ESC Newsletter - Issue 12

English Subject Centre

Newsletter Issue 12 • April 2007

ISSN 1479-7089

Interview with Alan Liu Nicole King

Literary Research and Academic Careers in Japanese Universities Anthony Martin

English: The long view from A-Level to graduation

Engaging with the Present, Believing in the Future

Nicola Adcock and Victoria Jackson

Lucinda Becker

Sue Harrison

Accessible and Inclusive Teaching in English

This newsletter is published by the English Subject Centre, part of the Subject Network of the Higher Education Academy. The Subject Centre provides many different kinds of help to English lecturers – more details are available in this newsletter and on our website (www.english.heacademy.ac.uk). At the heart of all our work is the view that the HE teaching of English is best supported from within the discipline itself.

As well as updates on the Centre’s activities and on important developments (both within the discipline and across HE), you will find articles here on a wide range of English-related topics. The next issue of the newsletter will appear in Autumn 2007. If you would like to submit an article (of between 300 and 3,000 words), propose a book or software review (perhaps a textbook review by one of your students) or respond in a letter to someone else’s article, please contact the editor, Nicole King (nicole.king@rhul.ac.uk) or visit our Newsletter webpage at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/ newsletter/index.php In the meantime, you can keep in touch with our activities by subscribing to our email list at www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/english–heacademy.html.

The newsletter is distributed to English departments throughout the UK and is available online at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/ publications/index.php along with previous issues.

If you would like extra copies, please email us at esc@rhul.ac.uk.

Contents 02 04

Ben Knights Director’s Foreword

News and Reports

32

Research, Reflection and Response: Creating and assessing online discussion forums in English studies

Articles

36

Teaching Shakespeare

06 10

Nicole King Meaningful Contexts: An interview with Alan Liu

39 42

Teaching Religion in Early Modern Studies

14

Lucinda Becker Engaging with the Present, Believing in the Future: Why our students’ career planning should matter to us

44

The Online Thesaurus of Old English

18 24

Nicola Adcock and Victoria Jackson English: The long view from A-Level to graduation

45

Funding for Student Literary Societies

Sue Harrison Accessible and Inclusive Teaching in English

46

IT Works!

48

The English Subject Centre Report Series

Events Calendar

Anthony Martin Literary Research and Academic Careers in Japanese Universities

The Transition from School to University: English Studies in Scotland

Book Reviews

28

Gary Snapper A Review of Defining Literary Criticism: Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of Literary Knowledge 1880-2002 by Carol Atherton

29

Laura Blakeman A Review of Postcolonial Poetry in English by Rajeev S. Patke

A note on our new look With this issue, the Newsletter is coming to you for the first time in full-colour, in a more flexible column layout, and in a brand-new type-face, Avenir. We’re planning other changes over the coming months, all designed to improve your reading experience. Let us know what you think, email us esc@rhul.ac.uk.

Newsletter 12 April 2007 1

Director’s Foreword One way of thinking about the role of Subject Centres is in terms of mediation and translation.

These functions are perhaps at the heart of all their roles. Across the Subject Network, the Centres seek to connect up communities and discourses, translating the languages and pre-occupations of one educational tribe to another. This form of creative trespass, this understanding that no party has exclusive access to ‘the truth’, sometimes leads Ben Knights, Director, to new and surprising results. A salient example of English Subject Centre, the need for this go-between function would be Royal Holloway, the current pre-occupation of the Higher Education University of London Academy and its paymasters with the ‘student learning experience’. (This reflects converging and mutually reinforcing trends both in educational theory and in DfES policy.) There it is on the Higher Education Academy homepage: Our mission is to help institutions, discipline groups, and all staff to provide the best possible learning experience for their students. (www.heacademy.ac.uk) Cue discomfort all round, not least for a Subject Network which was in its early days a ‘learning and teaching support network’ able to offer discipline communities the re-assurance that it would make no serious waves.

Let’s acknowledge straightaway the vulnerability of the very concept of ‘the student experience’. Not only does it homogenise what are self-evidently hugely diverse experiences, but it colludes with consumerism in implying that the core raison d’être of universities is cherishing and satisfying its students. So for the English communities (insofar as they are even aware of it) this po-faced mantra is a sitting target. Hardly worth wasting an ironic aside. All the same, here at the English Subject Centre, we would argue that the community ignores the phrase (and the orientation it represents) at its peril.

Certainly we should not fall into sentimentalising our students. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux put it clearly some years before the idea of ‘student-centred education’ migrated from the populist left to the mainstream.

It is not enough for teachers merely to affirm uncritically their students’ histories, experiences, and stories. To take students’ voices at face value is to run the risk of idealizing and romanticizing them. The contradictory and complex stories that give meaning to the lives of students are never innocent, and it is important that they be recognized for their contradictions as well as their possibilities. (Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991: 130 – 1.)

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But the romanticization of the student experience is not a necessary consequence of a salutary reorientation towards the learner. For one thing, the tendency to prioritise the student experience is not simply an intrusion foisted upon us by an alien community of educational developers. There are, as I have argued elsewhere (Active Reading 2006:34), marked historical affinities between the ‘death of the author’ phase in Theory and the rise of the new student-centred accounts of learning styles in educational psychology in the late 1970s. Profound analogies exist with Barthes’s emigration ‘from work to text’, from monologic authority to the dialogic buzz of meanings. As Derek Attridge has argued, the study of literature (and the same must surely apply more broadly to language and discourse as well) requires a gesture of hospitality towards the ‘other’, towards all the guests that may turn up, bidden or unbidden in the classroom (Singularity of Literature 2004). In exercising hospitality towards our student guests, we who teach offer them model and opportunity for their own acts of hospitality, for welcoming the strange and perplexing as generous hosts in their own turn.

At the other extreme, there is the command economy of knowledge, of the kind that still largely underpins our curricula. (This is what you need to know, and this is how we intend to convey it to you.) The English trades – even in their Theory incarnation, and while formally committed to dialogue – have down the years invested too much in their own self-image as a Clerisy, as the social arbitrator of cultural and aesthetic significance.

There’s a paradox here, and one we need to tease out if our subject grouping is not to shrink into an elite subject for the expensively educated. On the one hand to do justice to the rigorous demands of knowledge, yet in the same breath to recognise that we need to be more sensitive to, to know more about, the learning styles, the varied intelligences and needs not only of those who happen at this moment to be our students, but of those who (were we to relax our border controls) might be our students in the future.

Commitment to ‘the student experience’ does not have to come at the cost of denying the difficulty of learning or betraying the altogether serious demands of knowledge about literature, language or culture.

We would be short-changing our students if we sold out to evanescent consumer whim, or succumbed to the temptation to pretend that we are all really 20 year olds at heart. Yet such commitment does require that the English constellation think much harder than in general it has been accustomed to do about its own procedures, rhetorics, support systems – all the pragmatics of its relation to students and potential students.

Director’s Foreword

Learning is by turns tough, exhilarating, boring, and liberating. We do our students no favours if we pretend otherwise, or strive to protect them against the experience of risk. We have, so to say, to do justice to learning as noun as well as participle, and find ways of sharing with students the difficult privilege of being active producers of knowledge. Yet maybe too much of the subject’s identity has been

invested in the production of that small minority of students who will become the future scholars of the subject. While we should never in our dealings with students forego the rigours of scholarship, we have to acknowledge and work towards the needs of those whom we might not have seen as the ‘ideal readers’ of our efforts. For them, too, ‘English’, as subject matter and practice, offers the opportunity

to nourish the roots of citizenship in vibrant language and luminous artifice.

In the words of Martha Nussbaum’s title, our subjects concern ‘cultivating humanity’. Our responsibility towards our students need not trump but is always commensurate with our responsibility to knowledge.

Renewals: Refiguring University English in the 21st Century Royal Holloway, University of London 5-7 July 2007 This second English Subject Centre international conference will address the matter of English as a discipline through performance, writing, rehearsal, technologies, pedagogy – all the ways in which students and scholars ‘do’ their subject.

Strands include: • Pedagogy • Performance • Creative – critical crossover • New writing/e-writing • Style and language • Life writing Speakers include: • Alan Liu • Andrew Motion • Elaine Showalter • Jonathan Bate • Richard E. Miller

To find out more or to register, visit

www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/renewals Newsletter 12 April 2007 3

Events Calendar 2007 Brief details of each of the English Subject Centre’s forthcoming events are given below. If you would like to attend any of these events please register on our website at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events or email esc@rhul.ac.uk.

All events, with the exception of the New Lecturers conference, are free of charge.

Networking Day for Heads of English Departments 19 April 2007: Oxford Brookes University The purpose of the day is to enable Heads of Department (and those with equivalent roles) to share ideas, experiences and concerns on the issues that currently preoccupy them. The focus is on informal networking and exchange in a relaxed context.

We do not arrange external speakers but consult participants in advance about the issues they wish to discuss and arrange the programme accordingly.

Transition – The First Year Experience of English 10 May 2007: Keele University This workshop, aimed at teachers working across the sector in HE, FE, schools and sixth-form colleges, will enable participants to explore a range of topics relating to the first year experience, including curriculum design, the pacing and structure of assessment, pedagogical strategies and support and tutorial systems. It will also showcase some of the initial findings of ‘The Production of University English’, an English Subject Centre project based at Keele and Nottingham investigating the social construction of the discipline in the classroom.

Renewals Conference: Refiguring University English in the 21st Century 5-7 July 2007: Royal Holloway, University of London This second English Subject Centre international conference will address the matter of English as a discipline through performance, writing, rehearsal, technologies, pedagogy – all the ways in which students and scholars ‘do’ their subject.

Networking Day for Careers Advisers 20 July 2007: Goodenough College, London The English Subject Centre, in collaboration with other humanities Subject Centres and their AGCAS ‘buddies’, is convening a second meeting for HE Career Advisers with an interest in the humanities.

The meeting will provide a forum for careers advisers to discuss and share ideas and experiences, focussing on issues of working with academic staff. A panel of academics will give their views on working with careers advisers, and several Careers Services will be showcasing their English Subject Centre funded projects to enhance services to English Students.

Teaching the 18th Century 13 September: University of West of England This one-day workshop will provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and good practice among lecturers teaching the 18th century. Most sessions will take the format of a brief presentation, followed by a discussion in which all participants can join. Some of the issues we will explore are: • How long is the (long) 18th century? Should 18th century courses go into the Romantic period? Where is the 18th century situated in the curriculum?

• What kinds of text do we teach? How do we integrate ‘new’ 18th century material with more traditional texts?

• How do we negotiate the interdisciplinarity of the 18th century?

• How can teaching successfully integrate electronic resources?

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Skalds and Skills: Teaching Old Norse and Viking Studies 6 October 2007: Nottingham University In recent years there has been a growing interest in Old Norse, influenced by film and cultural studies and by the trend towards interdisciplinary research. There is now a great variety of ways in which students approach the subject within English Studies. This workshop will encourage discussion of teaching philosophies, approaches and the needs of the various learners, as well as the exchange of good practice and innovative teaching methods.

Teaching WW1 Literature 12 Nov 2007: University of Oxford The literature of the First World War continues to be one of the most popular areas of the English syllabus in schools and universities, yet there are questions to be asked of the traditional curriculum and teaching methods. Why has the curriculum been dominated by the British poets of the Western Front, despite the volume of material extending much further? The popularity of WW1 literature was rekindled by the anti-war movement of the 1960s, but how is it now viewed against the backdrop of Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq? This one-day workshop is an opportunity for secondary and higher education teachers of WW1 literature to discuss these and other issues.

Training Conference for New Lecturers in English 23-24 November 2007: NCSL Conference Centre, Nottingham The aims of this conference are to share and debate practical teaching ideas and activities as they relate to English as a subject; equip new lecturers with a ‘survival kit’ of ideas; and establish a mutual support network. The conference will combine short contextual and orientation talks by leading members of the profession with practical work in groups, each facilitated by a member of the Subject Centre staff. The conference is intended for lecturers in the English disciplines (literature, language, creative writing) who are in their first or second year of fulltime teaching. It supplements local PgCHE courses which are inevitably of a generic nature by offering the opportunity to reflect on the demands of subject teaching.

Articles Meaningful Contexts: An Interview with Alan Liu Nicole King spoke to Professor Alan Liu in December about his development as a teacher and how he began to explore and incorporate digital technology into his teaching practice.

The first set of English books a young Alan Liu owned were the Tom Swift books for children, targeted for young boys who were interested in gadgets of different kinds. He came by the interest honestly.

An immigrant to the U.S. who arrived at age five from Hong Kong, Liu was born into an especially technologically focussed family. ‘My dad was a structural engineer and every one of my male relatives of his generation came over to the U.S. as an engineer of some sort – we had electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, industrial engineers.’ And, as an undergraduate, Liu was on course to join this cohort of science-minded Lius.

But this is the story of an English Professor, who had a ‘secret life in technology’ that is, before the internet landed: ‘when the World Wide Web came along circa 1993 or thereabouts, there was this little light bulb that went on in my head and it occurred to me that there was a way that I could bring my interest in literature and my interest in technology together in a common pursuit both in teaching and in research.’ During our interview I was on a mission to find out the details of this joined-up thinking

6 Newsletter 12 April 2007

and to discover what the implications have been for Liu’s pedagogical approach to teaching English.

Liu spoke to me from southern California, where he is a Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He had just dropped his teenage daughter to school in what I imagined to be glaring sunshine, while at my end, I sat bundled up in the gloomy afternoon chill typical of London in winter. Liu spoke in a measured voice that belied a passion for teaching our subject and exploring new avenues for pedagogy occasioned by digital technologies. His many publications include Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford UP, 1989) and The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and he is the editor or principal investigator for several major digital initiatives such as the Voice of the Shuttle: Webpage for Humanities Research (VOS).

After receiving his Ph.D. in English from Stanford University, Liu began his teaching career in 1979 at Yale University, moving on in 1988 to UCSB. That switch from an elite, East Coast institution to the state-

run University of California precipitated a major shift in Liu’s approach to teaching.

‘The UC system is part of a large system that is fed laterally by the community college system so, nearly 40 to 50 percent of our students come in after their second year from the community college. Because of that, the experience here isn’t exactly the tight, gathered, four-year, intense liberal arts education that it was on the east coast at a private university. We have a lot more students who come in for a quarter or so (ten weeks) and then go out and work again, so it is a much more diffuse, modular kind of experience.’ Some of the correlative effects of students who are often working up to 40 hours a week will be familiar to UK lecturers: Liu finds his students have a lot less time to do the reading he assigns. ‘And’ he adds, ‘because some students are poor, I am finding and I think my colleagues are finding too that strangely enough there is a decreasing number of actual texts in the classroom. So it is increasingly hard to say to students to ‘turn to page 50’ of a particular text when they don’t have the text in the class. Or in some cases they are actually so poor that they buy one text

Interview with Alan Liu

and turn it in for a refund and then buy the next text with that money. So there is a declining base of what one can assume students have accomplished when they come to an actual class.’

‘The other part of this’ Liu continued, ‘is that there is less of a common sense of a literary background or a background to other disciplines, so there is less of a knowledge that one can assume students have in common. Partly as a consequence of that, I think that my teaching has changed since I moved to the public university system; I’ve become much more aware of how carefully one needs to think through and manage the introduction of a text into a meaningful context for the students. So rather than saying turn to page 50, for example, one needs always to, in some way, perform in class, the text or passage, or have a student perform it, within a context that one has very carefully set up, narrating a scenario or drawing an analogy to some piece of popular culture or some current event that gives the particular passage rich and resonant meaning semi-autonomously of a larger fixed cultural background one might have assumed students to have.’

What does this actually become in practice I asked, curious as to how lecturers might tap into the popular cultures of our students? Liu did not miss a beat, recalling a course he taught while researching The Laws of Cool, part of which is about the popular cultural sensibility or aesthetic of cool in its relation to broader currents in the workplace and the world. While Liu might have relied upon the book Subculture, by his colleague Dick Hebidge, to make the topic meaningful to his students, instead he drew on the news of that particular month which happened to be the fatal shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. ‘I asked the students about the style or dress of the two student gunmen – they were dressed in a kind of a Goth style, in trench coats and so on. This led to an interesting discussion about the function of style, of subcultural kinds of behaviour, and moved on from clothes and it turned into an open discussion about the nature of evil. When I asked why was doing this bad? What are the grounds for thinking through ethics in the modern world? There was a pause and I remember one student said to me, ‘Because it’s not cool.’ A wonderful piece of contemporary adolescent slang which is either

are a little bit more attuned these days to pages of texts that have graphics on them, illustrations, animations, sometimes sound backgrounds…there is a lot more competition, in other words, in the media ecology around texts than there has been in the past.’

completely flat in effect or profoundly deep and moving, depending on how it is read and in what context it is read. That is an example of building a meaningful context that students can latch onto whether it is a student who has prepared well and read the text or whether it is a student who is somewhat behind when they come to class.’

Liu is clearly a teacher who has thought carefully about how to resolve the tensions of how and when he was taught and the very different proposition facing him as a teacher today. While community

These forms of new media practice and literacy do not affect students in isolation.

Liu spoke of the good teachers he had at Yale and Stanford who were equally concerned with building meaningful contexts around the passage or couplet to be discussed. ‘What’s different’, Liu reiterated, ‘is that they could depend upon that meaningful context being one that could be brought out of a text; they could point to other parts of a text and very carefully tease out the world of the author or of the text and identify what makes a particular word or sentence significant.’ Of course Liu has himself been affected by new media practices, by the inner technology boy living inside him from his youth: ‘I am finding myself now,’ Liu confesses, ‘that texts introduced purely by themselves without a lot of work preparing the students are a little bit more inert. I don’t think I am alone as a teacher in increasingly drawing upon media parallels or analogies of different sorts even if one has not thought this through or does not ‘work’ with media… so many of my colleagues draw, for example, from popular film or from music, to display

“Our students are not less literate today but they do spend less time in books and more using media of different sorts.” college, state-educated students were not plentiful at Yale and Stanford in the seventies, other social trends are also transforming higher education, trends in what Liu identifies as ‘the media habits or media practices’ of today’s students. ‘Our students are not less literate today’ asserts Liu, ‘but they do spend less time in books and more using – often in very intelligent although not fully articulate ways – media of different sorts and of course, lately, much of that media is digital in one way or another. I’ve actually had students tell me, ‘professor you know that page is awfully hard to read, you know it is all grey text,’ which means that our students

something into discussion in the proper way.’ I could only agree with Liu here, thinking of all the times I screened a film or played a music track in order to get my students into a more comfortable yet critical ‘zone’ with a text.

I understood that Liu’s professors in the 1970s could be sure that there was a text in the classroom, and they taught close reading and historical context accordingly.

And Liu, in between Romantic poetry, hankered after the flickering computer screen. But I was still unclear about how this Wordsworth scholar became the doyen of the digital humanities universe

Newsletter 12 April 2007 7

Interview with Alan Liu

or even how the young Liu had diverged from the path set by his male elders. With a soft chuckle he tells me what he calls ‘the most successful narrative’ of these rather organic transformations connecting ‘the Romantic and information culture poles’ of his career.

perspective on what we call today the global economy.’ And what exactly was it in his undergraduate career that made Liu switch from chemistry to literature? ‘I was just more absorbed with my literary study.

