ESC Newsletter - Issue 8 by English Subject Centre

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

English Subject Centre

The newletter’s aims are:

Newsletter

• to provide information about resources, developments and innovations in teaching • to provide a discursive or reflective forum for teaching and learning issues

Issue 8 June 2005

• to evaluate existing and new teaching materials, textbooks and IT packages We welcome contributions. Articles range from 300–3000 words in length. Editor: Jonathan Gibson

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

ISSN 1479–7089

Royal Holloway University of London

Linguistics in an English Department

Pedagogical Research in English

Two Types of Interdisciplinarity

Nigel Fabb

Ben Knights

Jonathan Gibson

Writing Culture

Developing the Independent English Student

David Kennedy

Chris Hopkins

Contents Director’s Foreword – Ben Knights

Events Calendar

Articles Nigel Fabb – Linguistics in an English Department

David Kennedy – Writing Culture

Ben Knights – Pedagogical Research in English

Chris Hopkins – Developing the Independent English Student

Jonathan Gibson – Two Types of Interdisciplinarity

News & Reports Current Subject Centre Mini-Projects

The First-Year Experience of English

Teaching Victorian Fiction

Teaching Holocaust Writing and Film

New Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

Thinking Outside the Box

Supporting Blind and Visually Impaired Students

Enhancing Careers Services for English Students

Education for Sustainable Development and English Studies

IT Works!

Reports Roundup

Director’s Foreword Ben Knights, Director, English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London

experience’ mantra puts squarely before us the necessity of paying attention to the fluid identities of those who enter our subject as learners; and takes us back to the broader meanings of an education in ‘English’ (in all the sub-disciplines that cluster beneath that elastic label) for those most of whom will not go on to become the future professionals of the subject.

e have reached an exciting moment in the history of the Subject Centre. The decision has been taken to fund the Subject Centre network to July 2009. New contracts are currently being negotiated between the Higher Education Academy and host institutions. For the first time in our short but intensive existence we are able to weave a huge array of threads and initiatives into coherent longer term planning. In doing so, we shall as always be working in dialogue with our subject community and its students. In turn that commitment requires us to negotiate the potentially fruitful tension between the role of supporting teaching (inherited from the Learning and Teaching Support Network) and the Academy’s orientation towards the student experience (sometimes qualified as the ‘student learning experience’). At the English Subject Centre we are well aware of the suspicions our community entertains towards this latter imperative: its semi-overt project of positioning UK higher education in a global marketplace, the potential for reinforcing short-term consumerist attitudes, the downplaying of the seriousness and danger of knowledge in favour of skilling up an intellectual proletariat for the ‘knowledge economy’. We are aware, because in many ways we share the reservations ourselves. Nevertheless, we believe that there are intellectual and social advantages in offering support for teaching in the context of attention to the student experience (however defined). The range of contents of this newsletter – like the range of Subject Centre events – itself bears witness to the productivity of shuttling between domains. If it does nothing else, the ‘student

Small outfit that it is, the English Subject Centre is not in a position to make all the connections and carry out all the projects with which our colleagues nationally or we ourselves might wish us to be involved. But we are in a position to work with our communities and with other agencies, offering tentative advice and acting as catalysts for development. Above all we can create or seize opportunities to enrich the pedagogic matrix: to help build on the existing communicative and pedagogic habits of the discipline. We can thus facilitate a self-aware activity that reaches from day-to-day reflection on teaching all the way to a systematic scholarship of teaching and pedagogic research.1 This orientation means that we seek in all we do to pay attention to the forms and rituals through which our subject matters are mediated, all those ways in which students and potential students are invited into (or excluded from) dialogue. Let us take the example of the ‘English 21’ initiative with which the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has been charged. This is an important opportunity to contribute to the shaping of ‘English’ in schools and colleges.The Subject Centre, while actively involved, cannot fully represent the higher education community all by itself, and strongly urges national colleagues to join in the dialogue.2 It is at least possible that we are seeing a thaw in the cold war which has for the past fifteen years – since the shameful dismissal of the Cox and Carter reports – tended to barricade University and School English into blocs of mutual misunderstanding.3 Some implications for students of effecting the boundary crossing are explored in Andrew Green’s recent report for the Subject Centre.4 It would be irresponsible to miss the opportunity presented by ‘English 21’, especially since we now know that ministers and the DFES see no need for an Adrian Smith-style enquiry into English. But an adequate involvement rests on the higher education English community being able to articulate the values and benefits of our subject to the larger community,

Director’s Foreword

even while recognising with due humility that this extended family of subjects is not and never has been a straightforward derivative of scholarly research. For this is a dispersed subject with its roots in multiple practices and traditions. In a classic sense it is a ‘soft subject’ whose boundaries with its surroundings are weak and permeable. That, paradoxically, is its strength. It has as much to do with the habits of speech and reading communities as with the habits of educational systems. Shuttle diplomacy between communities (teachers, students, writers and readers) may be precisely what the

Subject Centre is positioned to do.We cannot (and should not) act as sole representatives of the higher education English community – that community can speak for itself – but we can bring tidings, offer translation facilities, take part in and report on parleys.Above all, we can assist colleagues in articulating and sharing the ways in which their scholarly knowledge and practice fuels transactions between generations and communities. We can thus play a part in renewing the connectedness between this group of university subjects and the critical literacies of the future.

