for his pioneering crime novels with their presentation of the complexities of ‘truth’, but also his defi ance of Joseph McCarthy. So I’m also drawn to the more subtle possibilities of espionage fi ction, and must include le Carré. I’d prefer to take The Complete Smiley – though not as compressed for Radio 4 – but have settled for the last of the Karla trilogy.
Charles Dickens, Little DorritSome nineteenth century fi ction of course, but how could I survive without Eliot, Austen, Hardy, Trollope, …? It was in part through Dickens in my very British colonial education that I came to ‘know’ London before arriving here 38 years ago, and subsequent re-reading of his work became a personal project affording great pleasure. This novel because of its associations with areas of the city I know well.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the FuryFaulkner speaks to the southern US part of my heritage, and his novels were important in helping me come to terms with the racism embedded in this legacy, its parallels in the racist society in which I grew up, and the humanity somewhere beneath that may yet provide hope in the darkest of times and circumstances.
Alexander McCall-Smith, The No 1 Ladies Detective AgencyFor my fi nal choice – if possible I'd like the whole series! – I must declare a personal interest, the author being a friend since student days. I’m including him nevertheless for his sympathetic portrayal of a part of the world important in my life, and for the gentle humour and sheer humanity of his writing.
Professor Harold Short is retiring after 15 years as Director and Head of the Centre for Computing in the
Humanities (CCH) at King's College London. Under the banner of CCH Harold was an instrumental voice in the
establishment of the Subject Centre. We would like to thank Harold for his pioneering work in the fi eld of
Digital Humanities and salute his success in building his department from the bottom up. As Technical Research
Director in a large number of collaborative research projects, generating over £20 million in research funding,
Harold has been highly infl uential in the development of ICT in the Arts and Humanities both nationally and
internationally. We wish him well on his desert island...
We’re All in This Together – Another Fine Mess?
It is a cruel irony that this issue of WordPlay celebrates the success of the fi rst ten years of the English Subject Centre, just as its future – like that of the other HEA Subject Centres – hangs in the balance. As I write, the Higher Education Academy’s Executive team is responding to the 30% funding cut which has already been announced by preparing a cost-benefi t analysis of three different models for restructuring the Academy. As each of these models envisages that the Academy will have fewer sites and operating units than it currently does, it seems unlikely that the Subject Centres will continue in their present form. The Academy does, however, remain committed to the principle of maintaining the continuity of a subject or discipline network approach to working with academics.
Certainly, for most academics, the Subject Centres are the human face of an otherwise faceless organisation. The English Subject Centre has been particularly successful in engaging with its subject community and it would be extremely wasteful to unpick the networks of practice and practitioners that it has nurtured and to jettison the valuable work of the last ten years. Indeed, the approaches to sharing good practice and pedagogic innovation developed by the English Subject Centre will become even more important in the next few years as we all struggle to ‘improve the student experience’ and (to quote David Willett’s speech at Birmingham University on 20 May) ‘empower’ students (he neglects to say for what), whilst coping with severe reductions in resources.
Thus far I have been unimpressed by the Panglossian rhetoric of those who would seek to persuade us that the current and forthcoming cuts in Higher Education funding present an exciting challenge and an opportunity for innovation. My intellectual inclinations and my sympathies are with the majority of Heads of Schools and Departments who responded to the ESC’s recent survey of the English Curriculum and Teaching in UK Higher Education, who, when asked what would most enhance learning and teaching, replied ‘more staff’. I have no doubt that one sure fi re way of enhancing the student experience and empowering students to become self-motivated learners with good team-working and communicative skills would be to provide them with more and better supported teachers who can engage directly with them and devote time to developing their abilities. At some level I am sure that most current cabinet ministers would agree with me – this is, after all, the model of education that they choose for their own children.
However, we live in desperate times, in which a real need to pay back the money borrowed to bale out a reckless fi nance sector has coincided with the emergence of a new government with
a deep ideological commitment to reducing public spending and/or outsourcing public monies to private providers. Fewer and less well supported teachers working in more cramped conditions in more dilapidated buildings will be the norm. In such circumstances the innovations pioneered and disseminated by the English Subject Centre through its networks, events and the useful ideas and resources on its website will be invaluable as we struggle (yet again) to do more with less.
This time round it seems unlikely that we shall be required to increase student numbers whilst reducing staff. Rather HEIs will be required to offer more – in the form of better teaching – to (probably) fewer students with (certainly) fewer staff, whilst, at the same time, playing a key role in delivering the government’s aim to ‘rebalance the economy by meshing enterprise and manufacturing with training, learning and research’ , as David Willetts put it in his Birmingham speech. As a student of Victorian literature and culture I was delighted to see David Willetts’s emphasis on renewing the UK’s manufacturing base and his affi rmation of the value and importance of the crafts. I was also pleased to see that Willetts’s Birmingham speech, the fi rst given by the new Minister for Universities and Science, offers encouragement and opportunities to those of us who teach and research in the arts and humanities. It is good see that the new Minister supports ‘diverse provision of a high quality’, and recognizes both the ‘enormous value in further and higher education which cannot just be captured by the utilitarian calculation’ and ‘the importance of all those courses and degrees which – through their rigour – increase the intellectual capability of the nation and its skills base’. It is also refreshing to note that the Minister is ‘all in favour of curiosity-driven research whose applications may take time to emerge, if at all’, and that he accepts the fact that although Birmingham University’s ‘excellence in Shakespeare studies has probably contributed to the tourism industry ... boosting the tourism industry is not what inspires an academic to study Shakespeare’. The Minister assured his Birmingham audience that he was not going to make the mistake, so often made by politicians of treating ‘the economic value which fl ows from much academic research ... as the only possible motive for research’. These are fi ne words and noble sentiments on the non-utilitarian value of education and research. We must hold him to them, as well as making sure that we continue to address, with rigour and depth, the issue of what we do and why we do it.
NoteThe text of David Willetts’s Birmingham speech can be found on the BIS website at www.bis.gov.uk/news/speeches/david-willetts-keynote-speech
Lyn Pykett, Chair of the English Subject Centre Advisory Board
The Last Word
52 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Teaching English Literature and Creative Writing:
A Workshop for Early Career Lecturers19-20 November 2010King's College London, Strand Campus
• Have you recently begun your fi rst full-time post?
• Do you teach Literature or Creative Writing?
• Would you like to discuss and develop your teaching with your peers in English studies?
If the answer is 'yes' to these questions then register now.
What can you expect? • Lively debate and dialogue on teaching
• Space to refl ect on and develop your teaching practice
• Structured sessions on topics such as: close reading, assessment, and lecture and small-group teaching
And much more …
For more details, to view the programme
or to register, please visit our homepage
or contact the English Subject Centre
at esc@rhul.ac.uk
The English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London Egham TW20 0EXT 01784 443221 • esc@rhul.ac.uk www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
The English Subject Centre supports all
aspects of the teaching and learning of
English Literature, English Language
and Creative Writing in higher education
in the UK. It is a Subject Centre of
the Higher Education Academy.
www.heacademy.ac.uk