I enjoyed it more, and frankly I was better at it.’

own database or server-based resources, in order to be able to contribute quite substantially to a database that is being kept elsewhere online. I myself think this trend-line is going to be promising if we can turn it to the advantage of the universities.’

‘When I started my career, 1979 through 1989, when my first book on Wordsworth appeared, that was a generation that was involved in trying to find new ways to recapture the relationship between literary texts on the one hand and historical

Pulling back from the personal and returning to the public context, Liu is lukewarm about the whole idea of the digital divide at least in terms of the inequality often laid at its doorstep.

He agrees that gender along with race,

‘Right now in the Web 2.0 world there’s a long-standing controversy about a different kind of digital divide—the gap between on the one hand, expert knowledge and the knowledge of the ‘folk’ as they call them in the neologism folksonomy. Some of the controversies that have been raging around Wikipedia have to do with how and whether experts should be involved as opposed to the lay person creating knowledge. I think one of the hot research topics for the future – but a curricular issue as well – is how socially and technologically to invent the apparatuses that will allow experts and the ordinary folk to contribute intelligently together to the building of knowledge resources in ways that complement each other. That is something I am very interested in.’

“Part of me thinks this is a fool’s errand that I am engaged upon. What was I thinking, that I could create a site essentially solo that would register the humanities for the internet age?” contexts on the other. So I was a part of New Historicism within the Romantic field.

It is that interest in historicity or historical awareness that has steered through to my current work on contemporary culture and its relationship to information. It’s very much the case that I am thinking through issues having to do with the relationship between historical awareness and media literacy today. I am fascinated by an information universe in which information seems to last exactly one second before it disappears from the radar scope of relevancy.’ Yes, but isn’t that jumping ahead of the story? What about that corps of engineers otherwise known as his family – how did they react when he told them, actually, he wanted to do literature? ‘They took it very well. The great change took place midway through my undergraduate career at Yale, when I had to carefully rehearse in my mind how I was going to go home on the train and tell my dad I was switching from a chemistry major to an English major. I still remember the answer he gave me (all my fears were unwarranted) ‘whatever you choose is fine, it’s just that in my experience, the only good profession is the one you can take across the border with you.’ He was concerned that training in a particular language, in literature, was not going to give me that global currency that someone of his generation needed to hop across the border. It’s a very interesting

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ethnicity and class are all ‘issues’ in the digital humanities, but, he argues, ‘it doesn’t seem to me clearly to map on to a natural digital divide, between, for example men and women.’ In academia he has observed the opposite in many cases: he sees digital media and digital studies as working as an equalizer between, for instance, institutions with world-class print libraries and those without. Liu was keen to point out that in his own experience ‘digital archives and collections have been one of the drivers for those without to be among the first to invest heavily in digital humanities kinds of work. One of the great reasons a university like ours, Santa Barbara, which is not the top of the system here, (we’re not Berkeley or UCLA), became interested in digtal media early on was that my colleagues saw this as a way to develop a special access to knowledge that would not compete with but would be something different from having a worldclass university.’

‘The interesting wrinkle in all of this right now is that since about 2001 or so, what they are calling Web 2.0 has started up.

I will be saying more about that in my talk when I come out there in July—the world of blogs and wikis and social networking and so on. The nature of that technology is such that the trend line is towards a levelling of the playing field. One no longer necessarily needs a high degree of technical mastery or to invest in one’s

Prompted to discuss these ideas in tangible curricular terms, Liu described a course he ran last year that was designed completely inside a wiki, using the same software that powers Wikipedia. ‘I asked the students to be a production team with me, to design the organization of the site, to create the content for the site, to do the research for the site, to use these new technologies – in other words to blur the line between being a consumer and a producer of knowledge.’

Having established the trajectory of Liu’s journey from chemistry to literature major, from New Historicist Romantic to digital humanities, there was but one area left to question—the origins of his very first website, which again takes him back to the beginnings of the World Wide Web. ‘The Voice of the Shuttle (VOS) started in mid 1994, when I started to keep, essentially, a bookmark list for myself. I decided to open it up and share it with my colleagues – I was like one of those people out in a street alley saying pssst, come over here, look at what I got! [laughter] But soon after that, my university’s humanities division acquired its first server and actually had no ‘top of the hierarchy page,’ and since I had a page they asked me if my page could serve that function for a while and

Interview with Alan Liu

that’s how it was released to the world.

As with all internet work, one thing led to another, or rather one thing led to a million others, and the site grew. My concept for it was that it would be a kind of a university bookstore organized in the way of academic research and the way that disciplines are organized relative to each other, historically and otherwise because the organization of that knowledge in and of itself has value as a supplement to a general social knowledge. One of the lessons I have really learned from VOS is that although it is organized academically and targeted for a scholarly community, the lay person seems to find value in it.

It is a kind of teaching tool about how things are related to each other from the perspective of the scholars who have spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.

Over the years the site grew, mostly as a solo effort, but occasionally I had some grant money that would allow me to hire students to help me with the site.’

There is a hint of despondency in Liu’s voice as he begins to catalogue recent, continuing and increasingly malicious hacker attacks to VOS, which sometimes shut down his ability to edit it for months at a time. ‘Not being a corporation,’ he explains, ‘and depending partly upon student goodwill and the goodwill of programmers who have this kind of knowledge, it is not the case that I can instantaneously ‘harden’ the site or do the kinds of work that a major corporation would be able to do. So much of my energy has gone into worrying about issues like that instead of directing it into the knowledge of the actual content there.’

It seems to me that in creating online environments in the public domain and in introducing and working alongside his students in the classroom to harness new technologies for the purposes of humanities, Liu has been ahead of the curve in terms of the ways technology is changing our classrooms. He leads by example in showing us we can shape technology to the uses we prioritise and require rather than, as he has written about, just having to take what ill-fitting software gets tossed our way from the corporate world. It also seems to me that Liu’s reputation as a ground-breaking figure is well-deserved. Why then can’t he get the needed infrastructure support – funding, staff, etc. – to stave off the

sort of attacks suffered by the VOS site?

Mightn’t such a lack of support have a deadening effect on other people trying to do similar work, for surely if an established expert Professor can’t get support how will anyone else? But Liu is characteristically

problems and topics we take up, and the pedagogic approaches we design.’

So what lies ahead for Alan Liu? As mentioned above, he will be visiting England in July to be a plenary speaker at the Subject Centre’s Renewals Conference.

“I am fascinated by an information universe in which information seems to last exactly one second before it disappears from the radar scope of relevancy.” well-ahead of me – he has already theorized this idea. He agrees with me, audibly sighing, and yet quickly pushes despondency away and sees the core of the very difficult work he has embarked upon: ‘One sharpens one’s perspective on what is proper to a university teaching environment. Those are environments which are very good for experimenting with and putting out prototypes for knowledge. So Voice of the Shuttle is like that, the wiki class with my students is like that, but they are not environments that are very good for turning out production quality, hardened, super efficient products of different kinds. That requires capitalization and staffing at a level beyond not just what a university is capable of but beyond what is good for a university, which needs to move on to new areas of knowledge and to move its students along. Part of me thinks this is a fool’s errand that I am engaged upon.

What was I thinking, that I could create a site essentially solo that would register the humanities for the internet age? That seems now like a foolish quest.’

During his visit he is looking forward to finding out what the differences are in the UK setting for education in general but also within information technology and the humanities. Beyond that, he says with a matter-of-fact modesty, ‘I am ultimately interested in and I hope to eventually write about how forms of literary imagination have absorbed us in generations past and how they can contribute to and enrich the similar forms of imaginative engagement that are at work in the media world today. I am very interested in the topic of simulation, for example. How exactly is it that the imagination is at work in simulated or virtual kinds of environments?’ For our part, we can wonder at the real, rich, not virtual imagination of Liu himself, nurtured unwittingly, many years ago by a character called Tom Swift.

It is not a foolish quest, of course, and we owe Liu a debt of gratitude for seeing the possibilities of cross-fertilising humanities subjects and technology. ‘I really want the knowledge to be invested in our students,’ he declares. ‘I want them to be behind the scenes and see what’s involved in running this technology and to bring that knowledge back into their core work.

To use technology not just as an instrument serving humanities skills but to bring the knowledge of technology into what we think of as the humanities, the way we think about the world today, the

Newsletter 12 April 2007 9

getty

Literary Research and Academic Careers in Japanese Universities Japanese Universities have a tradition of patronage and apprenticeships, and an explicit link to nationalism. However, all this is changing, and rapidly, due in part to the advent of new media technologies.

Anthony Martin teaches English Literature in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Waseda University in Tokyo. He has published on 16th and 17th century literature, and is also engaged in research on the uses of new technologies in literary research and teaching.

A common, perhaps stereotyped, perception of Japanese researchers in fields such as English literature and cultural studies, is of diligence, but also of conformism and lack of originality. This perception arises in part from variations in social and cultural norms, differences which have been explored in many standard works on Japan, while such an emphasis on cultural divergence is frequently advanced as an explanation of academic isolation.

However, at least some of the problems Japanese students and researchers exhibit in interacting fully with their western counterparts may arise from the conditions in which academic research, especially in the field of English, has been conducted until very recently in non-Western nations. A culture of translation has dominated research and has channeled academic work into largely unproductive areas, even in countries such as Japan, which have a long history of higher education, and which have devoted considerable resources to academia. Moreover, the

10 Newsletter 12 April 2007

hierarchical nature of higher education in Japan has shaped an academic career structure where research, questioning and independent or radical thought has been actively discouraged. However, external factors, in particular the major economic realignments currently taking place, and internal pressures within higher education, have increasingly undermined and in some cases overthrown the traditional model of academic work in the Japanese university. In future, as the potential of globalized networks of information and communication within higher education and research begins to be fulfilled, it is to be hoped that Japanese research students and academics will take further active part within the world community of English studies.

Japanese intellectual life from the late 19th century to the present may usefully be considered in terms of the concepts of center and periphery, as proposed

by Franco Moretti, following earlier work by such as

Literary Research and Academic Careers in Japanese Universities

Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi.(1) One key figure in the reception of the modern in Japan was Tsubouchi Shoyo, who was both instigator and major translator of Western, especially English, literature and of the development of Japanese modern literature itself. In his translations of the entire Shakespeare canon, the novels of Scott and others, and in his establishment of a school of literature at Waseda University in Tokyo, Tsubouchi took a major part in the creation of both the subject of literature and the faculty of humanities in which the subject would receive serious study.(2) Crucially, from this re-creation in the late-19th, early-20th century, Japanese literature, and the study of literature, have suffered from non-metropolitan modernism; that is, the process of becoming modern takes place, but only as a simulacrum or imitation of the central, metropolitan model. The effort of those key figures in peripheral modernism, such as Tsubouchi, has been one of grafting and transmitting the metropolitan modern into a radically different native tradition.(3) In educational policy, as in the development of modern literature, the problematic relationship between the foreign and the native was the crucial factor in the creation of a higher education system. The Japanese university began in 1886 with the establishment of the Imperial University of Tokyo (now the University of Tokyo), an institution consciously developed as part of an overall project of national self-development.(4) Dominant figures in the modernization of Japan, such as Mori Arinori, the Minister of Education, demanded the provision of a system which would foster an educated elite, capable of administering the economic, scientific, and ideological structures of a modern nation. In the following decades, national universities were established in various regions of Japan, and private institutions were also

established by major political figures, such as Okuma Shigenobu (Waseda) and Fukuzawa Yukichi (Keio).

Mori, the architect of Japanese education, was not only concerned with the nationalist regeneration of Japan, but also was deeply receptive to the problem of modernity, and like Tsubouchi, Fukuzawa, Okuma and others, an adept and influential transmitter of the concerns of the centre to the periphery. In considering the establishment of a university system, Mori perceived at an early date the necessity of the model of the research university; thus Tokyo University was founded as a research university almost coterminously with the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins, which like Mori’s national university system, were heavily influenced by the German model.

However, as Ushiogi Morikazu has pointed out, the Japanese research university was created by government diktat, and has atrophied since its inception.

Indeed, by the 1990s, it was apparent to many commentators that even in areas of special concern to the state, such as engineering and applied science, almost no real research was being conducted in universities, the Japanese developments in these areas being made exclusively within the R & D departments of the major companies.(5) The second critical aspect of the origins of the Japanese university system has been its essential foreignness. Though there had been institutions of learning attached to Buddhist temples in various parts of Japan, some of which, such as the institution on the holy mountain Koya, have since become Buddhist universities in the modern era, the Meiji bureaucracy, led by Mori, chose not to develop the national Japanese university out of such existing institutions. Rather, the Japanese university, led by the Imperial University in Tokyo, emerged from the area of “Dutch

studies” or rangaku; that is, the research and study of foreign knowledge, by means of the translation of foreign documents.

The institution which directly preceded the national university was an office, which had been in existence since the 18th century, and which facilitated the bakufo dictatorship’s desire for knowledge, particularly in the areas of medicine and astronomy. The office, called at various times Bansho Wakai Goyo (Office for the Interpretation of Barbarian Books) or Yosho Wakai Goyo (Office for the Interpretation of Western Books) was thus the forerunner of the modern Japanese university, a precursor of a translation culture which, as Nagai Michio has noted, seeks not simply the assimilation of foreign culture, but through that assimilation, a “regeneration of native culture”. (6) In its origins and early years, then, the Japanese university system was based on the translation of foreign documents, and thus of foreign knowledge. Moreover, in developing an indigenous professional academic class, Mori imported a large number of foreign teachers, spending the major part of the higher education budget in the final decades of the 19th century on o-yatoi gaikokujin.(7) The import of foreign teachers has become a tradition of temporary induction which has continued to this day, especially in the national universities, with the employment of gaikokujin koshi (a term usually, (mis)translated as “visiting professor”, the term actually means foreign instructor).

Though the foreign instructors initially employed at the end of the 19th century were temporary assistants, necessary but never intended to be a permanent part of the intellectual culture, the obverse side of professional development was the requirement that young Japanese teachers or professors have some foreign experience at some point, preferably early in their careers. Nevertheless, it is also required, through the dynamic of

1

Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review (Jan/Feb 2000) pp.54-68; Fredric Jameson, “In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities,” introduction to Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1993) pp.vii-xx; Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel (Berkeley: U of California P, 1974)

2

Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era (New York: Henry Holt, 1984), vol. I, Fiction, pp. 96-108; vol. II, Poetry, Drama, Criticism, pp. 410-17.

3

On Japan’s translation culture, and the consequent uneasy relationship with the metropolitan West, see Sakai Naoki, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997).

4

Byron K. Marshall, Academic Freedom and the Japanese Imperial University, pp.1868-1939 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992).

5

Ushiogi Morikazu. “Graduate Education and Research Organization in Japan,” in Burton R. Clark, ed. The Research Foundations of Graduate Education: Germany, Britain, France, United States, Japan (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) pp. 299-325.

6

Nagai Michio, Higher Education in Japan: Its Take-off and Crash. Trans. Jerry Dusenbury. (Tokyo: U of Tokyo P, 1971) p.60.

7

Nagai, pp.55-6.

Newsletter 12 April 2007 11

Literary Research and Academic Careers in Japanese Universities

centre-periphery, that the peripheral never completely absorbs the central, for that would be to lose its identity as peripheral, and become absorbed into the centre, and be part of an unindividuated bloc.

Consequently, the “visiting” professor tends to be just that, a visitor, never wholly accepted, while the Japanese academic must not gain the foreign knowledge with too much skill or fluency, else she runs the danger of becoming non-native.(8)

Moreover, translation remains the principal academic activity within humanities disciplines such as English literature, and it is translation, the transmission of culture from centre to periphery, which is seen as the basis of intellectual knowledge. From the work of Tsubouchi Shoyo on, there has been a strong connection between the worlds of the university, especially English literature departments and academics, and of contemporary Japanese literature. Tsubouchi was the first of many,

The conflict between the native and the foreign, between inside and outside, which runs like a deep faultline throughout Japanese history and culture can be immensely creative.

It is still the case that the Japanese academic has to experience foreignness, the sense of other, in some sense before he or she can reach complete academic status. However, it is the foreign experience in itself which is often considered crucial, rather than the acquisition of knowledge or particular abilities, learning and skills which in many cases could be achieved quite easily at home. Moreover, it is seen as highly important that this foreignness is not completely mastered, but remains in some way unreachable; the foreign should remain too difficult to achieve with complete fluency. The novelist Natsume Soseki, sent to London for a period of some months, painstakingly recorded his feelings of alienation, which thus proved his essential Japaneseness. (Though it should also be observed that much of the alienation felt by Soseki resulted from the cultural insensitivities of his metropolitan hosts.)(9) Soseki’s work on his experiences in London continues to model perceptions of the relationship between the centre and the periphery, and is held in high regard for maintaining an alternate, alienated identity. Even today, there remains a great deal of suspicion of the Japanese academic or cultural figure whose sensibility and work meld too easily into the foreign.

exemplifying the originary figure within peripheral modern literature as discussed

by Moretti and Miyoshi, a figure who attempts, impossibly, to unite the native and the foreign.(10) The translation ethos of Japanese academia thus expresses a divided attitude: on the one hand an ideology of native tradition to which the foreign must be assimilated if it is to be appropriated; on the other hand a fear of and desire for the unattainable, irreducible other of foreign knowledge.

The conflict between the native and the foreign, between inside and outside, which runs like a deep faultline throughout Japanese history and culture can be immensely creative. However, while in literature itself, art, and cinema, the impossibility of translation has often produced striking adaptations, versions and reformations of the original, in academic study, the restricted nature of the canon, and the hierarchical nature of the education structure have combined to corrupt and inhibit intellectual practice.

Typically, and until very recently, an academic career in a major university depended upon being part of an apprenticeship system – either formalized in the national universities, where a senior professor would have two junior professors and a small number of postgraduate

researchers in an official and rigid attachment, or, in private universities, in groups not so formal but tending in practice to the same small group structure.

In this system, preferment, teaching and research opportunities came almost entirely from within; failure to enter into the habatsu/gakubatsu system (the name means something like study group, but denotes academic clique or faction) led inexorably to academic failure per se. Exceptions to this order were to be found in the further periphery of less prestigious universities and colleges, where the absence of any graduate school or other post-graduate provision rendered the faculty unable to replicate itself, and thus forced to employ outsiders.

While this external hiring structure in less prestigious universities and colleges often led to some institutions and departments becoming closely connected with faculties and departments at the major, core institutions, the more open professional practice did allow the employment of faculty who were not the product of the gakubatsu system. Thus, paradoxically, in the 1970s and 1980s flagship universities such as Tokyo, Kyoto, Waseda, and Keio tended to employ almost exclusively their own graduates, with relatively few faculty holding recognized postgraduate qualifications, while smaller, less prestigious institutions often had numerous faculty with doctorates from North American or European universities.

I should observe that there has been a marked tendency, especially in the hiring of junior staff in the major universities in very recent years, to require post-graduate qualifications; however, the reliance on home-grown scholars who have come up through the department doing the hiring is still strong.