The National Association for the Teaching of English announces a new publication: Text: Message The Future of A Level English by Jane Bluett, Susan Cockcroft, Ann Harris, John Hodgson, Gary Snapper In this timely book, the NATE Post-16 Committee evaluate A-Level English in the light of modern approaches to English studies. Basing their case in part upon teachers' evaluations, they argue that neither the structure nor the content of the current A-Level English curriculum suits current needs. The writers provide detailed critiques of each English subject, and survey alternative curricular models that have developed in higher education, overseas, and in other disciplines.They consider appropriate modes of assessment in English. Finally, they propose approaches to A-Level English that draw on best theory and practice, and suggest ways in which these might be delivered. The NATE Post-16 Committee have brought diverse experience to this task. The writers currently work in 11-18 schools, in further and higher education, and in teacher training. They are engaged in research into literacy and the English curriculum, and have responsibility as senior examiners and moderators in English. Text: Message is now available from NATE Publications at £5.50 (members); £6.50 (non-members), plus postage. The National Association for the Teaching of English 50 Broadfield Road Sheffield S8 0XJ Phone: 0114 255 5419

1. See the article on p. 13 of this newsletter. 2. See http://www.qca.org.uk/11775.html and boxed item above. 3. Cf. Ben Knights, ‘Building Bridges:Traversing the Secondary/Tertiary Divide’, English Subject Centre Newsletter 6 (February 2004), pp. 28-9, available online at: http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/newsletters/newsissue6/knights1.htm 4. Andrew Green, Four Perspectives on Transition: English Literature from Sixth Form to University (English Subject Centre Report 10, 2005), available online at: http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/archive/publications/reports/transition.pdf. 3

Events Calendar Brief details of each of the English Subject Centre’s forthcoming events are given below. If you would like further details, please see www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/events or e-mail esc@rhul.ac.uk. All events are free of charge unless otherwise stated.

Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy The Annual Lecture of the Subject Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics (C-SAP), co-funded by the English Subject Centre.

problems in relation to specific concerns within English studies. We aim to address how dedicated skills training can enable and enhance students' awareness of resourceful and independent approaches towards learning, and how to bridge the perceived gulf between academic and employment-related skills.

June 7, 2005: Birmingham Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Vice-President of the American Association of University Professors, will offer a trenchant analysis of faculty passivity in the context of the mounting political and economic pressures facing higher education in the US and the UK. Putting forward examples of student and academic activism that have reshaped disciplinary professional organisations, department teaching provision, and university employment conditions, he will propose routes out of the current crisis.

Teaching Scottish and Irish Literature October 21, 2005: University of Manchester. This event will examine the issues which arise in teaching Scottish and Irish literature. It will focus on the different kinds of teaching which may be necessary to deliver these subjects to home audiences, to students in the other country (e.g. teaching Irish Literature in Scotland) and to students in England and Wales.

Close Reading October 28, 2005: Central London.

Teaching Chaucer at Secondary and Higher Level June 8, 2005: University of Birmingham. This one-day conference for university and sixth-form teachers of Chaucer will discuss recent developments in Chaucer criticism and how these can be integrated into the school and university study of Chaucer. The conference will be a mix of lectures and workshops in which participants can discuss and exchange ideas relating to the practice of teaching Chaucer. The conference will also aim to explore more general issues relating to the study of English across the secondary/tertiary boundary, underlining the value of dialogue between university and sixth-form teachers.

The aim of this one-day event is to bring together colleagues to discuss practical, methodological (and perhaps ideological) issues in teaching close reading. From the disputed origins of the discipline of ‘English’ in I.A. Richards’ practical criticism experiments in Cambridge in the 1920s to Isobel Armstrong’s reassessment of close reading in The Radical Aesthetic (2000), the value of detailed individual engagement with the formal qualities of texts has been crucial to debates about what ‘studying English’ means. This event will feature discussions with practitioners about the role of close reading in university curricula, especially at first-year level, as well as sessions on methods of teaching and assessment.

New Lecturers' Workshop Enabling and Enhancing the Study of English

2-3 December, 2005: University of Birmingham Conference Park.

September 9, 2005: Central London

Cost: £45.

This one-day conference will debate best practice methods for enabling undergraduate students to gain competencies in, and awareness of, expository skills such as critical thinking, information gathering, writing skills, group participation and presentation skills.The conference is designed to offer models, pose queries and address

A two day residential event intended for recently appointed higher education lecturers and tutors of English. The conference will be highly participative in nature and will offer ample opportunity for the formal and informal exchange of views and models of practice.

Articles Linguistics in a department of English Literature Nigel Fabb, Professor of Literary Linguistics and Head of the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, reconsiders the relationship between linguistic analysis and literary studies.This is the second in an occasional series of articles on the links between English and cognate disciplines.

n this article I offer some ways of integrating theoretical linguistics into a literature department. I write as a theoretical linguist who also teaches literature.The article is in three parts. First, I explain why I think linguistics has an place in literary studies; second, I show how some of the major differences between linguistics and literary studies are resolved in Strathclyde's 'Ways of Reading' class; and third I talk in general about ways of bringing linguistics into the literature curriculum. It is easy to explain why some knowledge of language should be useful in literary studies. Knowing what a preposition is, or a gerund, or a partitive, makes the analyst more sensitive to the medium from which literary texts are made, and provides a vocabulary for talking about them. Being able to isolate elements of language enables you to see things which otherwise are below the threshold of attention: the first two lines of Milton's Paradise Lost begin with 'of', and thereafter a higher than chance proportion of lines in the poem begin with 'of'. When we now look at Tintern Abbey we find that 23 of the 60 instances of 'of' in the poem are line-initial, and we have something previously unexpected to say about the 'Miltonic style' of this poem. None of this requires linguistics; just standard descriptive English grammar will do, perhaps supplemented with some newer terminology, and certainly stripped of its more oppressive prescriptive characteristics. In contrast, theoretical linguistics is the scientific study of language, which seeks to establish what forms language takes and why it takes these forms. What can a theoretical linguist do for literature which cannot be accomplished by an a theoretical grammarian? To answer this question we must acknowledge two of the major discoveries made by linguists in the past fifty years.

The first major discovery is that a single utterance or inscription (e.g. a sentence, part of a text) is always mentally represented in several distinct ways. In their mental representations, a surface representation of the text may be quite different from an underlying representation of the same text; this is the distinction known to many by Chomsky's terms 'deep structure' and 'surface structure' and while the theory has moved on, the discovery that there are different representations of the same sentence remains valid: Chomsky's current 'minimalist investigations' are centred on the problem of why this distinction exists â&#x20AC;&#x201C; why for example the phonetic form and the logical form of a sentence should differ. One example of the relevance of this for literary studies is poetic metre: the underlying metrical form and the surface rhythm of a text can be very different. Not only does the metre underdetermine the rhythm (hence allowing great rhythmic variety within a single metre) but it is also possible for rhythm to communicate a surface metre which differs from the underlying metre: hence English iambic pentameter can rhythmically mimic a Sapphic, or Christina Rossetti can write a strict metrical poem which mimics a ballad1, or Auden a loose metrical poem which mimics various strict metres. The fact that an instance of text can have multiple representations demonstrates the systemic complexity of language as a source of formal and interpretive richness, and linguistics offers a way of understanding how this richness comes about. The second major discovery is that there are different kinds of meaning: there is no unified 'semantics', but rather a collection of different kinds of semantics. This has been suspected and reported throughout the twentieth century, but the explanatory breakthrough was in the

1 Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle, 'Metrical complexity in Christina Rossetti's verse', College Literature (in press). 5

Linguistics in a department of English Literature

work of the linguistic philosophers, Austen, Grice and Searle, and in linguistics particularly in the 'relevance theory' of Sperber and Wilson 2. Most importantly, we now have an ontologically parsimonious and psychologically realistic theory of metaphor and of irony (and other forms of metarepresentation), which are explanatory not just for everyday language but also for literature. I have argued elsewhere that many elements of literary form (most obviously genre) can be explained under a theory of pragmatics, and that in fact these 'forms' are actually meanings communicated by the text, things the text tells us about itself 3. In these ways, formalism finds a new way to return to literary studies, via contemporary pragmatics. Both of these major discoveries offer ways in which literary studies can understand how language makes possible the richness of literary texts. Neither of these discoveries has been as influential as it deserves to be in literary studies. Perhaps linguistics feels too grounded, while in contrast literary studies is free to roam, and thus appears to liberate students in ways not possible for linguistics. I will shortly suggest that linguistics has its liberatory side as well. In the next section of this article I will look at two of the major differences between linguistics and literary studies and show how they are practically resolved in a class at Strathclyde University. In the late 1980s my colleagues and I created a class called 'Ways of Reading' (its title a homage to John Berger's influential book Ways of Seeing). At Strathclyde it is the only class from that period still taught, and its organizatory principles have come to influence our whole undergraduate English curriculum; it was also the basis of a Routledge textbook which has sold 28,000 copies and is about to go into third edition 4. I think the class and book are successful in part because they temporarily overcome two of the major differences between linguistics and literary studies. The first major difference is that linguistics is concerned with generalization, and literary studies with specificity. Linguists do not care about any instance of