Rather than acquiring a doctorate, especially from a non-Japanese institution, and thus becoming somewhat tainted by too intimate a contact with foreignness, graduate students and junior researchers have been encouraged to publish a small number of articles, often in minor, nonrefereed journals, to give papers at a small number of colloquia (usually within the university, or at meetings of small scholarly

8

The position of foreign lecturers in Japanese universities, the vast majority of whom engage in teaching English language and literature, is described in Ivan P. Hall, Cartels of the Mind: Japan’s Intellectual Closed Shop (New York: Norton, 1998); and Brian J. McVeigh, Japanese Higher Education as Myth (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002) pp. 164-77.

9

Keene, Dawn to the West, vol. I, pp. 309-11.

10 Sakai, p.147.

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Literary Research and Academic Careers in Japanese Universities

societies), and to concentrate their efforts on attaining teaching, and eventually full-time positions within the patronage of the senior professor. In the humanities, and particularly within foreign literatures such as English, the senior professor himself, very occasionally herself, would be principally occupied with translation of canonical works, which had often already been translated.(11) This situation of patronage and faction has been changing over the last decade, at an accelerated pace in the last few years.

Government reform papers formulated in the 1990s are now being enacted, though often with chaotic and dismal results.(12) However, while the top-down pressures from civil bureaucracy and government are unfortunately prone to short-termism and simple cost-cutting, there has been a marked opening up of academic employment structures. Within my own department, for example, hiring decisions are no longer made by the department itself, a development which has already

had a considerable effect on the various backgrounds and qualifications of newly hired faculty. In this new structure, graduate students must adapt to demands of a competitive, relatively open job market.

A shift in relations between the centre and peripheries in English studies or in academic research in the humanities will not come about as part of a reformist public policy on behalf of more progressive politicians, nor will it emerge from the best intentions of teachers and university administrators. Indeed, reforms which have been attempted in the past decade have almost completely failed in their aims, and students and junior faculty are no better trained or equipped to do research than they were previously.

Rather, I would argue, dramatic changes in peripheral cultures have always been technological, rather than ideological in nature. It may well be seen, however, that in a post-modern world, different technologies come to bear, and in the electronic era the centre is at once

everywhere and nowhere.

An optimistic view of the current changes would take note of how, historically, internal crisis and foreign technology have had a dynamic effect on Japan, from the introduction of writing and the Imperial system in the 7th to 8th century; through the imports of God, gunpowder, mercantilism and totalitarianism in the late-16th century; to the American interventions of the mid-19th and mid20th century. The immediate access to texts and information offered online has been readily and eagerly accepted by a new generation of Japanese graduates and young researchers. The most popular Japanese academic journal in the field of English literature is entitled Eigo Seinen – The Rising Generation; and it should be the case that the new generation of Japanese academics will rise to prominence not only within their own institutional culture, but also in the world of humanities and literary research.

11 Ushiogi, p.309.

12 McVeigh, pp.245-55.

Applications for English up by 7.6% The number of people applying to full-time undergraduate courses in English at UK universities and colleges in 2007 has increased by 7.6%, the latest statistics from UCAS show (www.ucas.ac.uk/new/press/news140207. html). English has therefore exceeded an average rise in applications of 6.4%, although the picture varies considerably from one discipline to another with transport, tourism and travel recording an increase of over 30%, and anatomy, physiology and pathology a decrease of about 18%. History and media studies showed smaller increases than English of 1.8% and 5.7% respectively, whilst drama showed a 10.6% increase. English had 55,581 applications by the 15th January, making it the fifth highest subject in terms of applicant numbers after law, psychology, pre-clinical medicine and management.

Newsletter 12 April 2007 13

Engaging with the Present, Believing in the Future: why our students’ career planning should matter to us.

Career management skills will play an increasingly important part in the lives of our undergraduate in the coming years, but why should we become involved?

Lucinda Becker is a Lecturer at the School of English and American Literature, University of Reading.

She is the author of Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (Ashgate 2003).

An English degree is clearly not a directly vocational course: this is self evident in its content, but also reflected in the career destinations of our graduates, who regularly enter professions as widely diverse as journalism and accountancy. Although some universities include what might be thought of as vocational modules in their English degree courses (modules such as journalism or media and cultural studies), many English departments prefer a more purely academic module profile, focusing on literature for its own sake rather than leaning towards more vocational modules.

This is, in my opinion, no bad thing: an English undergraduate at Reading might be expected to have chosen this degree course on just that basis, expecting to be guided along the fascinating pathways within the realms of English literature.

The problem for Schools of English such as ours is that in our enthusiasm to celebrate literature with our students, we might overlook the inherent vocational aspects of our course: we do, in fact, offer our students the chance to develop an impressive array of transferable skills and marketable personal qualities, we just have to hunt a bit harder to find them. I have lost count of the number of students who have approached me over the years to discuss their career options and, on being asked about their transferable skills base, earnestly assure me that they have absolutely no skills at all! Of course they have developed skills and personal qualities which would be attractive to an employer, they are simply unaware of them.

The Career Conundrum for Schools of English For a School of English the challenge in teaching Career Management Skills (CMS) is how to package the qualities that our students have to offer, and how to encourage our students to remain idealistic and ambitious about their career choices whilst ensuring that they are ready to enter the career market effectively once they graduate. We need to protect our students from the nagging anxiety that they really should be work ready almost before they reach us: this could potentially undermine the whole point of an enlightening and intellectually invigorating degree

14 Newsletter 12 April 2007

course. Increased debt and a highly competitive graduate career marketplace inevitably bring pressures to bear on our students, but we naturally want the best for them, and this means allowing them to take time to consider what career would be most satisfying for them, which career path would most closely fit their life goals and aspirations.

If we are to do this effectively, any career management training must incorporate these ideals.

A generic teaching model will form no more than the basis of our teaching activities: it must be adapted to suit the particular needs of our students.

For those working with English undergraduates the challenge is clear: students must learn to package themselves to perfection for the career market, whilst giving themselves time to consider every possible career choice, safe in the knowledge that this is, for most of them, the right way to approach the task ahead of them. We do have one advantage here over more vocational courses: most of our students can expect to undertake some form of training once they graduate if they are to succeed in their chosen careers. This training might take the form of a PGCE, one traditional route for English graduates, but we have found over the years that our graduates are equally attractive employees for a plethora of other professions. If an undergraduate is able to accept that further training might be necessary, then training within marketing, journalism, law or accountancy are equally possible, and might be more appealing for many of our students. A recent database created for the use of our current students focused on the career destinations of our most recent graduates, and it came as no surprise to find that a good proportion of those who responded to our request for information were happily embroiled in the most unexpected careers.

Teaching Career Management Skills The destinations of some of our recent graduates is no great shock because we know, as educators, that our graduates leave us with a broad range of skills, most particularly skills of analytical criticism,

Engaging with the Present, Believing in the Future

effective communication and the ability to present ideas and evidence coherently and persuasively. What is more shocking is the spectacle of a group of students who can be effortlessly persuasive in a seminar setting being struck dumb at the thought of persuading employers at interview that they would be successful and productive employees. Students who can produce elegant essays frequently struggle to write an effective curriculum vitae; those who have no problem with a tight essay word count seem, initially, to be incapable of completing a succinct and well written application form.

Our key responsibility to our students is undoubtedly to provide them with an appreciation of English Literature by developing their analytical and communication skills: this is a lifelong gift that we offer our students. However, alongside this we also have a responsibility to prepare our students for their working lives: this is another lifelong gift, and one that we are well placed to offer.

For us, the answer has been to follow the CMS Module offered throughout the University of Reading, whilst adapting it to fit our needs. In the past the issue of career management has been left largely to students; they were encouraged to attend centrally organised careers fairs, and were made aware of the services provided by our Careers Advisory Service.

The problem with this approach was that students often approached these resources too late (if at all) and so were not in the best position to profit from them. In this, career management is perhaps not so very different from other aspects of English teaching: it is not my experience that every student fully appreciates the need to grasp the intricacies of Shakespearean blank verse, and they may not, therefore, relish the hour we will spend together poring over twenty lines of blank verse from an obscure scene, but I know that they will bless me when it comes to exam time, and even (in my fondest hopes) when it comes to appreciating Shakespeare when they rediscover him in ten years’ time.

of, our careers advisors), internet based learning materials (the vast majority of learning hours allocated to the module are self-directed, web-based learning) and the back up of our Careers Advisory Service.

Despite an understandable caution about the introduction of the module (from academics and students alike), it has become an increasingly accepted, and acceptable, part of our undergraduates’ university experience.

The current module is still principally internet based, with students having the opportunity to access a range of materials on our university’s central CMS website. During this process they are encouraged to undertake personality and career preference tests; they can also access the latest information regarding the careers market and work through the advice offered on effective applications.

The contact teaching time for the course (six hours for all of our students in the Autumn Term of their second year) is reserved for interactive aspects of the course. Students learn in a workshop style, exchanging ideas and working in small groups to analyse their transferable skills and personal qualities, to plan for effective applications and to improve their interview techniques. Assessment takes the form of three assignments: a personal profile essay (which includes an analysis of the personality preference tests and an assessment of the career market as it relates to their career goals), a CV and a career action plan.

Embedding the CMS Module The assessment model outlined above reflects the way in which we have adapted the generic CMS module to suit our needs

as a School of English. In particular, we have departed from the generic model by including a career action plan in our assessment. The personal profile and CV take the form of summative assessment of the 5-credit module; the action plan is formatively assessed as part of the ongoing process of career management and preparation by our students. We have taken this step partly in response to a perceived problem with the delivery of a generic CMS module throughout the university, and partly as a way of embedding the module within our normal teaching and pastoral programmes.

There is, inevitably, a temptation for our students to see the CMS module as simply another course to be completed before they move on to the next challenge.

This is not an ideal way to approach the module: our hope is that we can guide our students towards a different approach, that of seeing the CMS assignments as a springboard from which they can continue to plan their careers throughout their time at university. Students often need an effective CV quickly if they are to be successful in applying for the most lucrative and satisfying vacation jobs; they also need to make an audit of their skills, experience and marketable qualities at this relatively early stage in their undergraduate course. In addition to this, we would like to encourage them to devote some time and energy to working towards long term career planning.

If we get this right, there are two huge advantages to implementing career action plans. Firstly, students can plan some of their activities around the targets they have outlined within their actions plans. Those with few presentation skills,

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With this ideal in mind, Reading University instigated, five years ago, a generic, university-wide module entitled Career Management Skills. The module is compulsory for all undergraduates and has, from the outset, relied on contact teaching from each department (sometimes delivered by, or with the help

Newsletter 12 April 2007 15

Engaging with the Present, Believing in the Future

for example, might choose to become more involved in seminar presentations, or join the debating society; those with poor IT skills might take advantage of our IT training courses. By constructing the action plan template in such a way that it can be continued throughout their course, students have the opportunity to make plans well in advance, gaining in confidence as they progress and thus both reducing their anxiety about their future career and boosting their ambition.

The Future of CMS The second advantage is less obvious, but equally important. It is to be expected that academics will feel some reluctance to become directly involved in career management training for their students.

This is perfectly understandable: lecturers pride themselves on the quality of their teaching, and would not wish to compromise this by attempting to teach a subject area in which they have no qualifications and, sometimes, very little experience. However, our lecturers do

management skills, they do not necessarily want to undertake training in this area, but they do have the life experience and mature common sense to be of great service to their students, if only CMS is embedded in the curriculum – and in their timeframe – in a way that makes it no more of a burden, but does ensure that it is of the greatest relevance and value to both personal tutors and their tutees. Having worked through the implementation of a generic CMS teaching model we have moved some considerable way towards adapting and developing the model to suit the needs of our School. In future all English Schools and Departments will be in a position to do the same, and are likely to do so in order to engage their students, add value to the course and ensure that no precious research time is wasted on a less than perfect system.

In the future we anticipate continuing the development of an embedded CMS module within our normal teaching and pastoral activities. We have the facility to hyperlink any of our internet based

Students who can produce elegant essays frequently struggle to write an effective curriculum vitae. undertake to mark the assignments on this course, and feed back the results to their personal tutees as part of their programme of supporting the personal development of our students. For specialist help, such as detailed careers advice or interview training, they will send a student to our Careers Advisory Service. What academics do have to offer is a wealth of life experience, and we are often best placed, knowing our personal tutees so well, to discuss a student’s aspirations, fears and anxieties. With this in mind, the career action plan has been designed to be used as a discussion document, allowing personal tutors to extend their pastoral role by encouraging and guiding students through the process of change. This takes up no more of the academic’s time; it is simply a way of allowing a more structured discussion to take place.

It is perhaps this aspect of CMS training that is most vital to its future success.

Academics are not necessarily in a position to offer more time to their students in order to help them to develop their career

16 Newsletter 12 April 2007

learning websites to the university’s central CMS site, and we hope to use this feature to help our students to view career management as an everyday part of their university experience, rather than a discrete module: students who are preparing for a presentation, or analysing primary material, or planning their dissertations, will be able to see how these skills could help them to succeed in the career market. It will also allow students to value activities which fall outside the more traditional remit of Schools of English such as ours: creative writing is just one of these. In our School we have, for many years, welcomed a professional writer into our department, usually during the Spring Term, and in this way offered our students the chance to develop their creative writing skills. Student numbers on these optional courses vary from year to year, but we have signalled our enthusiasm for this mode of study by incorporating creative writing within our final year dissertation options.

The challenge with creative writing is therefore not necessarily one of asking students to engage with this form of intellectual and creative development, but of allowing them to see its benefit in terms of both their academic development and their long term career aspirations.

As Mimi Thebo points out in her article ‘Employability and Creative Writing’, (English Subject Centre Newsletter 11, November 2006), we are caught here in a further conundrum. We know that courses such as creative writing can benefit our students enormously, but the measures used to quantify success in the area of employability are often too crude to recognise this. Entry into the Creative Industries may still be low paid or unpaid; as academics (many of whom will have entered their career in an ad hoc and relatively low paid position) we are still able to see the intrinsic value of these careers and the undergraduate training which led to them: sadly, the current statistical analysis model is unlikely to reflect this value.

However, a combination of creative writing (or other similar activities) and an effective CMS programme could help to overcome this problem to some extent.

If we are, as Mimi Thebo suggests, to incorporate ideas of enterprise into our employability measures, and we were to trace, through CMS, the transferable skills base gained from such courses, then reason might prevail. We know that English undergraduates may take time to settle into a career (despite the anxiety of statistical compilers, this is, in my opinion, a good thing in many cases); we also know that they are likely to enter a plethora of careers (my two 2006 English graduates who are now investment bankers could testify to that). This being the case, an inspiring CMS programme, which allows students to identify their transferable skills and value their spirit of adventurous enterprise, can only be a good thing, for both the students and the institution.

Most importantly, the development of the CMS module will increase further the involvement of academics with this facet of our undergraduates’ lives. In this way it is hoped that all of us – student, academics and careers advisors – can become involved in our students’ career planning in the most efficient and productive way.

Our students deserve to succeed in their chosen careers: we are determined to help them in every way that we can.

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Seeking Stimulation for your Teaching?

T3 – Teaching, Topics and Texts www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/t3/ If you’re wondering how to begin your seminar tomorrow, or have a fresh idea for teaching a particular text, T3 is for you. Organised by text and topic, T3 is a growing resource of teaching ideas designed by and for hard-pressed English lecturers. To encourage you to share yours, we’re offering a £10 book token for each one (up to a maximum of £50 per applicant).

t recent entries:

Here’s one of our mos Theme

ea Levy Small Island by Andr Culture Clashes

Activity

The Cricket Test

Text

rts teams they support.

Ask students what spo old family links to? team or one they have Do they follow a local rnaments? national team in big tou Do they support their s? tion, exploring how s or reluctant spectator Are they passionate fan patriotism and participa y, alit ion nat of es issu wider develop to incorporate Allow the discussion to ating obvious ‘teams’. cre by Powell’s icts fl con its simplify read extracts from Enoch Small Island refuses to could get students to you es issu geles se An the of Los e nt e cricket test’ (Th the historical developme ’s comments about ‘th bit Teb To provide a sense of an rm No 8) 5).

196 200 egraph, 03/08/ (The Birmingham Post, tolerance (The Daily Tel ‘rivers of blood’ speech vid Davis about cultural Da by icle art ent rec re Times, 1990) and a mo rsity) Waller (Bath Spa Unive Submitted by: Alison

Newsletter 12 April 2007 17

English:

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The long view from A-Level to graduation

18 Newsletter 12 April 2007

English: The long view from A-Level to graduation

From Sixth Form to the world of work, a new study conducted at the University of Central Lancashire probes the decision-making process and benefits of doing a degree in English.

In 2005 the University of Central Lancashire’s Centre for Employability (CfE) commissioned a research project to investigate students’ motivations for studying English degrees. The research aimed to identify the reasons why prospective students, current students and graduates choose to study English and to discover more about the perceptions of College teachers and Careers Advisors about studying English-based subjects at degree level.(1) This, it was hoped, would have implications for widening participation, retention and employability strategies throughout the sector.

Findings from the students about their motivations for studying English revealed that the main reasons for choosing this subject were for enjoyment as well as their ability in the subject. With regard to employability, it was found that students did have an awareness of this but not a full understanding.

Graduates however demonstrated their employability by entering a variety of careers accessed via the wide range of skills attributable to their English degree.

Background The English Subject Centre commissioned two relevent studies in 2002. Deborah Cartmell’s research into the motivations for studying English found that over two-thirds of her sample claimed that their reason for choosing English was their enjoyment, interest and pleasure in the subject.(2) This is supported by the English Subject Centre’s leaflet and website ‘Why Study English?’ (2006) which emphasises interest, enjoyment and choosing a degree that’s ‘for you’ as well as for work.(3) The report into admissions trends in undergraduate English by Williams reveals that fears that English is a

declining subject are unjustified, although the English community may need to consider ways of maintaining the position of English in a more competitive HE environment, especially as pupils were found to be more interested in how their degree subject related to employment than they had been in the past.(4) Since Williams’ report was completed, top-up fees have been introduced and the continued success of newer subjects like Media, Communications, and even Creative and Cultural Industries are forcing English to re-evaluate itself further. A recent article in the Times Educational Supplement claims, for example, that Media, Film and TV Studies is the fastest growing A-Level this year, putting it among the ten most popular subjects for the first time.(5) Our research aims to investigate whether, four years after these two studies, pupils and undergraduates especially, continue to have these views and concerns.

Nicola Adcock is currently working as the Centre Administrator for ceth.

She has recently been awarded her MA (by Research) in English Literature.

Victoria Jackson is the Research Assistant for ceth and is working towards an MPhil/PhD in employability.

One of the key responses to the need of prospective students to factor employment prospects into account when making decisions about higher education has been the Student Employability Profile developed by a number of Subject Centres, including English.