language in itself, but only in how that instance is evidence of underlying regularities, while in contrast literary scholars value specific texts. The second major difference is that linguistics proceeds by problem-finding and problem-solving, notions which are somewhat alien to many ways of teaching literature. The â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ways of Readingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; class is organized around topics, and thus around generalizations: a class on metaphor, a class on parallelism, for example. Each week we have one lecture and one workshop, with the students following detailed instructions on a worksheet. We begin with a class about how to ask questions about a literary text, and this sets the tone for the class. I'll give an example of an actual class which has been used to illustrate how it works; this is a class on narrative where our goal is to teach the students about Propp's notion that narratives might be segmented into types of event (drawn as an ordered subset from an ordered set). The workshop broke into about 25 parts a summary of the film Salmonberries by Percy Adlon, and presented them in randomized order. The task was first to find the most 'realist' or conventional way of ordering the events; and then to produce an antirealist or postmodern narrative from the same sequence of events. The point here is not the text itself, which is derivative from a film which the students haven't actually seen, but the way in which this text can provide material through which students can learn about our expectations about event order, and how these expectations can be manipulated. The linguistics here comes partly via the explicitly formalist thinking behind the class, but more through the idea that by inventing and manipulating verbal material we can make discoveries about underlying principles. Some classes are a long way from linguistics in their content. In one session we look at the book as a physical object and the artist's book, and in the workshop give (cheap, used) books to students and ask them to alter them to produce a new object/text from them by any means except fire. Here again the point is experimentation, a procedure derived from the teaching of linguistics.There will be a new session

2 Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 3 Nigel Fabb, Language and Lliterary Structure: The Linguistic Analysis of Form in Verse and Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 4 Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss and Sara Mills, Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading Skills for Students of English Literature, second edition (London: Routledge, 2000). 6

Articles

in autumn 2005 on the aesthetics of 'going for a walk': the flĂ˘neur and the Arcades, the dĂŠrive and Debord's 'walk home', the Artist's Walk, skateboarding, and so on. There is no actual linguistics here, but even though linguistics is not the subject matter of the class, it is always a linguisticsinfluenced class in the sense that it is always about generalization and the finding and solving of problems. Our choice of texts for each session is left to some extent to chance; this has to be the case, because our underlying assumption is that no textual practice is unique. Salmonberries works nicely for the 'narrative/Propp' workshop because its narrative presents some surprises as regards family relations (the bedrock of Propp's theory), but there are thousands of other narratives which would also have been good.The educational roots of the class come in part from Richard Kohl's 'open classroom' with its radical pedagogy 5, and in part from the problemsolving methodology used in linguistics departments.6 While theoretical linguistics might be committed to idealization and the discovery of universals, and hence operates in some ways by excluding, closing down, focusing, and regulating, it nevertheless has paradoxically been taught in ways which can be liberatory for students, and can be adapted to literary studies. In the final section of this article I will suggest some ways of putting linguistics into the literature curriculum. Sometimes at Strathclyde we do this by having an option class whose subject matter is linguistics or English language, but because our curriculum is so heavily option-based, we run the risk of having a class which few students will choose to do. Some students originally chose to do literature precisely in order to get away from the technical kind of thinking required for linguistics; others seek instead the fun they will get from reading literary texts; and others, driven by considerations of relevance, find linguistics too far from their everyday concerns.The traditional way in which linguists have nevertheless sought to satisfy literature students is to make the linguistics as relevant as possible. The traditional British 'stylistics' way of doing this, promoted for example by Simpson 7, is to seek always to show how linguistics gets you

somewhere with a literary text. Thus I have taught journalism students Searle on speech acts by showing how newspaper headlines 'fake' speech acts for specific purposes; and have asked students studying creative writing to write and then comment on their own fiction exemplifying Goffman's notion of facework.There is no question that these exercises engage the students, though I think there is an intellectual cost incurred by too intensively seeking to make theory relevant for practice. There is however another way of making linguistics relevant. New media, which students might know better than we do, can raise interesting linguistic problems; one of our students is about to write a dissertation on the syntax of text-messaging, and another who will be working on the sociolinguistics of blogging. And at Strathclyde we have discovered a characteristic interest in the linguistic analysis of non-standard dialect. Perhaps Scotland may have a special status here; strong dialect loyalty struggles with rigid proscription of dialect, such that multi-dialectalism is very widespread, and language is very visibly tied to issues of nation and social class. Thus we find that dissertations on topics relating to Scottish English are quite common, even on the basis of small amounts of class-based instruction, and that students are willing to learn substantial amounts of linguistic theory in pursuit of topics such as 'The difference between aye and yes' or 'The language of (the soap) River City'. Though it is always possible to find some students who want to study linguistics as such, it is not resource-effective always to offer a linguistics or English language option. Because of this, we are open to letting linguistics appear in any class.The possibility of using theoretical linguistics in this way exploits two characteristics of the discipline as originally formulated by Chomsky: it is modular, and it is rationalist rather than empiricist. The modularity is manifested by a willingness to separate out a problem and deal with it independently of some other problem. One of my favourite tasks with students at any level is to get them to see how far they can get in asking questions and formulating hypotheses by looking just at the first and the last sentence of a text, and for the moment to ignore the rest. Chomsky's rationalism tells us that there is no pre-theoretical arrangement of the