The English profile helps academics better articulate to both prospective students and employers the employability skills developed through the study of English Language and Literature.(6) Mimi Thebo also supports the employability agenda to further strengthen staff teaching in Creative Writing.(7) Employability is a particular concern to the higher education sector in light of Labour’s Manifesto and White Paper on higher education, which declared their aim to raise the higher education participation rate of those aged 18-30 to 50%.(8) The increasing numbers of graduates entering the workplace will put

1 ‘English based degree’ refers to degrees in English Language, English Literature, English Language and Literature (although these might be given slightly different names at some universities) and English on a Combined Honours programme.

2 Cartmell, D (2002) Report on English in the Workplace: English Graduate Careers 1998-2001: Statistics and Commentary.

www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/deptproject 3 www.whystudyenglish.ac.uk 4 Williams, S (2002) ‘Admission Trends in Undergraduate English: Statistics and Attitudes’ English Subject Centre. www.english.ltsn.ac.uk/resources/general/publications/reports/Admission.pdf (Accessed 20 February 2006).

5 Mansell, W. (2006) Times Educational Supplement. 18 August: 6.

6 Student Employability Profile (2004) English Subject Centre, The Higher Education Academy. Electronic resource www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/projects/archive/careers/careers5.php (Accessed 20 February 2006) 7 Mimi Thebo (2006) Employability and Creative Writing. The Higher Education Academy English Subject Centre Newsletter Autumn 2006. Electronic resource www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/newsletters/index.php (Accessed 28 January 2007) 8 Blair, T. Labour Party Manifesto ‘Britain forward, not back. Education: More children making the grade’ (2005). Electronic Resource www.image.guardian.co.uk/sysfiles/Politics/documents/2005/04/13/labourmanifesto.pdf (Accessed 20 February 2006) Clarke, Charles. The Future of Higher Education. London: The Stationery Office. Electronic Resource. www.dfes.gov.uk/hegateway/uploads/ White%20Pape.pdf (Accessed 20 February 2006)

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English: The long view from A-Level to graduation

extra strain upon the graduate market.

Universities are under pressure not only to increase retention and widening participation rates but employment rates as well, while prospective students are increasingly asking difficult questions about how their degree programme will increase their employability.(9)

Methods In order to obtain a range of views, students were chosen from different stages of their education to participate in the study. There were five stages to the project. Firstly, 114 second year A-Level English students from ten Sixth Form and Further Education establishments in the north-west were asked to complete a questionnaire about why they had chosen to apply for an English degree and what

them for the world of work. Finally, a sample of these respondents was selected for an in-depth interview to build up six case studies. The findings, conclusions and recommendations of this research as discussed below.

Findings from A-Level Students The sample of English A-Level students were first asked general non-subject specific questions about the factors that had influenced their applications. Around 90% of the respondents chose a university based on the courses it had to offer.

Location was a deciding factor for over three-quarters of the sample: in addition to this they also cited reputation, entry grades and the “feel” of the university as important elements. In terms of the usefulness of resources consulted, almost

most students talk to people who are not necessarily knowledgeable about studying English and the benefits to be gained from an English degree. factors influenced this decision. This questionnaire had been piloted with a sample of local first year A-Level students who attended the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) for an open day.

Secondly, the views and opinions of those from whom these students sought advice were explored: four English teachers from Sixth Form and Further Education Colleges were interviewed about why their students chose to take English (both at A-Level and degree) and one Career Advisor was asked about why students might/might not choose to apply to study for English.

Thirdly, two focus groups (total of four students) and one interview with current undergraduates from UCLan were held to examine their reasons for studying English, their satisfaction with their current degree programme as well as their awareness of employability issues. Fourthly, a questionnaire was then distributed to UCLan graduates enquiring about the areas of employment and careers they had entered, the transferable skills gained by studying English and specifically, how they felt their English degree had prepared

all participants found the prospectus invaluable, slightly fewer used the Internet and around 80% attended Open Days.

Over three-quarters of respondents were likely to take advice from friends; less than three-quarters took advice from immediate family whilst just over half consulted with teachers. Students were unlikely to talk to other family members and careers professionals. It can therefore be assumed that most students talk to people who are not necessarily knowledgeable about studying English and the benefits to be gained from an English degree. Other sources students used when making a decision ranged from the useful – “talking to people who have done the course I’m considering” – to the less useful – “I went down a list and picked six at random.”

Factors influencing the choice of degree peaked at almost 90% for enjoyment of subject, closely followed by success at the subject and career prospects.

A quarter of students who had applied to read an English degree were then questioned about their reasons for this choice. The findings show that most of

these students chose to study English because of their enjoyment of the subject, just over three-quarters chose because they considered that they were good at it, and just over half because of the career prospects. Around half of the participants wanted to pursue postgraduate study in this area.

Findings from College Teachers and Careers Advisor When considering the influences that affect a student’s decision to study English it is important to explore the views and opinions of those from whom students seek advice.

During the interviews, English teachers offered varying reasons for why they felt their students chose English as an A-Level, including the fact that it is a subject they were familiar with from GCSE, that the students have previously enjoyed and been successful in English, and that English is a versatile subject. Only one of the teachers interviewed, however, stated that he felt students chose to study English A-Level because they wanted to study English at university. Teachers were also asked what factors they considered deterred students from studying English. These included bad experiences in GCSE classes – “I mean, I can see why they don’t choose Literature when they tell me that they have spent a year reading Shakespeare out loud in class” – and the emphasis placed upon reading. “In my generation we didn’t have the television” said one tutor, ”so I was what was called a natural reader, I would read the end of the shredded wheat packet if there was nothing else available and I don’t think young people these days are natural readers.”

Teachers’ views and attitudes towards studying English (both at A-Level and degree) were both positive and negative: teachers often expressed confusion about the advice they should be offering students. Some teachers felt that the career prospects with an English degree were narrower than with other subjects while many were unsure of the career options available (apart from the ‘traditional’ routes e.g. teacher and librarian). The Careers Advisor and some of the teacherss brought up the issue of parental pressure to study other subjects than English while one even claimed that the reason that students chose

9 We recognise the difference between employability (as the skills, competencies and personal capabilities necessary to promote success in job seeking and job performance) and actual employment (having a job). Whilst prospective and current students often want the reassurance of employment, university departments are more concerned with developed general or subject-related employability.

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English was “because they couldn’t do Chemistry”. Interestingly, the comment was made that students were not aware of the transferable skills to be gained from studying English, yet surely this depends largely on whether the teacher has the knowledge and time to inform students about the skills they are developing.

One teacher cited the broadness of the degree programme as a reason students found the English degree attractive, whilst others claimed it was love of the subject or subject success. This was reflected in the students’ responses to the same question, indeed this was the only question that teachers responded to in a similar way to students; for most other questions, their responses and opinions were very different.

of the students that hadn’t planned on studying English had originally applied to study a language (for example Spanish and German). The change in decision to study English instead of the original choice of a language was mainly due to the student’s lack of success in the language subject at A-Level and realising that they performed better in English.

Recent literature on retention suggests that withdrawal from higher education is more likely to take place during the students’ first year at university.(10) All first year students spoken to during these focus groups were satisfied with their current degree, were enjoying the subject and reported no desire to withdraw from the programme. Indeed some students were pleasantly surprised by the content Findings from Undergraduates of their degree since, prior to beginning their course, they were unaware of certain All the undergraduates who took part in topics that their English degree would these focus groups were in their first year cover (for example one student was studying for an English degree (on either surprised by a communications module single or combined honours programmes). on her English course). As Smith and The main discussion focused on their Hopkins’ research into sixth-formers’ reasons for choosing universities and perceptions of teaching and learning in courses. When it came to deciding upon degree-level English reveals, there is a a higher education institution, courses on mismatch between student expectations offer at the university, the location and and the realities of university study.(11) the entry grades required were the three The results of our research suggest that, most important aspects. The emphasis on although students’ experiences at UCLan location may be peculiar to UCLan which were rather different to their expectations, recruits mainly from the local area: it can’t be presumed that the same response would these differences were experienced as overwhelmingly positive. Many of be achieved at other institutions. When the students were involved in Student deciding upon a subject, the students overall rated their enjoyment of the subject, Societies associated with their English course, such as Creative Writing and their ability at the subject and the career Journalism. It was felt that these provided prospects associated with that subject the type of student support reported by as the main influential factors. This was Tinto that improved student retention.(12) the same response that A-Level students Benefits of a small class size were also had given and supports the research by commented upon as having the benefit of Cartmell although today’s students place more emphasis on career prospects. Those increasing academic support. undergraduates who declared that they had When asked about employability, these ‘always’ wanted to study English explained students showed an awareness of that this was due largely to familiarity employability issues and were conscious with the subject at school or college. of its importance. Their understanding of Interestingly a large percentage (40%)

employability was variable and ranged from ‘doing personal development’ to ‘how much an employer wants you’ to the rather impressive ‘having the appropriate life skills to evolve in a work environment.’

Students did not, however, seem to know what they wanted to do after they had graduated. Some talked about further study and the work experience they had taken on in order to keep their options open.(13) This supports Williams’ research claims that students, even in the first year, were aware that employability mattered but also reveals that students had no definite ideas about what they wanted to do with their English degree.

The discipline of English, like that of other non-vocational subjects, needs to raise awareness, not only of the options available for students but the people who can offer useful advice and the resources available to help.

Findings from Graduates Responses to the questionnaire illustrated the large range of careers that graduates had entered from the conventional career paths linked with English such as teaching, to a more diverse Media and PR Manager and Mental Health Nurse. There were also a large number of graduates in administrative positions.

The graduates who were sent this postal questionnaire graduated between 1990 and 2002. Since the University of Central Lancashire set up the Centre for Employability (CfE) in 2001 and has gradually increased its emphasis on employability it might be expected that the graduates would hold synchronistic views about how employability was dealt with by the university. The majority of the graduates were satisfied with their current role. A large number, however, considered that they were not prepared for the world of work. Students who graduated before 1999 (before the CfE was established) often commented that the university could

10 Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. (2001) Education and Employment – Sixth Report. London: The Stationery Office. Electronic Resource www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200001/cmselect/cmeduemp/384/38402.htm (Accessed: 20 February 2006).

Tinto, V (2004) Student Retention and Graduation: Facing the Truth, Living with the Consequences. The Pell Institute: Washington, DC. Electronic Resource www.pellinstitute.org/tinto/TintoOccasionalPaperRetention.pdf (Accessed 20 February 2006) ‘Student Retention: News Archive’ (2004) Information and Computer Sciences Subject Centre. The Higher Education Academy. Electronic resource www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/student_retention/home/ 11 Smith, K. & Hopkins, C. (2005) ‘Great Expectations: sixth formers’ perceptions of Teaching and Learning in Degree-Level English’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Volume 4 Number 3: 304-318.

12 See 11 above.

13 In 2005-06 the Centre for Employability Through the Humanities conducted an employability survey asking Humanities students about their career options. Most of those second and third year students who were subsequently interviewed did have an idea about their dream job but rather less understanding of how they were going to achieve this. Neither Lecturers nor Careers Advisors had been approached for advice.

Newsletter 12 April 2007 21

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English: The long view from A-Level to graduation

have given them more support and career guidance. However after 1999, this seems to become less of an issue with only a handful of students commenting on these services: often the comment is that the services were available but the student chose not to use them.

A sample of these graduates was contacted to discuss further their experiences since graduation. These interviews were then used to build up case studies showing a sample of graduate career paths including Primary School Teacher, Call Centre Supervisor with an established career as a Writer, Senior Political Consultant, Stained Glass Artist and a Publisher. These graduates were all deemed successful in their field (in that they had established careers that they enjoyed) and this research sought to establish if this success could be attributed to a common career developmental factor.

It turned out that none of the graduates interviewed had made use of the Careers Service or the Centre for Employability.

Comments from the graduates indicate that they did want careers advice and guidance but did not know where to

access this information or what information was available – “I had no advice from anyone as to what to do when leaving University or what I could do with my degree.” The majority of the graduates in the Case Studies had undertaken further studies including a Creative Writing course, a Stained Glass Art course, Masters degrees in English and Teacher Training Courses. One graduate is also thinking about starting a PhD. This need or desire for additional learning or training is significant and suggests that the recent (and perhaps current) English undergraduate degree does not prepare students enough for finding suitable employment or perhaps that many employers or careers require more than a first degree.(14) This apparent trend to ‘topup’ an undergraduate degree with either postgraduate study or additional training may not be specific to English. As the graduate job market becomes increasingly competitive, many graduates of other disciplines may also be feeling the need to have something extra.

Our research revealed how each graduate had taken a very different path: some had

worked before university, others had not; some were mature students whilst others were straight from college; some had had a number of different jobs, others had worked in only one field. The one thing they all had in common was their love and passion for the subject of English.

Graduates chose such a degree subject in the first place because they enjoyed it and their desire to continue English in further study or training expressed their continuing pleasure in the subject. The fact that not all the graduates interviewed had entered a traditional English career provides evidence that, despite recent concerns about employability, English continues to be studied for interest; what is more, this doesn’t preclude graduates from alternative careers in other disciplines. This supports the belief of college teachers that an English degree offers versatility in the marketplace.

Conclusion The main conclusion of this research is that, although students entering university chose to study English for many reasons, the consensus is that prospective and current students enjoy the subject, are

14 Additional training undertaken by graduates who completed the initial questionnaire included qualifications such as Post Graduate Certificate in Education, Postgraduate Nursing Qualifications, Masters Degrees and Post Graduate Degrees and IT qualifications.

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English: The long view from A-Level to graduation

good at it and believe that their career prospects will not be diminished (and indeed may be enhanced) by studying for an English degree. Although some teachers were unclear about the careers English graduates can enter, others were well informed and educated their English students on the variety of options open to them. Parental pressure does appear to be an issue and this was echoed by students, teachers and the Careers Advisor. Although not purposefully researched, gender was also identified as an issue by one teacher. It was felt that the large numbers of female students and the nature of some subject content could be off-putting for male students and possibly even deter some male students from continuing in this subject.

College students involved in the study showed an awareness of employability, even if they didn’t display full understanding. English graduates demonstrate the variety of careers that are possible with an English degree, with or without further study or training, and that the transferable skills and flexibility of the subject justify the sector’s continued confidence in the degree. It appears that English has a clear function in the marketplace and that employers understand the relevance of such a degree.

There are, however, a number of recommendations that the study has made to UCLan; these may be equally useful for other institutions:

1. Further education teachers need to be informed about the variety of English courses available and the ways in which English can be combined with other subjects.

2. Information should be provided for all stakeholders on graduate destinations and the careers that graduates can enter with an English degree.

3. ‘Friendly’ leaflets, like the English Subject Centre’s ‘Why Study English?’ should be made available to prospective students telling them about ‘English at UCLan’. Such information might include the different areas we cover in English, what the course involves, staff-student ratios, and social aspects such as the societies associated with English (including Creative Writing and Journalism). This, plus information about the different types of support available, should support the university’s retention strategy and result in students having more realistic expectations about the university experience.

4. Teacherss, parents and students need to be provided with more information about how the study of English can enhance employability and about the wide variety of career options available to an English graduate. The services available at UCLan, the Centre for Employability especially, should be promoted widely. Careers Advisory services should perhaps find different ways of reaching out to students and communicating on their level.

5. English undergraduates should be encouraged to make the most of all the facilities available at university that could enhance employability active learning approaches e.g. Live Student Projects and modules such as ‘Planning Your Career’.

6. Graduates should be encouraged to remain in contact with their university and to offer advice about how their degree, student experience and employability could be improved.

Authors’ Note The Centre for Employability at UCLan has now been augmented by the Centre for Employability through Humanities (ceth), a national CETL which has a particular remit to enhance the employability of students on nonvocational programmes such as English, History and Film and Media. Ceth works partly through the establishment of Realistic Work Environments including a Publishing House, a Drama and Events space, and a Museums and Exhibitions facility plus Art House Cinema and a Media Production area. More information can be found at

www.uclan.ac.uk/ceth The authors can be contacted via email (on NCAdcock@uclan.ac.uk or VJackson@uclan.ac.uk) for more information about this study or about UCLan’s CETL. The authors welcome comments on this article.

Seeking that special someone?

Directory of Experience and Interests www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/find/colleagues This Directory enables you to identify colleagues across the UK with similar teaching and research interests in English to your own.You can search by literary author, subject area, teaching interest or colleague name.

To help you overcome your natural modesty and join the Directory, we are offering a £10 book token to all HE lecturers who register.

Newsletter 12 April 2007 23

Accessible and Inclusive Teaching in English As the use of e-learning becomes more prevalent within the English subject community, we all need to consider issues of accessibility for our students and master some basic good practice techniques.

Sue Harrison is an Advisor at TechDisc, a JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Advisory Service

Many lecturers in English have incorporated some aspect of e-learning into their teaching – they may not be podcasting or creating wikis yet, but a fair number now know their way around a VLE or use PowerPoint in lectures. The use of various electronic formats to provide material for students is a big step forward in terms of broader potential accessibility for larger numbers of students – as individual users can adapt the look and feel of a document to suit their requirements.

At its base level, enabling a student to access simple material online (e.g. a Microsoft® Word document) results in a student having the opportunity to amend and adapt that resource into a format that suits them (they could change the background colour, text colour or font, export the document to an MP3 file, use their own assistive technology to read the text aloud, magnify the screen or export the document to a mind map). The student is given the freedom to adapt the material, even if the format most applicable to them is to print out the text and store it physically.

Web Accessibility within an e-learning Context TechDis have been working with other key players in the sector discussing the relevance of accessibility standards for e-learning object creation. Although a standards ‘checklist-based’ approach has its benefits within website accessibility (where the user-base is essentially unknown) it can be detrimental in the realms of e-learning and the creation of e-learning objects.

The use of standards in an e-learning context can be very inhibiting to staff who are just starting out in e-learning or using technology in a very iterative way with students. As Phipps and Kelly (2006) state

‘the application of accessibility-related standards and guidelines can be at best a discouragement or at worst damaging, preventing staff from exploring the potential of e-learning’.(1) The holistic approach to e-learning places the need of the learner (any learner, not only disabled learners) at the centre and examines a number of different facets in investigating a solution to their learning need.

In the holistic model the accessibility of a learning resource, the infrastructure of the institution, local factors (such as subject discipline or language), the intended learning outcomes and the usability of the resource are all considered in the context of a quality enhancement framework.(2) It is important to understand that e-learning is only one part of the learning cycle for a student: there are many different experiences a student will undertake, some of which will be enhanced by e-learning, others may not. For example, in a course of study a student may experience: fieldwork, tutorials, library work, lecturers, group work, lab-work, problem based learning, viva voce, examination, assessment or work-based learning and many of these will have little to do with e-learning. E-learning is one of a number of tools a lecturer can have at their disposal, but they are unlikely to use only one technique. Within a holistic approach there is a need to provide accessible learning experiences as opposed to accessible e-learning experiences.(3) No resource, whether electronic or physical, is going to be equally accessible to every learner. For example, a learning object which contains a drag-and-drop activity, is not likely to be very accessible to a blind or severely visually impaired learner; however the interactivity may engage a dyslexic learner more than

1 Holistic Approaches to E-Learning Accessibility, Phipps, L. and Kelly, B., In: ALT-J: Research In Learning Technology, Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2006, pp. 69-78. DOI: 10.1080/09687760500479860 www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/alt-j-2006 2 Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility, Kelly, B., Phipps, L. and Swift, E. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, Vol. 30, Issue 3, Autumn 2004. ISSN: 1499-6685 www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/cjtl-2004/ 3 Implementing A Holistic Approach To E-Learning Accessibility, Kelly, B., Phipps, L. and Howell, C. In: Cook, J. and Whitelock, D. (2005) Exploring the frontiers of e-learning: borders, outposts and migration; ALT-C 2005 12th International Conference Research Proceedings, ALT Oxford. www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/alt-c-2005/

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Accessible and Inclusive Teaching in English

a heavily textual document. Similarly, a ‘podcast’ of a short audio play would be very accessible to a blind learner, but not accessible to a deaf learner or one who does not have an auditory learning style. In both of the examples above, an issue may not arise if a lecture group was known and the resources did not disadvantage any learners within a specific group.

Furthermore, the accessibility of any learning resource relates heavily to the circumstances of the user at the point of delivery and the context in which it is being delivered. All resources are accessible to someone but some are more inclusive than others and some can be made more accessible at the point of delivery by effective staff intervention.

Materials used in a distance learning context or produced for use by others in a different context (for example, within a repository) need a far higher degree of implicit accessibility than those used in a known context where human intervention can moderate the learning experience.

Key Considerations for an Inclusive e-learning Experience To reiterate some of the comments above, the key considerations when examining inclusive e-learning include: • Adapting the learning experience for inclusion may be more effective and sustainable than adapting the resource.

• Good practice is typically about variety of approach, flexibility, adaptability, innovation and responsiveness to learners.

These are traditional teaching skills.

• By considering the benefits of different types of experience to different learners, reflecting on accessibility should encourage diversity of learning experiences rather than monotonous convergence to ‘lowest common denominators of accessibility’.

• The guiding questions should be ‘who will this benefit?’ and ‘what can I do for those who will be excluded by this?’ If a resource adds value to some of your learners and excludes none of your learners then there is no reason not to use it. You do, however, need to cultivate the awareness of what you might do if future learner cohorts included some who were unable to access that resource.

Accessibility in Everyday Practice The information above suggests the concept of ‘accessibility for all’ is a misnomer. However, with certain best practice techniques lecturers can make materials more accessible for more people.

For instance, within both Microsoft Word and Microsoft® PowerPoint, two of the most commonly used technologies in English Studies, there are basic accessibility features which can be easily implemented.

Accessibility Essentials of Microsoft® Word Font Styles When writing with Microsoft® Word, there are a number of good practice techniques.

For example, a minimum size 12, Sans Serif font (e.g. Verdana or Arial) should be used as this increases readability for users. If possible, avoid excessive use of capitalised, underlined or italicised text and ensure all text is left aligned, not justified, as justified text can lead to some users focusing on the ‘rivers of white space’ between the words, not the words themselves.

Structuring Documents Microsoft® Word has an inbuilt structuring system which should be used when creating any document. Heading tags can be used to denote headings and sub-headings thus providing an intrinsic document structure. When creating a document use the Styles and Formatting toolbar to create appropriate heading for your document. From the ‘Style’ box in the formatting menu a user can choose an appropriate heading and style for the structure of a document (see figure 1).

The ability to navigate a document by structural headings will benefit all users but give exceptional benefits to a range of disabled people. For example: • Visually impaired users may rely on a screen magnifier for reading. A long document can be awkward to navigate through a screen magnifier, requiring much horizontal and vertical scrolling.

A properly structured document can be navigated via the Document Map. • People with poorer English skills (for example, British Sign Language users or others for whom English is a second language) can extract the key concepts before negotiating the dense text.

• A motor impaired user can access the whole document with minimal keyboard or mouse movement.

Once users have created a document using the styles and headings options a number of benefits accrue to both those reading the document and those creating them. Microsoft® Word has an inbuilt navigation system (accessed by navigating to View > Document Map) which can enable users to navigate an appropriately structured long document. Selecting the Document Map will allow the user to expand and contract headings or jump to the relevant section of a large document (see figure 2).

Figure 2 – Microsoft® Word Document Map enabled

Figure 1 – Style Menu in Microsoft®

Hyperlinks All users can benefit from access to additional materials that hyperlinks can provide, as well as from a screen tip embedded within a hyperlink which describes the linked resource enabling the user to decide whether to access it.

There can be particular benefits for some learners with specific needs, for example:

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Accessible and Inclusive Teaching in English

• A motor impaired user can have access to a variety of material more easily than would be possible if they were handling physical resources.

• On a well designed document a screen reader user could browse by hyperlink title, giving the user the ability to ‘skim read’ the resource to find the next level of information.

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Microsoft® Word can be a very powerful learning and teaching tool when used effectively. When used appropriately, the features described above can add interactivity and exemplification to a traditionally inaccessible document.

Accessibility Essentials of Microsoft® PowerPoint Within both the creation and delivery of a PowerPoint presentation there are a number of best practice techniques which should be considered: • Write no more on a slide than you would on a postcard. Over-wordy or complicated slides will be more difficult for an audience to read.

• Use the inbuilt slide design options within Microsoft® PowerPoint wherever possible. (The slide design options can be accessed from Format > Slide

Layout .) By using these slide layout options all text inserted will appear within the presentation outline and will thus be accessible when the document is exported.

• Ensure images and animations are used appropriately. A continuous animation will only serve to distract the audience from the information portrayed. Any images used for exemplification of concept should be explained by the presenter, for the benefit of anyone who cannot see or interpret the visual image.

• The colours chosen for the text and slide background should provide adequate contrast, dark blues and creams have been shown to be particularly legible.

• Use the inbuilt notes field within Microsoft® PowerPoint. The notes field is an ideal place to add additional notes explaining the slide text. Not only will this act as an aide memoir for presenters, but will ensure the context of the presentation is understood when not being delivered (for example if a presentation is uploaded onto a website or Virtual Learning Environment).

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Presentation Technique When physically presenting a session a number of tips and techniques can ensure that you engage as many members of the audience as possible: • Face forward at all times when speaking: you may not know whether there are any lip readers in the audience.

• Use a microphone, if available. It may be connected to an induction loop and your voice may not carry as far as you think it does!

• Ensure you vocalise everything which is present on the slides, otherwise a visually impaired learner (or one sitting at the back of a large auditorium) will not be able to access the material on the screen. Stating ‘this slide explains the concept’ is not acceptable.

• When taking questions from the audience, repeat it from the front, enabling all participants to hear the question.

Of course, there may be some participants who will still not be included by these techniques and where appropriate the needs of individual learners should be taken into consideration.

The use of Assistive Technology within the English Subject Community The techniques mentioned above cover a number of the essentials of accessibility and as such will positively benefit a large number of learners. However, for some disabled learners, further assistive technologies may be required in order to fully access the learning materials. These technologies can be very specific to the learner and their learning environment.

TechDis have been working with the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre Network on the Higher Education Assistive Technology (HEAT) scheme, with the aim of raising awareness of the potential of technology to encourage inclusive teaching and learning and developing and disseminating good inclusive practice to the wider HE sector.

The English Subject Centre has successfully bid within this scheme to investigate the use of mind mapping software with dyslexic English students and the exploration of ideas and concepts in a non-linear style. This project will provide a broader insight into the value of visualization techniques for the study of literary texts. The results of this research are due to be published in late 2007.

Accessible and Inclusive Teaching in English

The HEAT scheme ties into a larger project being undertaken by the English Subject Centre. This larger project is designed to investigate the experiences of a diverse group of disabled learners within the English Subject community and survey their expectations within the subject and any pedagogical, social, structural and technological factors which may have helped or hindered them in their progress. It is hoped this project will provide insight into the specific needs and requirements of disabled learners within the English discipline. This report is also due for dissemination in late 2007.

Conclusions The process of creating more accessible and inclusive teaching practice and learing experiences is not a difficult one. It is important that the learners you are supporting have access to the resources in a manner most suitable for them. Ensuring resources are available online is the first (and probably most important) step. The other important issue is the use of everyday software to increase the accessibility, usability and interactivity of a resource. The basic practices covered above will, when utilised effectively, ensure a more inclusive experience for more learners.

Further information and Resources • TechDis Helpdesk – If you have any queries relating to any accessibility or inclusion issues please email helpdesk@techdis.ac.uk.

• The information provided within this article has been distilled from the TechDis Accessibility Essentials Series.

For further information on the TechDis Accessibility Essentials (or for detailed step-by-step information on how to achieve the techniques mentioned above) please visit www.techdis.ac.uk/accessibilityessentials.

• Creation of Learning Materials Section of TechDis Website: Effective and engaging e-learning materials can go a long way to meeting the accessibility needs of different learners – www.techdis.ac.uk/gettopiccreationlearningmaterials.

• TechDis Staff Packs – These self-supporting staff development materials are designed to enable staff development units to have the resources (presentations, activities, information sheets etc) available to run staff development workshops on a number of different technology and disability related topics – www.techdis. ac.uk/staffpacks.

Recently appointed?

In your first or second year of teaching?

Then don’t miss the Subject Centre’s Training Conference for New Lecturers in English 23-24 November 2007: NCSL Conference Centre, Nottingham Now in it’s fifth year, this conference aims to share and debate practical teaching ideas and activities as they relate to English as a subject; equip new lecturers with a ‘survival kit’ of ideas; and establish a mutual support network. The conference will combine short contextual and orientation talks by leading members of the profession with practical work in groups, each facilitated by a member of the Subject Centre staff.

The conference is intended for lecturers in the English disciplines (literature, language, creative writing) who are in the beginning stages of their careers as full-time lecturers. It supplements local PgCHE courses which are inevitably of a generic nature by offering the opportunity to reflect on the demands of subject teaching.

ÓThe course was exactly what I needed at this stage of my career.

All of the sessions were relevant to me.Ò (2006 participant) ÓThe best aspects were the concise yet highly detailed and informative classes on specific subjects, which seemed to fit together very cohesively and the friendly, approachable programmes leaders.Ò (2006 participant) To find out more and register go to www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events

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Book Reviews Defining Literary Criticism: Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of Literary Knowledge 1880-2002 Carol Atherton (Palgrave Macmillan, London 2005) Defining Literary Criticism is both a substantial and imaginative work of literary scholarship in its own right, and a significant contribution to – and symbol of – the relationship between English in schools and in universities. Occupying ground associated with the tradition of historical-critical writings about the origins, development and ideological status of English Studies (Palmer, Eagleton, Guy and Small etc.), Atherton’s study nevertheless strikes out in new directions by focusing, through archival study of university English courses, both on the historical realisation of the discipline, and on the way in which the tensions marking that history are manifest in school English today. For readers in university English departments, this book should have a double appeal, providing both a rich account of the development of the discipline in universities, and a rare commentary on the A-Level subject which produces today’s undergraduates.

fledgling discipline, English, was taught. Atherton begins with an account of the work of Arnold, Pater and early professors of English such as Courthope, Saintsbury and Gosse. Most interesting, perhaps, is her subsequent examination in two chapters of the impact of Modernist critics – Woolf, Murray and Orage – and of the three critics popularly most associated with the formation of the taught subject – Eliot, Leavis and Richards.

Throughout, she problematises the relationship between the broad cultural purposes of the critical work of these figures, and the specialist, professionalised academic practices of the university subject.

Framing this historical account, Atherton places it in the context of two contemporary debates. First, she locates her work within the ongoing debate about the validity of accounts of the development of the discipline. If this debate can be characterised as the Marxists (Baldick, Doyle, Eagleton et al.) versus Atherton is well placed to perform this feat. The book Guy and Small (Politics and Value in English Studies, is the product of her doctoral study in English, carried Cambridge, 1993), then Atherton’s study is clearly out whilst continuing to teach English full-time to 11 to ideologically aligned with Guy and Small’s, and indeed 18 year olds at Bourne Grammar School (a state school Atherton makes this explicit. Guy and Small suggest in Lincolnshire.) Whilst (as an ex-state secondary Head that their establishment of a firm disciplinary pedigree of English myself) I find it hard to imagine the stamina for literary studies rooted in the intellectual history required for this, her dual perspective as school-teacher of the nineteenth century invalidates the politicised and literary critic is certainly both exceptional and nature of the Marxists’ accounts. Atherton argues that valuable. There have, of course, been school-teachers the Marxists conveniently ignore the real institutional who have practised literary criticism at this level; history of the discipline in order to stage a political however most of those have been associated with the attack on ‘the public arguments put forward to justify rather more rarified environment of the public school, the inclusion of English in the curricula of various and have been concerned with a more conventional institutions.’ form of textual appreciation. Atherton, on the other I find the oppositional nature of this discourse hand, has sought to draw together her expertise in somewhat overdone. Atherton’s early demolition both literary criticism and the history of the discipline of some of the claims made in broad-brush strokes with her interest in, and experience of, the way in which

by Doyle, Eagleton and others is fascinating and the subject is actualised in both secondary and tertiary convincing, based as it is in her archival studies. It educational institutions. makes an excellent case for a more sceptical reading The core of the book is an absorbing exploration of the of those authors, and a clearer recognition of the tensions between ‘critics and professors’ and ‘methods partial nature of their account. However, neither it, and institutions’ from 1880 to the mid-twentieth century, nor Guy and Small’s argument, suggests to me that showing how the work of cultural and literary critics the broad political perspectives of those authors, or in the tradition of Matthew Arnold was often at odds the alternative targets of their critique, are invalid, with the practicalities of the institutions in which the especially given the continuing influence of thinking

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about English in the Arnoldian tradition (in schools particularly, as Atherton’s last chapter suggests).

The core of Atherton’s book tells another part of the complex story of the way in which the worlds of literature, criticism, teaching and the university collided during the twentieth century. This narrative can surely not only co-exist with but also inform and lend nuance to other more political accounts.

Second – and this is where the interest of the book lies in relation to the school subject – Atherton shows, in her introduction and conclusion, how the tensions she describes in her history of the discipline are paralleled in current debates about the nature of the subject at A-Level, the two sides of which are

broadly exemplified by the differences which exist between literary study as practised at university and as practised in the sixth form. She also explores the parallel way in which critics such as Harold Bloom and John Carey continue to blur distinctions between the popular reader and the serious critic in their work.

Her argument for a more disciplined approach at A-Level, rooted in contemporary practice at university level, is a strong one – whatever one’s view of how the discipline came to be as it is.

Gary Snapper National Association for the Teaching of English

Postcolonial Poetry in English

by Rajeev S. Patke, (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2006) Rajeev Patke’s new publication Postcolonial Poetry in English is an excellent addition to the Oxford University Press series ‘Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures’, under the general editorship of Elleke Boehmer. This plainly bound, concise and comprehensive introduction to postcolonial poetry is a gem that should be available for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in every university library.

Each volume in the series aims to provide the reader with an accessible introduction to a key area of postcolonial literary studies by contextualising specific texts in the historical and social climate within which they were conceived, as well as elucidating other relevant figures, movements, institutions and cultural events. In this volume, Patke adeptly couples his knowledgeable criticism of postcolonial poetry with an exceptional grasp of the social history relevant to the genre. Patke refutes a ‘uniformly cross-cultural’ interpretative approach to postcolonial poetry, and focuses on the diverse and colourful effects that localised theory and politics have on the poetry of specific regions of the postcolonial world, whilst also engaging with their wider spheres of influence. By saturating his work with adept narration and analysis of the social history surrounding the problematic export of English as a colonial language; the conception of a postcolonial poetic mentality amongst writers; and further the development of the genre of postcolonial poetry, Patke’s work provides the reader with an excellent introduction to postcoloniality as well as postcolonial poetry. Patke notes that he has tried ‘… to make space for poets to speak for themselves …’, and never is a quotation included that is not intrinsic to furthering his argument.

The book is structured in three main sections which follow his thematic focuses of introduction, narration, and analysis. Part I introduces the reader to the relationship between poetry and postcoloniality, by linking colonial history and its specific literary formulations, to the poet’s desire to achieve an authoritative and individuated poetic voice. It also charts the influence of English in Britain, interestingly focusing on an exploration of the reactionary existence of the language in Ireland, in both a political and literary sense. Patke moves from such ‘local themes’ to ‘global applications’, deftly demonstrating an awareness of the wider influence and applications of discursive specificities without falling foul of generalization. In ‘Back to the future’, Patke provides the reader with an insightful interpretation of three volumes of poetry published between 1989 and 2002, as a means of demonstrating the postcolonial poet’s fluid relation to their own historicity, as emphasised by their engagement in ‘a vocation that is energized rather than disabled by the traumas of a colonial past’.

Part II narrates the ‘Development of Local Traditions’ in the socio-geographical contexts of South Asia and Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Black Africa, and the Settler Colonies (Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand). Each sub-section provides the reader with an extended discussion of the historical and cultural events and figures that have shaped that zone, and affected others, from the pre-colonial period to the modern day. For example, in discussion of Caribbean postcolonial poetry, he provides the reader with a comprehensive social history of the Caribbean aptly demonstrating the shaping of Caribbean postcolonial linguistic concerns, both in

Cover from Postcolonial Poetry in English by Patke, Rajeev, S. (2006) by permission of Oxford University Press

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Book Reviews

relation to poetry and in the wider context of the region’s artistic output. By discussing the development of Calypso, Reggae, and Dub Poetry (showing transference to a metropolitan setting with reference to the Black British poet Linton Kwesi Johnson) Patke aptly captures for the reader the importance of orality in Caribbean literature. His descriptions of such countercultures are excellently negotiated, and phrases such as ‘Words come off the page and move to a beat learnt from music’, are as lyrical as they are topical.

the term ‘postcolonial’, arguing that in the future such a ‘period of ‘cross-over’’ will come to an end; his brilliantly chosen epigraph from Heaney is invaluable: ‘Post-this, post-that, post-the-other, yet in the end / Not past a thing’.

getty

The book is exceptionally well produced, and is easy to navigate, with a detailed index and helpfully titled sections. There are also concise overviews at the beginning of each section allowing the reader to interrogate each chapter’s content before reading on.

The wealth of material included in Patke’s book will inform and delight the lighter reader, and also lead the deeper researcher Part III analyses in more detail the work of a number of onto a multitude of further sources. His poetic interpretations postcolonial poets as a means of explicating the problems of are well thought out and sensitive, presented in such a way as self-representation; the cultural politics surrounding issues to encourage the reader to ruminate further on elements that such as gender and modernism; and the recurrently discussed he lacks time to further explicate. Patke’s book would therefore experience of voyaging from migration to self-exile, that Patke prove an excellent teaching text, directly encouraging both notes is rendered by poetry ‘… through the metaphor of translation between languages, cultures, and values’. In particular student and teacher to not only engage with his own discourses on postcolonial poetry but to engage with the wider body of the section ‘Recurrent motifs: voyage and translation’ provides the reader with beautifully delineated discussions of ‘The voyage work that he has drawn on. Coupled with a highly involved verbal discussion on the topic, I feel that this text has the potential to home’, ‘Postcolonial exile’, and ‘Postcolonial translation’, in provoke even the inexperienced student into responding fluently the Caribbean, Malaysia, and India. Patke also makes reference to postcolonial poetry. This book was a pleasure to read, as well to European cultural critics and philosophers such as Bakhtin, as highly informative. Patke’s exceptional writing style and his Derrida, Benjamin and Adorno demonstrating his healthy interdisciplinary approach to the study of postcolonial poetry, and adept handling of such a vast body of information secures it as a very useful research and teaching text. providing for the reader an account of postcoloniality not wholly removed from modern European discourse. Patke provides a concise guide to the major poetic works of Brathwaite and Walcott, and also includes examples of pertinent literary criticism to which the reader can then journey if they are so inclined. A Laura Blakeman good example of this is a reference made to Robert Fraser’s MA student in English at Queen Mary, University of London. interpretation of Brathwaite’s The Arrivants. In the final chapter of the book, Patke engages with the waning cultural resonance of

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English at A Level a Guide for Lecturers in Higher Education Have you lost track of what’s happening to the English A-Levels? Are you mystified by a seeming plethora of Assessment Objectives? Are you slightly vague about the number and range of texts your Level 1 students may have studied? Do you find it easier to just to assume it must still be a bit like your A-Level circa 1980- something?