5 Herbert R. Kohl, The Open Classroom: A Practical Guide to a New Way of Teaching (New York: New York Review, 1969). 6 Maya Honda and Wayne O'Neil, 'Triggering Science-Forming Capacity through Linguistic Inquiry', in K. Hale and S. J. Keyser (eds.), The View from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 229-256. 7 Paul Simpson, Language through Literature: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1997). 7

Linguistics in a department of English Literature

data, and that we never know in advance what a theory will be able to explain, or that any particular theoretical model is guaranteed to be right. Instead, the theory must take a risk and work out for itself what data it is seeking to explain. Both of these characteristics make linguistics opportunistic and thus available for intervention at any point in a literature class. In one of the first lectures of our first year literature class, the issue of 'embedded' narratives arises when we discuss Margaret Elphinstone's complexly folded novel The Sea Road; this is the right moment to explain 'recursion' as a characteristic of linguistic systems, and to point the students to Chomsky's argument about recursion and the evolution of language. Chomsky created generative linguistics in opposition to earlier linguists' adherence to a methodology or pre-theoretical assumption about what a theory should be; while we are hardly Feyerabendians, this opposition to method is another of the liberatory aspects of linguistics. Opportunistic and 'modular' uses of linguistics carry over to the use of any language in the class. Linguists are used to working on any language, whether they know it or not, and focusing just on the problem at hand. In our first year class we use New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse8 because it is so multilingual, with its Latin, French, Old English, Icelandic, Gaelic, Scots, English and even Welsh (the Gododdin) texts. In one session we expect our students – few of whom know the language – to discover the metres of the early modern Gaelic poems. This is an easy task even for those who cannot pronounce the words (just looking at the written vowels will do the job), but it does require the willingness to be nonholistic, to separate off a problem of form from every other aspect of the poem.

I have written about ways in which linguistics can influence literary studies, but I want to end by acknowledging that the linguistics is being undertaken as part of a literature degree. A popular research topic for our students is 'The language of Irving Welsh' (or Jim Kelman, or some other Scottish writer who represents non-standard dialect in an interesting way). I remind the students who do this work that though they are working as linguists, the novel's author is not; Trainspotting is not a work of sociolinguistics. The language of the novel has an indirect relation to the Edinburgh dialect it represents; Welsh is undertaking linguistics as fiction, rather than linguistics as a scientific enterprise, and the student's linguistic work on Welsh's language achieves complexity and richness when it can combine the opposing demands of linguistics with the literary. Linguistics is the search for simplicity, literary studies is the search for complexity, and in a literature degree the opposition between these is true friendship. In this article, I have suggested that linguistics can open up new kinds of complexity in the teaching of literature.

Acknowledgement This article arises from an event I organized in Autumn 2004 for the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. The event was called 'New methods in literary linguistics and their relevance for linguistics', and was administered by Jane Copeland; it included presentations by myself, Barbara MacMahon and Sylvia Adamson.

Want the Latest? Join our E-mail list: English-heacademy@jiscmail.ac.uk If you would like to be kept up-to-date with the latest news on English Subject Centre events or be the first to hear about funding opportunities or new initiatives, then please join our electronic mailing list, English-heacademy@jiscmail.ac.uk . All you have to do is go to http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/english-heacademy.html and click on ‘join the list’. We promise not to overfill your mailbox: all messages are kept short and concise, and we rarely send more than one a week.

8 The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse ed. by Mick Imlah and Robert Crawford (London: Penguin, 2001). 8

Writing Culture David Kennedy, Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and AHRB Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts at Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds, describes a recent event designed to encourage students to think of themselves as writers.

The Need for a Writing Culture Students must write, as the title of Robert Barrass’s bestselling book has it. The modular system’s relentless focus on writing for assessment means they have no choice. Writing, more than ever before, is synonymous with learning; and being a student is synonymous with being a writer. However, the writing that students must do has a fairly narrow definition. Writing has become identified with gaining a particular mark and this has made writing a source of anxiety for large numbers of students. Crucially, it has removed any possibility or indeed necessity for the more exploratory type of writing that might make students better writers and help them to discover writing as an enjoyable activity. To put this another way, students already anxious about producing assessed assignments are unlikely to want to produce any more writing. They may even wonder, as many do when asked to read something that isn’t absolutely essential to their course, ‘what’s the point?’ Writing to learn or, more correctly, ‘writing as learning’ raises important questions. First, how do we encourage students to think of themselves as writers: i.e. as people who write? Thinking of yourself as a writer means thinking about things such as composition, construction and arranging words in appropriate and effective ways. It also means developing self-awareness in order to understand how to make your writing have the effects you want it to have. It means, we might say, being able to hear your writing talking back to you. It means understanding writing as a process and that all pieces of writing have one thing in common: they get written more than once. Second, how do we seed and sustain an inclusive writing culture in our individual institutions that will support students in this? A writing culture means that writing is a visible part of institutional life, not just something staff do in their offices or that students do between 9 and 11 on Wednesday mornings. The two questions are particularly urgent because the new emphasis on writing as learning has occurred at the same time as both a perceived diminishment in the abilities that undergraduates bring to university and the widening of access to non-traditional students. It is