If so, our new guide to the A-Levels in English was written for you! As Ben Knights says in the Foreword to this Guide, ‘much of what passes for knowledge about A-Level in academic departments is a mixture of increasingly distant memory, folklore, and hearsay.’

The Subject Centre commissioned the Guide from Barbara Bleiman and Lucy Webster of the English and Media Centre (www.englishandmedia.co.uk) in order to help HE lecturers get to grips what A-Level is all about and to help them to identify the implications for their first year teaching. We reasoned that lecturers who have a better understanding of curricula and teaching methods at A-Level will be better attuned to the expectations and prior learning experiences of their Level 1 students.

The Guide comprises a short description of the background to Curriculum 2000 and each of the three (yes, there are now three!)

A-Levels. It then gives statistics on candidates and grades before looking at set texts, assessment objectives, teaching methods and marking. The common ground and main differences between examination boards are drawn out, and there is handy table in an appendix that enables you to compare them in more detail. But the Guide does much more than simply provide basic information. We believe that it will provide colleagues with a detailed and vivid snapshot of the current AS and A2 environment: the QCA criteria for the three A-Levels, the specifications of the Awarding Bodies and typical modes of teaching and assessment.

Two copies of the Guide have been mailed to each department in the UK, but if you would like another please email

esc@rhul.ac.uk. The Guide is also available as a PDF on our website at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/archive/ publications/reports/alevel_report.pdf.

Why Study English?

This new website is designed to encourage young people thinking about which subject to study in higher education to choose English. It’s written by a recent graduate to provide straightforward and relevant information about studying English at university.

There’s a strong focus on employment prospects, and a section (You want to study what?!) reassuring parents.

The website supports a ‘Why Study English’ leaflet the Subject Centre distributes annually to all secondary schools and careers offices: it is also available free of charge to departments to support open days etc. If you would like copies, please email esc@rhul.ac.uk stating how many you require.

www.whystudyenglish.ac.uk

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News and Reports Research, Reflection and Response: Creating and assessing online discussion forums in English studies Rosie Miles reports on an event she organised at Wolverhampton.

Rosie Miles is a lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, and is currently one of the English Subject Centre’s E-Learning Advocates. She was E-Tutor of the Year within her School in 2006. She is currently producing a Guide to Good Practice in the Use of Discussion Forums with Ben Colbert and Frank Wilson for the Subject Centre.

I’d like to take a different approach to that offered

by Andrew Shail in his write-up of the ‘Interfaces: English Studies and the Computer’ Conference in the English Subject Centre Newsletter 10 (June 2006).

Shail opens his report with what is effectively a list of ten reasons for English tutors to dismiss e-learning, all of which apparently ‘featured heavily in discussion’ during ‘Interfaces’.(1) Whilst some of these statements raise valid concerns, others of them are not true in my experience.(2) I am also weary of the knee-jerk dismissal of e-learning by some English scholars that emerges sooner or later in almost every discussion of the topic to which I have been privy. So, perversely, I’d like to be positive about some of the possibilities that e-learning can afford English Studies. I don’t see myself as some kind of ‘techno-nerd’, and nor do I think I am notably highly-skilled or precociously quick in relation to technology. I am, however, interested in pedagogy, and it is through experimenting with e-learning in some of my classes – in particular through using VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) – that I have found myself reflecting on the processes involved in teaching.

What is e-learning but learning that happens to involve digital and online tools in some part of that process?

Surely English lecturers involved with e-learning want to encourage the same attributes, characteristics and

skills in their students that all English staff do, whatever tools they are using?(3) The Creating and Assessing Online Discussion Forums Conference in May 2006 was a day for presenting, sharing and discussing examples of best practice and genuine innovation in relation to the use of VLEs and their Discussion Boards/Forums within the Subject. It was attended by over 40 people, making it one of the most popular Subject Centre sponsored e-learning conferences yet. The day was divided into three parts – ‘Reflections on Innovative Design’, ‘E-Moderating’ and ‘To Assess or Not to Assess…’ – and what will be clear from the following summary is that frequently these topics overlapped in the presentations made.

Ben Colbert and Frank Wilson (Wolverhampton) kicked off the day with ‘Weaning the WOLF Cubs: Using a VLE in First-Year English Studies’. They introduced their use of the Wolverhampton Online Learning Framework (WOLF – a custom-built VLE) with a large (c. 160) first-level Introduction to Literature module. The work was assessed, and thus mandatory. After an initial ‘how to use a discussion forum’ session with the class in a computer lab, using icebreaker activities to familiarise students with how to post and reply to messages, eight online sessions

1 Andrew Shail, ‘Blackboard can kiss my …’, English Subject Centre Newsletter, Issue 10, June 2006, 35.

2 Shail is probably reflecting a widespread Subject perception when he states that “There are no rewards for doing e-learning”.

However, it is likely that institutional Teaching and Learning committees will be interested, and if institutions have money available to support teaching innovation then e-learning developments would surely be eligible. The English Subject Centre is also currently supporting six E-Learning Advocates within English departments across the country and has funded a number of e-learning related projects. It is also now possible to submit a pedagogically-oriented item as part of one’s RAE return. I hope the rest of this report demonstrates that “Beyond an archival function … there are no immediately apparent uses for e-learning in the humanities” is an unsustainable view. In respect of “Students will by and large not use a virtual learning environment unless they are assessed in doing so, and they will use it unimaginatively if their participation is assessed”, I broadly agree with the first part of this, but not the latter.

I hope that the presentation I gave at ‘Interfaces’, where I spoke about the work my own students had been doing using a VLE – all assessed – suggested that imaginative engagement and assessment are not mutually exclusive terms in relation to online work. Shail’s final point, that there is “little … theorising of what function [VLEs] can actually perform in relation to face-to-face teaching” is also somewhat belied by the rest of this report below. There is an increasing body of literature on ‘blended’ learning, where face-to-face and online methods of teaching work alongside each other. See, for example, Janet MacDonald’s Blended Learning and Online Tutoring: A Good Practice Guide (Aldershot: Gower, 2006).

3 This is a point that my colleagues and I have argued in more detail in a recent article. See Benjamin Colbert, Rosie Miles and Francis Wilson, with Hilary Weeks, ‘Designing and Assessing Online Learning in English Literary Studies’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 6: 1 (February 2007), pp. 74-90.

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followed over the course of the module.

The aim was to get students to research, reflect and respond in relation to the designated tasks. Their use of the VLE was integrated into the course as a whole (alongside lectures, face-to-face seminars and tutorials), and took a ‘building block’ approach in which the online activities moved from simple to more complex as the module progressed. They also emphasised the need to ‘see as students see’ when thinking about the design of tasks. Their activities included (i) teaching students how to develop a discussion ‘thread’ by asking them to construct a communally-authored sequel to a novel (in this case David Lodge’s Nice Work); (ii) encouraging students to make historicallyinformed readings of Blake’s poetry via use of the Oxford English Dictionary Online; (iii) and exploiting the ludic possibilities of online space via a ‘Twelfth Night Saturnalia Party’ in which students arrived and posted in character from any of the texts studied over the module. Colbert and Wilson had also tried an online exercise to help develop bibliographic and referencing skills, which they felt had been less successful. Might this be one area where well thought through online multiple choice questions could be a helpful addition to the ways that we teach students how to reference accurately?

Christina Lee (Nottingham) spoke on using WebCT to support the teaching of Viking Studies in ‘Virtual Vikings: Using a VLE to Run a Team-Taught Module’. Viking Studies is compulsory at Nottingham but frequently students arrive with no necessary understanding of grammar, history or Christian context. The VLE offers a means of providing background information and self-assessment activities, such as multiple choice questions on grammar, audio clips of Old Norse and even Old English crosswords! She also reiterated a point which will be familiar to many of us: namely that students need guidance and training in discerning useful and scholarly websites, and feedback can be given to students on this via the VLE. A second-year module on Viking culture and history utilised the VLE for virtual seminars alongside conventional weekly lectures.

The VLE was used to assemble study topics and the students researched one a week. The module also included a ‘Viking Masterclass’ whereby the class took part in a chatroom encounter (in ‘real’ as opposed to asynchronous time) with a noted scholar. This ‘live link’ captured students’ imaginations and encouraged ambition.

On a joint MA with the University of Oslo students were also able to use the VLE to ‘buddy up’ with a counterpart from the associated institution, fostering friendships and online community.

Lee did not assess online discussion but made clear that expectations of involvement must be set early on. The advantages of not assessing were that students have a freedom to develop online and the chance to catch up if necessary. Her conclusion was that the worst thing you can do with a VLE is set it up and then ignore it, supposedly leaving the students to ‘get on with it’ (they won’t).

Monitored, it’s a great tool for deep learning and retention.

This last point led seamlessly into Matt Green’s (Nottingham) presentation on ‘Effective and Efficient Management of Discussion Boards’. Green’s e-moderator role was very much influenced by how he structured and integrated the use of the VLE into his course. He used Discussion Boards for pre-seminar discussion and then brought some of the issues raised on the Board into the seminar classroom for use alongside further face-to-face debate on a topic. The face-to-face teaching then formed the basis for postseminar postings. He had also developed an interesting way of splicing together student posts with fragments of other texts – the example given ranged from Zizek to Blake to Hamlet to Benjamin – as a means of re-contextualising students’ comments into wider frames of reference.

Used in a session on ‘Modernism and fragmentation’ this seemed a particularly

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Research, Reflection and Response: Creating and assessing online discussion forums in English studies

appropriate technique. Green had developed a good e-moderator ‘tone’ which was not too formal, yet still rich in content. He raised the question of what makes a good e-tutor, and stressed the importance of modelling to students how to ‘behave’ online via tutor example.

Other tips included: • Be consistent in your moderation across groups. Students don’t like seeing differential treatment.

• Give encouraging feedback.

• Summarise threads at the end of an exercise.

• Bring the VLE posts ‘into the classroom’.

This encourages the VLE work to be seen by the students as integrated with other forms of contact and teaching.

• Be clear about what the students can expect from you as an e-moderator (and what they can’t).

• Incorporate VLE preparation time into seminar preparation time.

• Reply to messages in a group format, rather than to individual students.

Heather Conboy and Kathleen Bell (De Montfort) introduced Creative Writing into the mix via ‘Towards Assessment: Discussion Boards as a Tool in Drafting and Reflective Writing’. On a first-year module students were invited to post an example of their creative writing and to provide comment and feedback to their peers’ work. Student feedback suggested that the class valued this opportunity for additional input on their writing, alongside the face-to-face feedback they got in the classroom. One student said they were soon “addicted” to posting! The Discussion Board allowed for anonymous postings, which on occasion helped students to contribute when otherwise they might not have done. Feedback such as “More people on the course needed to use it, but when used it was very useful” reflect the ‘critical mass’ issue with Boards/ Forums: a momentum is gained when students know lots of the class are posting.

Conboy and Bell received very little negative feedback from students regarding the use of Blackboard. However, one student who hadn’t used it said they were “too scared” to do so. This may have been

an anxiety about his/her being able to find one’s way around the VLE, or an issue of confidence in relation to one’s postings being visible to others. As e-moderators we can only try to provide as clear and student-proof instructions as we can for online tasks, and we can also remind the class (repeatedly if necessary) that everyone has valuable comments to contribute.

Conboy and Bell also commented that in their ‘blended’ use of VLEs (i.e. VLE use alongside face-to-face teaching) “students view the Discussion Board mainly in the light of how it fits in and helps with other elements of the module, such as their workshops and assessments and other contacts with the tutor and institution”.

Probably the most controversial part of the day centred around the question of assessment in relation to VLE work. In ‘Push Me, Pull Me, the Hybrid Nature of VLE Discussions’ Gail Ashton (Manchester) suggested that there are two approaches tutors can have to the use of Forums/ Boards. If VLE use is assessed then this ‘pushes’ the students to take part; if it isn’t then the students are ‘pulled’, or more freely drawn to participate. Ashton highlighted one student comment on Discussion Boards where the student felt that the Board was being “watched from above by the teaching elite” and that this impeded the exchange of ideas.

The student also raised concerns about everyone “want[ing] to appear clever” in their posts. Ashton thus felt that students want Boards/Forums that are open and exploratory, a platform for sharing resources and ideas and that students want a sense of ownership in relation to the Board. This largely means no assessment.

Ashton also raised the question of the nature of online discussion. What relationship does it have to discussion in ‘real life’? Online discussion can tend to be less formal: posts may well be ‘off task’ and digressive. Whilst this may help in terms of social bonding it can also become incoherent, and will make it difficult to assess. Asynchronous postings are also unlike a face-to-face discussion; there is thus discontinuity in the development of thought and mini-essay chunks of post lack the spontaneity and freedom of conversation. Ashton’s conclusions were

that for the ‘pull’ approach to work – i.e. no assessment – then a number of skills were needed in terms of setting up a VLE: creativity, reflection, investment in learning, possibly peer assessment, and the involving of students in the design of the online activities.

My own presentation followed this with ‘Some Issues in Assessing Online Discussion: Staff and Student Perspectives’ and presented some of the data I had collected from four different cohorts using VLEs on my modules via a detailed questionnaire on their responses to online work. General support for an online component ranged from 73-92% of respondents. My first use of a Discussion Forum was during a four-week experiment on a module and this wasn’t assessed.

When this group were asked whether online work should be assessed 57% said no, and 38% said yes. The following year, two cohorts experienced an online component that comprised 10% of the overall marks for the course. When these groups were asked about assessment 67% and 88% respectively were in favour and 13% and 8% were against (the rest were ‘not sure’).

The leap from 38% to much higher figures of support is not hard to understand: if students are doing the work then they want due credit for it. One student comment – “I enjoyed it, but it’s an awful lot of work for 10%” – was indicative of others from these two groups and led me to increase the weighting to 40% for the next year. When this cohort were asked whether online work should be assessed 58% said yes and 25% no (the rest ‘not sure’). However, when this latter group were asked how much online work was ‘worth’, 45% (the largest single response) agreed that a 40% weighting was ‘about right’. Thirty-seven percent thought it should be 25-30%. Nine percent thought it should be more than 40%.

I also suggested a number of positive reasons for assessing online work:(4) • It ensures full class participation.

• Students are being rewarded for the effort they put in and this means they take it seriously.

• It can be used as a form of low level continuous assessment across a course, ensuring engagement with a wider

4 Diana Laurillard also makes the point that “The only real test of any learning material is its use under normal course conditions. This means it must be integrated with other methods, the teacher must build on the work done and follow it through, and most important, the work students do with ICT media must be assessed”.

See Rethinking University Teaching (2002, 2nd ed), p. 205.

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range of texts, in more depth, than otherwise.

• It’s a way of extending the classroom into a virtual seminar, allowing more time for the development of ideas and quality of reflection.

• It’s a way of ‘hearing’ the quieter students, some of whom may really flourish online.

Having shared the assessment criteria I had used in relation to Discussion Forum work I concluded by encouraging people to take risks and be bold in terms of thinking how courses need to be put together if they are to integrate online work, including assessing it.

The Conference concluded with a plenary session led by Lesley Coote (Hull). Are VLEs a means of Foucauldian surveillance or ludic play spaces? Why do we use them?

Because they’re there? If we were creating a VLE platform from scratch what would we want it to look like and be and do? Can Discussion Boards be used with other media – e.g. interactive whiteboards? What is the right balance between ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’ contact for student groups? Responses to these questions are many and varied, and what the day made clear is that there

is a healthy exchange of ideas going on in the subject about how VLEs can be used within English Studies. We don’t all agree with each other, but it’s undoubtedly the case that there are some highly imaginative and innovative uses of VLEs and Discussion Boards/Forums taking place. No one who presented suggested that online work should replace or do away with face-toface teaching; all the examples integrated VLE use into their courses alongside more traditional modes of learning.

For me, becoming involved in e-learning has been another way of developing myself as a teacher. When I was first forced to instigate some ‘technology supported learning’ several years ago as part of a PGCertHE I never thought that I – or my students – might actually enjoy it. I didn’t realise that using a VLE would lead me to think about my courses and how I taught them in new ways, to pedagogic research, and to seeing other aspects of my students’ abilities that didn’t necessarily always reveal themselves either in the classroom or on paper in essays or exams.

The ‘Creating and Assessing Discussion Forums’ day demonstrated that there are a growing number of English lecturers who have discovered how VLEs can enhance

what they do as teachers. And a fair number of students think that using a VLE as part of their English courses is beneficial too. I conclude with a student response to the question ‘what does using a VLE and Discussion Forum add to the study of English?’

“It stimulates collegiate spirit. It has given me a broader understanding and appreciation of my fellow students’ views, which I may otherwise not have heard, and has raised issues which otherwise may not have been raised. It has encouraged me to further research new areas of the subject as a result of some of the points made by my classmates online.”

Author’s Note Many thanks to Hilary Weeks and Lesley Coote for their note-taking during the conference. It was a great help in the writing of this report.

Get the Builders In: New Technology-Rich Learning Spaces There is growing interest in the ways in which the learning experience can be enhanced by the design of the spaces in which the learning takes place. Interiors in universities and colleges traditionally have had a cold institutional feel to them with uniform colours and uniform furniture throughout. The setting out of classrooms has followed a pattern established within the church of rows of seats and desks with a teacher at the front of the class addressing the students as a preacher might address his congregation. Is that ‘one size fits all’ approach really appropriate or conducive to the 21st century learning experience? To provide some answers to this question the JISC have put together a new style of infokit which has just been made available. It is richly illustrated with case studies, images of buildings across the sector and a ‘virtual tour’ around an imaginary campus composed of spaces we find inspiring from a range of different institutions.

JISC

The resource is divided into 4 sections: 1. Anticipation 2. Imagination 3. Implementation 4. Evaluation It can be viewed at: www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/learning-space-design

Newsletter 12 April 2007 35

Teaching Shakespeare Today

Christie Carson is CETL Liaison Officer at the English Subject Centre and Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London.

36 Newsletter 12 April 2007

Teaching Shakespeare Today

presented to colleagues are unsuitable for practical work of this kind. This was followed by Roger Mortlock, Director of Communications at the RSC, explaining the Company’s strategy for making more performance resources available online.