perhaps arguable that universities are being forced to confront what J. P. Gee identified over 10 years ago: that the language and literary practices valued in educational institutions are not taught to those who do not already know them.1 It is certainly the case that there is a generalised despair about the ‘problem’ of student writing and how it continually falls short of the conventions of what is, as Theresa M. Lillis reminds us in a penetrating study, a highly privileged practice.2 Thinking of writing at university as a practice certainly departs from the dominant wisdom that insists that writing is a skill. However, a brief consideration of the changes that the word ‘skill’ has undergone suggests that ‘practice’ may be a more useful term. When Macaulay wrote that someone was ‘utterly destitute of the skill necessary to the conduct of great affairs’, he was not only describing practical knowledge but also suggesting a range and depth of understanding including, for example, what we would call social awareness and a firm grasp of ethical principles. If we turn to contemporary uses of the word in phrases such as ‘basic skills’ or ‘skill centre’ then we see an increased emphasis on functionality and on the repetitive performance of given operations. Thinking of writing as a skill tends to miss any sense of repeated performance as an incremental and potentially never-ending process of refinement. Thinking of writing as a skill evokes connotations of a specific thing done only in a specific place for a specific reason. It misses any sense of writing for enjoyment and any sense of what we might term ‘writing for life’. It also misses any sense that a specific form of writing is necessarily co-extensive with other types of writing and with reading. ‘Practice’ may also be a more useful word because thinking of writing at university as a practice means identifying it as an accepted mode of institutional behaviour; and one accepted mode of institutional behaviour connects with others. So writing at university and thinking of yourself as a writer at university means participating not only in the customary actions of your particular subject community but also in larger ideas about, for example, how to learn, how to express yourself and how to receive and transmit knowledge. Finally, being

1. J. P. Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideologies in Discourses (London: Falmer Press, 1990), passim. 2.Theresa M. Lillis, Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp.53-77. 9

Writing Culture

involved in a practice means recognising and being recognised by others involved in the same or convergent practices. And this recognition is an important starting point for both community and culture.

Seeding a Writing Culture A well-established relationship between the English departments at York St. John (YSJ) and Trinity & All Saints, Leeds (TASC) has resulted in an initiative that goes some way to showing how to establish a writing culture that will support students to think of themselves as writers by raising awareness of writing as a practice. The initiative took the form of two Writers’ Festival Days held early in March this year.3 The aim was a bold one:‘to foster a sense of excitement about writing so that participants will return to their own writing invigorated with a renewed sense of purpose’.The term ‘Festival’ was deliberately used to create a sense of celebration and occasion.The means of fostering excitement and renewed purpose was to bring together students and staff to explore the range of possibilities opened up by working with professional writers.Within this framework there was the possibility of local experimentation, so TASC decided to invite local schools and members of the local community to participate in its Day. The two Writers’ Festival Days offered participants choices from eight two-hour workshops across a range of genres and aspects of writing including writing for performance; writing for teenagers; poetry; life writing; American voices; storytelling; structure; and rhetorical punctuation. The aim was to combine traditional genrebased creative writing workshops with the opportunity to explore writing practices applicable across genres.4 All the workshops were designed so that participants would either complete a piece of writing or have the beginnings

of one to be completed later. The workshops were run once in the morning and once in the afternoon on each Writers’ Festival Day. Each day also featured a lunchtime poetry reading by some of the participating writers and by members of staff. A local bookseller ran a bookstall featuring publications by participating writers, staff members and books relevant to creative and academic writing.There was also a book swap stall. A number of factors made the Writers’ Festival Days initiative possible. Most important of these was a significant history of co-operation between YSJ and TASC. Collaborative activities have included the development of joint Masters’ programmes, shared staff development initiatives as well as writers’ events and one-day conferences. The two English departments are familiar with each other’s strengths and working practices and therefore well placed to mount joint ventures successfully. YSJ already runs a range of creative writing courses and has a student body keen for wider writing experiences. TASC English department runs a core module at Level One called ‘Writing Practices’ in which students complete a wide range of prose and poetry exercises from travel writing and reviews to myth re-telling and character monologues. Both YSJ and TASC English also have a long history of working closely with professional writers with the broad aim of cultural enrichment. YSJ colleagues Gweno Williams and Elizabeth Sandie are contributors to the latest English Subject Centre Report Living Writers in the Curriculum: A Good Practice Guide.5 A crucial factor in funding the event was that both YSJ and TASC are institutional partners in The Royal Literary Fund’s (RLF) Fellowship Scheme which places writers into higher education institutions to assist students with academic literacy.YSJ is a new partner in the scheme while TASC has been a partner since 1999. This relationship