Mortlock posed the interesting question of how much structure the RSC should provide. Should the RSC be providing teachers and students with methods of teaching or simply providing resources and allowing users to navigate their own way through them?

Kate McLuskie, Director of the Shakespeare Institute, then spoke about the need to address both how approaches to Shakespeare were changing and how teachers of Shakespeare were changing in response to an explosion of new resources being made available. She posed the interesting question of how we might tackle both the pervasiveness of Shakespeare and the dominance of the filmic representation of the plays.

Paul Edmonson, from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, spoke of the wide-ranging work of the Trust, and argued passionately for the importance of seeing education as a conversation which enabled full and frank engagement rather than prescribed questions and responses.

Farah Karim-Cooper, Lecturer at the Globe Theatre, recounted both the pleasures and the difficulties of her specific working environment. She faces the challenging tasks of interacting with a wide range of student groups from the UK and abroad, organising the research programme of the Education Department and responding to the research requests of the theatre practitioners. Through her experience of this unique teaching environment, which she likened to a laboratory allowing for experimentation on the stage, she said she has come to revise her view of teaching Shakespeare, finding it impossible now not to refer to the plays in performance.

Finally, John Joughin, Chair of the British Shakespeare Association, described his excitement in working on the international on-line MA course he has developed with Stuart Hampton-Reeves at the University of Central Lancashire. He pointed out the way this new course has generated a range of new and appropriate assessment methods, such as learning diaries and reflective statements, providing a structure for the course that might offer an example of practice that was not limited by the content.

In particular he was excited by the potential of the course to generate, in essence, its own archive. The way that digital technology was used to overcome the barriers of time and geography to enable the lecturers to speak directly to students all over the world through recorded lectures was seen by the group as an example of how a new world of possibilities is opening up for teachers of Shakespeare.

The session ended with a stimulating debate that drew attention to three key issues at stake in this area: the influence of technology, a changing student body and the impact of working in an international educational environment. While these are important issues in all areas of teaching it was felt that a discussion of these issues with a focus on Shakespeare opened up some very interesting and important questions about studying English in the UK in the 21st Century.

how Shakespeare fits within that raised important and revealing issues about how departmental strategies and teaching assignments are developed.

Following a break for tea Neill Thew, the author of the Report, presented the survey outcomes and gave colleagues an opportunity to discuss these findings. This presentation provided a lively illustration of the issues already raised and stimulated further debate that drew together the larger contextual picture with individual practice. A drinks reception followed and then a number of the group moved on to the theatre. Holding the event in Stratfordupon-Avon during the Complete Works Festival meant that it was possible for delegates to attend a performance – which proved good preparation for the second day of activity.

Day two of this event was turned over to the CAPITAL Centre and began with After lunch the participants were asked to an introduction to the work of the CETL join a discussion group based around the

by Jonathan Bate. The aim of CAPITAL, to explore the ways in which teaching teaching of a particular play. These were selected to reflect the survey results but mirrors the rehearsal process, was then also to open up a discussion of approaches made concrete through a workshop that based on generic arrangements. Therefore was conducted by Mary Johnson of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Learning one group gathered to discuss Hamlet and the Tragedies, another to discuss Department. The workshop began with Twelfth Nightt and the Comedies and the a series of exercises that were designed third to discuss The Winter’s Tale and to alert the participants to the potential of physical movement and sound when the Late Plays or Romances. The group sizes reflected the relative popularity of dealing with Shakespeare’s poetry. The work again focused on Hamlett and The these plays and the preference that both students and lecturers seem to have for Winter’s Tale drawing the two days

“What came as more of a surprise was the fact that overall the third most popular work taught was the Sonnets.”

the tragedies. In the Twelfth Nightt session, which I facilitated, it was very interesting to hear that colleagues often found it quite difficult to teach the comedies, largely because such an effort had to be made to explain the humour. This group presented a wide range of teaching approaches as well as institutions. What became apparent in this more informal session was that while those attending enjoyed teaching Shakespeare it was often not their primary research area. A discussion of the development of the curriculum and

together through the plays addressed.

The group was asked to work in pairs to develop a range of relationship models for Hamlet and Ophelia based on movement and vocal styles. Then, using the text from The Winter’s Tale the group developed an understanding of Leontes’ character development through a physicalisation of the language of the play. The exercises stimulated an engaged discussion about the usefulness of this kind of approach in the English classroom. In particular the question was raised of how would an

Newsletter 12 April 2007 37

Teaching Shakespeare Today

English class differ from a Drama class if these approaches were pursued? This question led to a discussion of assessment and whether it might be necessary for assessment to change to incorporate new teaching approaches.

The final session of the event was dedicated to looking at the lessons that could be taken away from the two days and from the survey results. It was suggested during this session that a distinction could be made between English assignments that drew on an understanding of performance and Drama assignments which embodied that understanding in their assessment methods. One approach that was suggested, given the resistance colleagues felt they might face in changing assessment models, was to incorporate innovative methods of teaching into non-assessed coursework. The survey seems to suggest that this is exactly what is happening already in many institutions.

It was pointed out that while there is a

call, on the one hand, to move towards innovative and student-centred teaching models there is pressure, on the other hand, to take on ever increasing class sizes. Some of the participants felt anxious about the extent to which they would be able to take forward the ideas developed during the event given the pressure caused by larger student groups and inflexible teaching spaces. A number of the participants requested training materials and wanted to know more about opportunities to support them in trying out some of the active teaching and learning techniques that Mary Johnson demonstrated. In response to this request a reading list was circulated to participants after the event and it was suggested that the CAPITAL Centre would be furthering this work for Higher Education lecturers with the RSC.

able to place that practice in a national context, was an invaluable experience for those who participated. Working with the English Subject Centre as the CETL Liaison Officer I have been asked to develop an overview of the work going on in the Centres of Excellence in Teaching and Learning that may have an impact on the English community. This is a challenging task in that much of the work undertaken by these Centres is focused on specific university environments. This joint event presented the first attempt to incorporate a CETL partner. The subject, Teaching Shakespeare, facilitated a broad approach and a broad appeal, however, the model, which combined personal experience with practical guidance and contextual information, is one I hope will prove useful for future ESC events.

While all of the potential hurdles to change were acknowledged by the group it was also generally agreed that coming together to share practice, as well as being

Pictures from the Shakespeare event

tea break and networking time

small group discussions

Mary Johnson leads an excercise

38 Newsletter 12 April 2007

Teaching Religion in Early Modern Studies Colin Brooks and Jonathan Gibson report on an event held at the University of Manchester.

Colin Brooks is the Director of the Subject Centre for History, Classics and Archaeology.

Religion is now at the heart of the research and teaching of many early modernists. This is due, in large part, to the flowering of Reformation history over the past two decades or so, a development which has helped reshape the priorities of early modern specialists in cognate disciplines. Indeed, one of the speakers referred to religion as early modern scholarship’s currently preferred means of ‘articulating’ the period as a whole.

Forty-six people attended this popular event in November 2006 including a number of MA students, whose contributions from the floor gave a valuable student’s perspective. The meeting was organized by Dr Crawford Gribben, English & American Studies, University of Manchester, Dr Jeremy Gregory from Religions & Theology, University of Manchester together with Dr. Michael Brown, now of the Department of History, University of Aberdeen.

It was supported by three of the Higher Education Academy’s Subject Centres – those for English (www.english.heacademy.ac.uk), for History, Classics and Archaeology (www.hca.heacademy.

Jonathan Gibson is an Academic Coordinator at the English Subject Centre.

ac.uk), and for Philosophical and Religious Studies (www.prs.heacademy.ac.uk). It was held in the impressive surroundings of the University of Manchester’s Centre for Excellence in Enquiry Based Learning.

Differences between the teaching practices of the three disciplines represented emerged repeatedly during the day’s discussions – persistently bubbling

up whatever the notional session topic, sometimes, it seemed, taking participants by surprise. For this reason, the meeting, which excavated a great deal of common ground and provided colleagues from cognate disciplines with a uniquely valuable chance to exchange ideas, was perhaps more a ‘multidisciplinary’ than an ‘interdisciplinary’ event. In his concluding remarks, Michael Brown suggested that the day had revealed English lecturers to be rather more optimistic about the current state of affairs, in particular about their students’ mental agility, than their Historian counterparts. Historians had, perhaps, to work harder at teasing out potential.

The day was made up of six brief presentations which provoked discussion, reflection and debate. The topics discussed in the presentations were: • Secularism, Fundamentalism and the Teaching of Early Modern Religion (Dr. Jeremy Gregory) • Teaching the Reformation (Prof. Peter Marshall, Warwick, and Prof. Alex Walsham, Exeter) • Teaching Religious Literature (Prof. Brian Cummings, Sussex, and Prof. Helen Wilcox, Bangor) • Teaching Religious Ideas (Prof. Alan Ford, Nottingham, and Dr. Lucy Wooding, London) • Teaching Religious Institutions and Communities (Dr. Graeme Murdock, Birmingham, and Dr. Sandra Hynes, Dublin) • Dr. Michael Brown offered a series of concluding reflections.

Newsletter 12 April 2007 39

Teaching Religion in Early Modern Studies

The Student Experience The assumption at the time of planning the colloquium was that a key matter would be the contrast between contemporary student interest in religion and systems of belief (and, consequently, of action), and student ignorance of the practice and theology of Christianity in the early modern era (ca.1500 to ca.1700). This assumption proved to be unfounded. Recent world events appeared to have been less provocative of student interest than had been imagined. On the other hand, contributors did not paint a bleak picture of student knowledge and understanding of past cultures. One of the key features of the discussion was the teasing out of the circumstances in which student interest and knowledge (and, indeed, student faith) might be drawn out, encouraged and put to good academic (and perhaps civic) use.

Jeremy Gregory, reflecting on his own experience of teaching in a variety of institutions, noted the considerable variation in student approach both between institutions and over time.

In the 1980s and 90s, he argued, the majority of students he had taught had been areligious, anti-religious and post-Christian. More recently, he said, students had become increasingly confident in confronting the implications of such labels and, in approaching these subjects without preconceptions, were showing themselves to be more flexible, more understanding, than the previous generation. Dogmatism, of all kinds, is waning. Nevertheless, today’s students still need to be encouraged to feel at ease with other perspectives, other convictions: higher education requires engagement with others and ‘the other’, and there is evidence that students are still, Dr. Gregory said, ‘afraid of hurting each other’s feelings’. To Brian Cummings, ‘post-ideological’ students were not necessarily exponents of deadened, pragmatic learning: in their engagement with Shakespeare, for example, they were proving themselves ‘better readers and more historically informed critics’.

There was a general agreement that one could spot a Christian Union member in a seminar group, but also a degree of anxiety about this: just as today’s students are less likely than before to stereotype past peoples, tutors should not stereotype their students. Everyone agreed that student commitment to a particular faith provided

40 Newsletter 12 April 2007

a challenge, but also that it could be positively harnessed. Secularist assumptions were being questioned by students: this did not imply adherence to any particular faith. That process of questioning is facilitated in institutions with a diverse student body, something that seems to nurture both confidence and a questioning interest. Experiences from various colleges of the University of London suggested that the presence of students personally committed to a religious faith could be a positive advantage for class discussions: it helped students to surmount the timorous and apologetic approach which they often adopted as a defensive strategy. Amongst contemporary students in the UK, there might be as much reluctance to expose ignorance as to reveal knowledge – though the value of ignorance in encouraging an open-minded engagement with the past was highlighted. Participants felt that it was important both for lecturers to find the right register for student response and to be ‘upfront’ about matters of faith. One speaker found that his students, confronted by material and arguments about belief, faith and practice, positively relished the opportunity to suspend their habitual ‘pose of disbelief’. In his concluding remarks, Michael Brown took a rather less sunny view, reminding us of the potential clash between academic study and student faith: study of ‘the other’ becomes ‘a threat if you have the solace of community and the conviction of salvation’. But then such tension might be no bad thing in the context of higher education.

Peter Marshall and Alex Walsham agreed that students could be put off modules by certain titles (‘Reformation and Religious Change, 1470-1558’; ‘Reformation Europe’). On the other hand, there was considerable agreement that students were particularly interested in such topics as ‘Popular Religion: Society and the Super-natural’ and particularly confident in dealing with irrationality. Confidence was a crucial matter. Students might well feel a lack of confidence alongside a fascination with modules dealing with such topics.

They were not a ‘safe choice’, especially at level three when so much seemed at stake in terms of degree classification.

But that might equally mean that only the more confident (and, perhaps, able) students would choose such options.

There was a sense, too, that a number of modules appealed to, and benefited from the presence of, students who had some

awareness of anthropology, or of Lacanian theory, and who were willing to embrace novel schemes of periodization. There was some discussion, as well, of the gender balance of students taking particular modules: Alex Walsham reported that ‘Reformation Europe’ attracted males and females in equal measure; ‘Society and the Supernatural’ seemed to be particularly appreciated by females. This seemed an interesting area for further investigation.

Student feedback was varied, and many participants had revealing anecdotes to tell. Student opinion could be vigorously expressed: attention devoted to The Pilgrim’s Progress was regretted by one student who considered it ‘sloppy, badly written and obvious’. ‘Too much religion’ complained another. Peter Marshall had compiled and made available a glossary of religious terms, only one student had gone out of the way to acquire a copy; students elsewhere, too, had been concerned by the apparent difficulty of the terminology. There seem to be grounds for the creation of a web resource here.

Institutional structures Institutional structures were acknowledged to be of central importance. Religious issues may be taught in departments of History, Literature (often ‘English’) or Theology. In institutions without a simple and overarching framework for taught programmes, there may be considerable variation in, for example, assessment and even credit regulations between departments, variations which would limit the opportunities for students to engage in a variety of approaches to the study of religion. And institutions vary in the extent to which they encourage or require, or allow, students to enrol in a module offered by a different department from that of the student’s major subject. Teaching, say, ‘The Reformation’ would be a very different matter if all the students were enrolled for Theology degrees or if they included historians, literature students – or sociologists. Alan Ford pointed out that this was not only an issue for student learning: he held a chair in a Theology department but had never himself studied Theology. The rich multi-disciplinary background, brought to a particular department by a faculty member might come up against the structural, methodological and curricular conventions of the department concerned. Participants also mentioned the important distinction between ‘core’ and ‘optional’ courses: the

Teaching Religion in Early Modern Studies

presence in the latter of students whose preference had been for another, often radically different, option is, it was felt, rarely helpful.

The discussion did not focus explicitly on questions of assessment but there was a consensus that as the period under discussion was one of considerable experiment in cultural forms and modes of expression we should nurture a variety of forms of teaching and assessment, and encourage risk taking.

Several speakers pointed to the significance of the periodization used by departments in organizing their curricula. ‘Early modern’ is not a neutral term, nor an obvious one.

A prior understanding of ‘late medieval’ might be essential for a student of the Reformation. Brian Cummings cast this issue in a different light, demonstrating how departmental curricula tended to be packaged in ways that followed disciplinary fashion. He reflected on the implications of this for the study of religious themes in sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature. For many years, English literature courses did not include any ‘Reformation’ (strictu sensu) literature at all. This led Professor Cummings to argue that the problem which we were discussing was in many ways one created by the disciplinary community (in his case, English) rather than by the students. Students in that discipline were ‘open and curious’; faculty were in thrall to academic fashion and to personal predispositions. Alan Fox in part agreed: tutors were now having to question whether ‘non-belief’ was an ‘objective stance’, having, in the previous generation, all too often taken it for granted as the natural position.

The Strangeness of the Past Historical context, a sense that the past is a different country, was generally agreed to be crucial, even for textbased modules in which the richness of the material examined might appear to make it self-sufficient. The very public significance of theological and religious issues in the contemporary world made that appreciation of difference the more important. Contemporary ‘fundamentalism’ and the assumptions which appear to underlie it, could not simply be read back into the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Early modern meaning and understandings are not ours.

Yet the term ‘early modern’ itself covers

a multiplicity of belief and practice – and language: it is hard for students to grasp essentials when they were examining a world in flux. Some participants noted a tendency among students to retreat into cynicism when confronted with such rapidly shifting categories and values.

On the other hand, teaching, while recognizing difference, often had to start by ‘translating’ the past into something understandable by the student in 2006: Helen Wilcox commented that students would ‘shamelessly draw on parallels with their own experience’. One of Professor Wilcox’s own teaching strategies is to

The combination of student knowledge and student experience works in various ways: one of the aims of a Theology degree, for example, might be to help students put their learning into an ‘overarching whole’, to create their own theology through direct engagement with that of others. Personal development of a related sort happens on English and History programmes too, of course, but it is much less likely to be explicitly planned for by the lecturer.

The informality of the day and the simple idea that papers were intended to promote and provide discussion was much appreciated by attendees. As to

Teaching ‘The Reformation’ would be a very different matter if all the students were enrolled for Theology degrees or if they included historians, literature students – or sociologists. explore the parallels between Donne’s Devotions and contemporary student blogs. Other methods mentioned included field trips, to holy sites as well as ‘symbolspotting’ tours of the National Gallery.

Consideration of the role of ‘place’ in learning about early modern life is something that might well be addressed at another discussion.

The study of ‘religion’ in the early modern era very often requires students to look beyond an individual country.

Yet students are, because of their lack of competence or confidence in foreign languages, tempted to concentrate on English-speaking areas. Textbooks and commentaries provide excellent secondary material and some translated primary sources: but these are often insufficient in scope to sustain a level three undergraduate dissertation. On another occasion, we have heard modernists comment on the comparative success of medievalists in persuading their students to equip themselves with the foreign language skills necessary for textual study.

Graeme Murdock discussed his use of translations of Genevan Consistory Court cases to get his students inside the various characters (backsliders, disciplinarians….) appearing therein: students, he thinks, ‘enjoy mastering idiosyncratic ideas’.

pedagogic practice, the discussion of ideas on teaching strategies was appreciated though a number of participants thought that they could with profit have been confronted directly. An over-dependence on anecdote in our discussion of, for example, student feedback, was noted by one participant who urged the need for a more rigorous analysis of teaching practice.

Participants suggested a range of further events and the need to include colleagues from fine art and from music in similar discussions was pointed out.

We thank the organisers for providing the impetus, and the University of Manchester for providing the facilities, for so interesting a day of discussion. Plans are being developed to hold a similar event dealing with ‘modern studies’. And we would be pleased to hear from colleagues who would like to take forward the ideas for future discussions mentioned above – or others.

In the words of Michael Brown, as we move forward, ‘we need to take into account the ability of religion to offend, to bring in its wake blood and hatred: a theme, it goes without saying, of pressing contemporary importance, and a good starting point, perhaps, for a future event.’

Newsletter 12 April 2007 41

English Studies in Scotland Bethan Benwell, Scott Hames, Dale Townshend report on a one-day workshop hosted by the Department of English Studies at the University of Stirling.

Bethan Benwell is a lecturer at the University of Stirling.

She is a co-author of Discourse and Identity (EUP, 2006).

Scott Hames is a lecturer at the University of Stirling.