3. The YSJ Writers’ Festival Day was held on 3 March, 2005 and the TASC Writers’ Festival Day on 9 March. 4. The project team for the two Writers’ Festival Days was: YSJ Head of Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning and National Teaching Fellow Gweno Williams; YSJ Senior Lecturer in Literature Studies Paul Mills; YSJ Project Administrator Lisa Wellington;TASC Head of Humanities Joyce Simpson;TASC Senior Lecturer in English Paul Hardwick; David Kennedy; and TASC Project Secretary Sylvia Simpson. The workshops offered were as follows. At YSJ: Experience, Memory and Language (Poetry); Creative Reading/Creative Writing; Writing for Teenagers; Caesar Entered on His Head (Punctuation); Fictional Lives (Short Story); Storytelling in Prose or Poetry; Structure (Plotting a Novel); Dramatic Monologue; American Voices. At TASC: Experience, Memory & Language (Poetry); Writing for Teenagers; Caesar Entered on His Head (Punctuation); Fictional Lives (Short Story); Storytelling in Prose or Poetry; Structure in Writing (from Novels to Encyclopaedia entries); Dramatic Monologue; Creative Memoir. 5. See p. 40 of this newsletter. 10

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meant that the RLF were happy to support the Writers’ Festival Days by paying writers’ fees and expenses and making a contribution to overall costs.The majority of the writers were RLF Fellows which meant that all were experienced working in higher education. The Fellows were novelist Jane Adams, poet Ian Duhig, children’s author Linda Hoy, poet and critic David Kennedy, poet and short story writer Helen Lamb, novelist and academic Denis MacEoin, poet Jack Mapanje, dramatist Sol B. River, and poet and creative memoirist Eva Salzman. Paul Hardwick, a TASC English lecturer and published poet, also led workshops. Additional funding was secured from the English Subject Centre and from YSJ’s recent successful Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning bid entitled C4C Collaborating for Creativity.

and ‘supportive’.This may, of course, reflect the novelty of the two Days, but it perhaps also gives some useful pointers towards the ethos of a writing culture. Finally, comments about the workshops and the Days in general show that participants felt they had learnt things they could apply to their future writing: • I learnt how to brainstorm. • Helped me write to a word count which will help with future essays. • I learnt how to write from a different point of view. A significant proportion of respondents also expressed a desire for similar events at regular intervals.

Future Writing Culture Writing Culture in Action As overall workshop co-ordinator for the two Days and a workshop leader myself, I am pleased to report that both days were an even bigger success than YSJ and TASC hoped for. At YSJ, 116 students participated in the workshops; and at TASC, 168 students, staff and members of the wider community participated in the workshops. It is particularly gratifying to find that around 15% of TASC’s participants came from local schools or writers’ groups. Comments on evaluation forms on the workshops and on the days in general are particularly revealing in three areas. First, it is clear that for many people writing – creative or otherwise – is a source of anxiety and that events like the Writers’ Festival Days can help them to overcome this: • Not threatening at all. • Helped me not to be scared of writing. • My confidence has increased tenfold in two hours. Second, it is clear that anxiety about writing can be alleviated by exposure to professional writers: • The tutor was full of contagious passion for writing. • The tutor got us all really involved. • The tutor’s enthusiasm was infectious. Student feedback about the writers themselves often included words such as ‘approachable’,‘kind’,‘friendly’,‘nice’

There are a number of important lessons to be learnt from the two Writers’ Festival Days about writing and the teaching of writing. First, student participants in the more traditional genre-based creative writing workshops reported that having to write something showed them that they could overcome the fear of writing they often encountered at the beginning of academic assignments. Second, the workshops focusing on aspects of writing such as structure and punctuation showed that such things can be taught in ways that are enjoyable and effective without students feeling the pressure of writing to gain a specific mark. Finally, the two Writers’ Festival Days made visible for both staff and students the connections between what might be termed ‘professional’ creative writing and general good writing practice. The visiting writers gave their time and their enthusiasm and showed by example how essential these are to effective writing. The overall structure of the Writers’ Festival Days was also crucial to their success. Bringing together students, staff and professional writers naturally facilitated discussions about writing and reading. The two Days provided physical and conceptual spaces for talking, listening and sharing. In the case of TASC’s day, students were able to meet members of local writers’ groups and get a sense of writing as an activity people do because they enjoy it. The lunchtime readings also gave particular opportunities for listening. Workshop participants were able to hear and see workshop leaders in action and 11

Writing Culture

experience live links between words on the page and words in the world. As one YSJ student observed, ‘It was great to hear examples of good writing as well as concentrating on the ‘how to do it’ factor.’ In the context of seeding and sustaining a writing culture, the fact that some of the readers on each Writers’ Festival Day were staff at host institutions made the identity of writers within existing institutional cultures more visible.6 The success of the two Writers’ Festival Days has generated confidence and enthusiasm among students and staff. The two Days will be repeated next March and

the RLF has again agreed to pay the writers’ fees and expenses. Web and paper publications gathering writing generated by the two Days are already in preparation. One of the more accomplished pieces is a short story by a TASC student which recounts how someone set in their ways and fearful of change has an experience which makes him understand the value of changing his behaviour for the better. One couldn’t have asked for a better emblem of the future writing culture at YSJ and TASC.