His teaching interests include modern Scottish fiction, Canadian literature and critical theory and he is co-editor of the International Journal of Scottish Literature.

Dale Townshend is a lecturer at the University of Stirling.

He has co-edited and introduced four volumes in the Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies series (Routledge, 2004).

This one-day event hosted by the Department of English Studies at the University of Stirling aimed to complement a similar event, ‘The first year experience of English’, held at Bristol in 2005. The event aimed to draw attention to the particular challenges which arise in teaching first-year English in Scottish universities, where such factors as the younger intake age, and separate guidelines for curriculum and assessment at secondary level, present challenges somewhat different from those encountered in England.

This was of particular value for the university lecturers in attendance, many of whom had only a sketchy understanding of the Scottish Highers system. Paterson was candid about the strengths and limitations of the Higher and Advanced Higher curricula, and clarified, in particular, the drawbacks of an inflexible system of continuous assessment. The recent tendency in Scottish educational policy towards nurturing the development of the ‘whole’ student was not felt to augur serious changes for English.

The event organisers were keen to foster a dialogue between schools and universities, and were therefore delighted that a number of local schoolteachers were able to attend. The day was organised as a series of themed sessions, each of which was led by a speaker who spoke briefly before opening up the topic to general discussion.

Scott Hames (University of Stirling) and Suzanne Trill (Edinburgh University) then discussed some of the challenges faced by English departments in managing the transition from school to university, as well as some of the efforts made by the respective institutions to meet these challenges. These included an unwillingness on the part of first-year students to engage critically or closely with literary texts (poetry in particular), and a more general resistance to the notion that English is an academic discipline with a rigorous critical method with which students ought to be conversant; instead, intuitive and highly subjective approaches to literary study seem to predominate.

Following introductory remarks by Ben Knights, Peter Paterson, a Principal teacher of English from a local High School, began the day by presenting an overview of the content and assessment procedures of Higher English in Scottish secondary schools.

42 Newsletter 12 April 2007

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The Transition from School to University:

The Transition from School to University: English Studies in Scotland

Student attitudes to the research process were also highlighted as a depressingly familiar area of concern, with many students favouring ‘cut and paste’ modes of approach. In both talks, as well in the discussion that ensued, all participants emphatically stated that teachers were in no way being ‘blamed’ for the study habits of those school-leavers who go on to take English at University; indeed, the issues raised as problematic by university teachers were precisely those encountered by teaching colleagues in High School. It was felt that the modes and methods of assessment imposed by the Higher English curriculum, as well as a waning interest in books (in comparison with other forms of culture) were felt to be partly to blame for these ‘deficits’. Scott Hames ended his session by suggesting that the disorienting and sometimes painful student ‘transition’ from school to university might in its own way be a productive experience of ‘unlearning’; given their often divergent pedagogical aims, a certain discontinuity between Highers and the first year of English studies at university level might in fact be desirable.

The two afternoon sessions focused directly on issues specific to the Scottish educational context. Graeme Trousdale (Edinburgh University), an English Language specialist and an examiner for the Language module of the Advanced Higher in English, discussed the relative neglect of English language within the English Studies curriculum at Higher level. In England and Wales, English Language has its own A-Level; in fact, English Language is the fastest growing A-Level in terms of its recruitment. In Scotland, by contrast, English language is embedded in the English Higher curriculum, featuring, when it does, in far more implicit forms. Because many

English teachers are graduates of English literature departments, they often lack both the confidence and expertise to promote the language modules - a fact attested to by some of the High School teachers in attendance. Thus, the cycle of neglect perpetuates itself. In the following discussion, colleagues from Glasgow University’s English Language department reiterated this problem, stressing the distinct disadvantage faced by those Scottish students wishing to pursue a language path through their

in the words of Alan Riach, ‘Scotland’s cultural self-determination has been formed, threatened, affirmed, broken, dissolved, re-configured and debated from various positions through history’, students’ ability to historicise texts sensitively is crucial, but often found wanting. The historical neglect of Scottish culture at secondary level leads to a clear domino-effect, whereby students are interested in, and stimulated by, material they are woefully ill-equipped to understand in relation to its own specific cultural context.

Representatives from the Association for

The historical neglect of Scottish culture at secondary level leads to a clear dominoeffect, whereby students are interested in, and stimulated by, material they are woefully illequipped to understand in relation to its own specific cultural context.

English degree. An increased proficiency in language, its forms, uses and structure, is an aim explicitly articulated by the Scottish Executive’s National Statement for Improving Attainment in Literacy in Schools, yet the English Higher has some way to go before this aim is realised.

Scottish Literary Studies gave an overview of recent campaigns to ensure Scottish pupils gain greater access to their national literary tradition at school-level.

In the closing discussion, clear conclusions or strategies for reform were understandably difficult to formulate, The final session was led by Jim McGonigal but all participants nonetheless felt (University of Glasgow) who discussed that the day had offered an important awareness-raising function. For instance, the place of Scottish literature, culture the possibility of involving more teachers and language in the English curriculum. with Continuing Professional Development Beginning with a review of recent efforts, courses run by Scottish universities was at both school and University level, to undo the historical marginalisation of raised, particularly in relation to English Scottish writing within the discipline of Language. Teachers and lecturers resolved ‘English’, the talk connected general to maintain a dialogue with one another, primarily in the interests of informing and concerns from earlier on in the day to particular issues pertaining to the study illuminating each others’ pedagogical practices in the future. of Scottish literature and language. Since,

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Newsletter 12 April 2007 43

Learning with the online Thesaurus of Old English (TOE) http://libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/oeteach/oeteach.html The Thesaurus of Old English contains the surviving vocabulary of the earliest stage of the English language arranged in categories according to the meanings of the words.

It started life as two hefty paper volumes, and then became an electronic resource.

Now, thanks to a grant from the English Subject Centre, it has been repurposed as a unique interactive learning resource, allowing students to explore aspects of Old English language and culture.

The project covers ten topic areas: Clothing, Colour, Death, Families, Farming, Food and Drink, Landscape, Plants, Time, and the Universe. The units have a cultural slant, focusing on what we can learn about people by studying the vocabulary of their language, and can be used by both classes and individuals. Each unit has three sections. Section 1 offers a guided tour through the material, interspersed with questions inviting the user to make a voyage of discovery into the database.

Questions have click-box answers and there is also a clickable glossary covering technical terms and background information. Section 2 is a short essay on the topic, reinforcing and giving more detail on points raised in Section 1. Section 3 consists of suggestions for reading, relevant websites, and ideas for essays or projects based on the topic. Projects in particular invite the student to explore TOE further.

The project is aimed at undergraduates who are studying Old English, History of the English Language, and, to a lesser extent, Semantics and Lexicography.

Although it draws on Old English, it assumes very little knowledge of the language: units normally work backwards from Modern English, building on what students already know, primarily Modern

English vocabulary derived from Old English. Those who wish to know more can consult general essays entitled ‘A Short Description of Old English’, ‘Life in Anglo-Saxon England’ and ‘The Vocabulary of Old English’.

Linguistic themes covered in particular units include word formation, semantic change, metaphor, and style.

The project was put together by a team of academics and postgraduate students at Glasgow University under the leadership of Jean Anderson, Carole Hough and Christian Kay. It has been an enjoyable learning experience for all of us. If readers have any comments or suggestions, we would be pleased to hear from them via the form in the Links section of the website. These will inform our next English Subject Centre funded project, which will extend the approach to later periods of the language.

We are currently working on a new English Subject Centre funded project, ‘Word Webs: Exploring Vocabulary’ that aims to demonstrate how a knowledge of vocabulary, and of the ways words develop and interrelate, can illuminate the study of texts and the cultures in which they are embedded. Through the use of electronic resources, we will explore two major linguistic areas of relevance to students of English Language and Literature: (1) The growth of the English vocabulary, and (2) The vocabulary of

literature. These will be followed by two case studies: (3) Shakespeare’s vocabulary, and (4) The vocabulary of gender. Our main source material will be the Glasgow Historical Thesaurus of English, but reference will also be made to online text databases and corpora, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech. The project will draw as appropriate on techniques developed in Stylistics and Discourse Analysis, sub-branches of linguistics which provide a meeting ground for language and literature. It will be presented as an interactive web-site designed to engage student interest through content, tasks and suggestions for project work. For a fuller description and more information please follow the link: www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/ projects/archive/language/lang2.php

1 Jane Roberts and Christian Kay with Lynne Grundy, A Thesaurus of Old English, King’s College London Medieval Studies XI, 1995, 2 vols., xxxv + 1555. Second edition, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.

2 Online version 2005, http://libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/oethesaurus/

44 Newsletter 12 April 2007

Funding for Student Literary Societies For many of us, studying English at university was a life-changing experience – not just because of what went on in seminar rooms and lecture theatres, but also (and, in some cases, more importantly) as a result of reading books that weren’t on the syllabus, talking about literature with our peers and taking part in extra-curricular cultural activities.

To what extent can this still be the case for today’s students?

Financial and time pressures can make it very difficult for them to explore and develop their enthusiasm for reading outside the demands of their courses. Increasingly, too, students choose to attend universities close to their home and, as a result, spend less time than previous generations on campus with their peers. Meanwhile, undergraduates admitted under ‘Widening Participation’ programmes can find the transition from school to university particularly problematic, sometimes feeling completely alienated from the world of higher education. As a result of all these factors, students today are perhaps less likely than ever before to engage in cultural and social activities relevant to the subject of English. The effects can be serious, with the concomitant lack of social cohesion among undergraduates leading to higher rates of student drop-out.

English Subject Centre Funding In response to this situation, the English Subject Centre is offering one-off, ‘seedcorn’ payments of £500 to help departments encourage literary/cultural activities that do not directly support course modules. Some of these activities might involve collaboration with (and attract part-funding from) local arts organisations. Projects the money might be used for include the following: • the development of student groups and literary societies

• theatre trips

• talks by visiting speakers

• a magazine

• reading parties

• film screenings

• creative writing activities

• play-reading groups

• a website

What’s the Catch?

It is a condition of the funding that, within one year after receiving the grant, a case study of c.2,000 words be produced, describing the project and giving an account of what has been learnt from it and what the benefits to students have been. The case study will be posted on the Subject Centre website and may be written by either a student or a member of staff (or both).

It is expected that, in all cases, students will be closely involved with the planning and organisation of the funded activities. A full-time permanent member of staff must, however, be named as contact for the Subject Centre and will be responsible for approving expenditure.

Applying for Funding If you would like to apply for this funding, please send a proposal of about 250 words describing the activities you would like us to fund to Jonathan Gibson (jonathan.gibson@rhul.ac.uk) at the Subject Centre. The proposal should contain the following information: • Contact details (name, email address, postal address, phone number).

• Summary of the activities for which you require funding and the reasons why you think they will benefit students.

• Details about the activities (type, number).

• The number and level of students you expect to be involved.

• How the money will be spent.

• How you propose to continue the activity beyond the funded period.

• Any other supporting information that you feel to be appropriate.

Newsletter 12 April 2007 45

getty

Newsletter 12

IT Works!

Brett Lucas casts his eye over recent developments in the world of e-learning

News Literature Online (LION) partners with OUP

Brett Lucas is the Learning Technologist and Website Developer at the English Subject Centre.

The popular Literature Online (LION) reference resource is now offering an enhanced cross-searching service including results from more than thirty literary reference titles in the Oxford Reference Online collection including the new 5-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, the new 4-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, the 4-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, the Oxford Companion to English Literature, and The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. Details are available at the link below: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/marketing/whatsnew.jsp

25 New Digitisation Projects!

Following the successful launch of the first six projects in the JISC digitisation programme, 16 new projects have recently been approved representing a £12million investment in national scholarly resources. Of particular interest to the English Subject community are: The First World War Poetry Archive (Oxford) – Preserving and sharing memories of the Great War through the words of its poets Electronic ephemera (Bodleian Library); discover hidden treasures of everyday life from the 16th to the 20th centuries; British Newspapers 1620-1900 (British Library) – Read the first three centuries of newspapers from all regions of the British Isles; a Digital Library of Core e-Resources on Ireland (Queen’s University Belfast) – a one-stop shop for Irish studies e-resources. Read more about the projects on the JISC website: www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/ programme_digitisation.aspx

Create a Course at Wikiversity The School of Language and Literature at Wikiversity is part of the large community established for the creation and use of free learning materials online using the popular Wiki format. Whilst it is clearly early days in terms of content in our discipline, the pages are growing rapidly and the site is always looking for contributors. Now might be the time to share the module of your dreams with the world! http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Language_and_Literature

Focus on…

Digital Imaging Service TASI (The Technical Advisory Service for Images) is a JISC service that provides a wealth of information for anyone working with digital images. Whether you are interested in finding images to illustrate your VLE course or lecture, scanning in your own images, developing an image collection or have a question about copyright of digital images TASI can help. The website also offers an extensive archive of tutorials on image related issues as well as a workshop programme run from their base in Bristol. TASI is definitely a website to add to your bookmarks.

46 Newsletter 12 April 2007

IT Works!

Tools Web conferencing Two tools for those interested in moving beyond the limitations of asynchronous communication online are described below.

Yugma is a free web-based conferencing service that allows you to share what you see on your desktop with other users: handy if you want to discuss a piece of writing with an individual student, or a group, deliver a presentation etc. You can also switch presenter to allow you to see the desktop of the person presenting. There is an annotation facility as well as a text-chat facility. The beauty of this tool is the ease with which you get started. When used in conjunction with Skype or the telephone this could be a powerful tool. www.yugma.com/index.php Marratech is free and simple web-based videoconferencing software. Simply downloading the software turns your computer into a meeting centre. You can host a meeting of up to five people live with voice and video connections – you can also collaboratively work on a writeboard. This software is for high-speed connections and you must have a static IP address. www.marratechfree.com/

Free Hosted Wikis PBWikis – Another externally hosted wiki service popular with the educational community http://pbwiki.com/edu.html TiddlyWiki - Allows you to create personal SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to a WebServer, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive to make a WikiOnAStick. www.tiddlywiki.com Schtuff – A Classic wiki interface with tagging facilities. http://www.schtuff.com/

Take a Stretch Break Everyone working for long periods of time with computers needs to be aware of the potential health risks when spending too much time seated in front of screens. Regular breaks, stretching exercises and good ergonomic furniture are just some of the things you need to aware of!

Stretch break is a nifty software program that reminds you when to stretch and has animations to show you how. You can time the messages to pop-up whenever you want them to (e.g. every twenty minutes) and there are 36 different stretching exercises in the program. There’s a 10 day free trial or the software will cost you about £23.00. www.paratec.com/index.htm For other tips and techniques there are many websites available online e.g.: Ergonomics for workstations (http://dohs.ors.od.nih.gov/ergo_computers.htm ) or Stretching exercises for hands and fingers: (www.stretchnow.com.au/exercises/hands.htm)

New Books HTML Mastery: Semantics, Standards & Styling

by Paul Haine Publisher: Friends of Ed ISBN: 1-59059-765-6

No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog

by Margaret Mason Publisher: Peachpit Press ISBN: 0-321-44972-X

Moodle E-Learning Course Development

by William Rice Publisher: PACKT Publishing ISBN: 1-904-81129-9

E-learning Groups and Communities

by David McConnell Publisher: Open University Press ISBN: 0-335-21280-8

Making the Transition to E-learning: Strategies and Issues

by Mark Bullen & Diane James Publisher: Idea Group ISBN: 1-59140-950-0

Newsletter 12 April 2007 47

The English Subject Centre Report Series

The English Subject Centre Report Series Our Report Series is now well-established. Copies of all reports are available on our website at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/general/publications/reports and most are circulated in paper form to English Departments in the UK. Further copies are available on request, subject to availability. Send your request to: esc@rhul.ac.uk.

Published Reports: Report no. 1

Admission Trends in Undergraduate English: statistics and attitudes, Sadie Williams, April 2002, ISBN 0902194437

Report no. 2

The English Degree and Graduate Careers, John Brennan and Ruth Williams, January 2003, ISBN 0902194631

Report no. 3

Postgraduate Training in Research Methods: Current Practice and Future Needs in English, Sadie Williams, February 2003, ISBN 0902194682

Report no. 4

Access and Widening Participation: A Good Practice Guide, Siobhรกn Holland, February 2003, ISBN 0902194739

Report no. 5

English and IT, Michael Hanrahan, December 2002

Report no. 6

Creative Writing: A Good Practice Guide, Siobhรกn Holland, February 2003, ISBN 090219478X

Report no. 7

External Examining in English, Philip Martin, April 2003, ISBN 0902194933

Report no. 8

Survey of the English Curriculum and teaching in UK Higher Education, Halcrow Group, Philip Martin and Jane Gawthrope, October 2003, ISBN 0902194291

Report no. 9

Part-time Teaching: A Good Practice Guide, Siobhรกn Holland, August 2004, ISBN 0902194291

Report no. 10

Four Perspectives on Transition: English Literature from Sixth Form to University, Andrew Green, February 2005, ISBN 090219498 4

Report no. 11

Living Writers in the Curriculum: A Good Practice Guide, Vicki Bertram & Andrew Maunder, March 2005, ISBN 090219414 3

Report no. 12

English at A-Level: A Guide for Lecturers in Higher Education, Barbara Bleiman and Lucy Webster, August 2006, ISBN 1-905846-03-7

Report no. 13

Teaching Shakespeare: A Survey of the Undergraduate Level in Higher Education, Neill Thew, September 2006, ISBN 1-905846-04-5

Report no. 14

As simple as ABC? Issues of transition for students of English Language A-Level going on to study English Language/Linguistics in Higher Education, Angela Goddard and Adrian Beard, April 2007, ISBN 1-905846-04-5

48 Newsletter 12 April 2007

English Subject Centre CETL Liaison Officer: Dr Christie Carson Administrator: Jackie Fernandes Manager: Jane Gawthrope Academic Co-ordinator: Dr Jonathan Gibson Academic Co-ordinator: Dr Nicole King Director: Professor Ben Knights Website and Systems Development Assistant: Payman Labaff Website Developer & Learning Technologist: Brett Lucas Administrative Assistant: Rebecca Price

The English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX T• 01784 443221 F• 01784 470684 esc@rhul.ac.uk

www.english.heacademy.ac.uk

Newsletter 12

The English Subject Centre Newsletter is produced twice a year and distributed widely through all institutions teaching English in Higher Education.

The newsletter’s aims are: • to provide information about resources, developments and innovations in teaching • to provide a discursive or reflective forum for teaching and learning issues • to evaluate existing and new teaching materials, textbooks and IT packages We welcome contributions.

Articles range from 300–3000 words in length.

Please help us reach more people in English Studies and beyond, by passing on this newsletter to a colleague or postgraduate student when you’ve finished with it. And do contact us if your English department is not receiving enough copies of the Newsletter, just email us at esc@rhul.ac.uk.

Editor: Nicole King nicole.king@rhul.ac.uk

The English Subject Centre Royal Holloway, University of London Egham TW20 0EX T• 01784 443221 F• 01784 470684 esc@rhul.ac.uk

50 Newsletter 12 April 2007

www.english.heacademy.ac.uk