Win a 40Gb IPod Photo in our E-Learning Practitioner Survey The Subject Centre is embarking on a major study of the state of e-learning in the teaching of English Studies in 2005. Finding out what you are using (whether developed by you or others), and more importantly how you feel about the way e-learning is being used by your students, will enable us to update our e-learning resource collection and tailor our support more appropriately to suit your needs. The survey should take approximately 15 minutes to complete and, as an added incentive to complete the survey, all those completed will be entered into a draw. The winner can choose between two prizes, either an iPod 40GB Photo (pictured above), or book tokens to the equivalent value (£250). Please go to our homepage: www.english.heacademy.ac.uk to complete the survey online or to download a copy.

6.The event also received good coverage in TASC’s internal newsletter Inside Out; and in YSJ’s Artworks and York Talk. 12

Pedagogical Research and English Studies Ben Knights, Director of the English Subject Centre, issues an invitation.

he English Subject Centre seeks to foster a quality that we might call pedagogic imagination. As stimulus and support for imaginative practice, the Subject Centre warmly encourages colleagues to engage in a range of related activities which may be described as, variously, Pedagogic Research, Scholarship of Teaching, and Reflective Practice. These might be envisaged as stages along a continuum which extends from unexamined commonsense, through puzzling over a new form of assessment or a seminar that did not go as we expected, to the systematic collection and theorisation of evidence. Movement along this spectrum tends to bring to bear an estrangement effect on the taken-for-grantedness of teaching and learning. It involves articulating ideas and questions about the relations between learner, teacher, and the object of study. Such enquiries have a pragmatic orientation, anticipating that teaching and learning may be enhanced through processes that include both reflection on experience and the gathering and analysis of empirical information.

lesser extent FDTL) projects. Over time, we look forward to the work which will emerge from the newlyestablished Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs).

The Subject Centre supports the view that writing and research about pedagogy can be as important and as valuable as subject research traditionally conceived. In any case, these need not be two mutually exclusive domains. We would like to suggest that the skills and preoccupations of both literary and linguistic scholarship may be profitably directed towards the processes of teaching and learning. Thus a nineteenth-century scholar might address ethical and educational encounter in the novel, or a linguist study the discourses and pragmatics of the seminar. Again, writing for an audience is a social as well as conceptual dimension of creative writing, and colleagues can and do explore performance as a key to early modern drama and its classrooms.

We recognise that one inhibitor can be the belief that to undertake this kind of work you have to be trained in social science methods, or command an educational discourse. Before taking up this point, we should make one thing clear.We are not arguing for an insular dismissal of work carried on by educational researchers within (broadly) social science paradigms. That is a tradition of work which English lecturers should respect and from which we all have much to learn. Naturally, there are bad examples as well as good, but that is true for literary criticism or sociolinguistics as well. Even at the preeminently qualitative ends of the discipline, there are occasions when we actually need more empirical evidence, and to equip ourselves with the means for gathering and analysing it.We should not be too proud to check our intuitions and impressions against other forms of evidence, even while acknowledging that surveys, interviews and so on are themselves discursive forms which do not yield up unmediated truths.

Activities in which the Subject Centre is already explicitly engaged include the book series Teaching the New English (with Palgrave Macmillan), the funding of departmental projects, and the production and commissioning of newsletter articles and website pages. We are also engaged in a long-running attempt to set up a refereed journal on the teaching and learning of the family of English subjects within higher education. Other, related examples include dissemination activities emerging from National Teaching Fellowship (and to a

Let us now spell out an implicit invitation. We would like to invite interested colleagues to collaborate with us in developing a body of writing and resources on the teaching of literature, language, and creative writing.These resources could take many forms, and be shared through both print and electronic media. As we have briefly indicated, there are numerous avenues, for instance: • Mini-projects with a report • Newsletter or journal articles • Web materials • A volume in the Teaching the New English series • Case studies (see small boxed item on p.32 of this newsletter)

Nevertheless, we also believe that there are within humanities disciplines traditions which could be developed to form the basis for subject-sensitive pedagogic research.Thus, for example, traditions of textual analysis on the one hand, or linguistic analysis on the other provide powerful tools for the analysis of group process.

What will English be?

Histories of the subject can be developed into accounts of the shaping of the identity of the learner. The preoccupations of the community with the performative nature of text and discourse, or in reading and comprehension as active processes, provide starting places for forms of work which would in many ways blur the conventional distinction between subject and pedagogic research activity. We believe it is important that research on learning and teaching should remain plural, and not dominated by any one school or tradition. In this light, we believe that ‘English’, like the other humanities disciplines, should not simply be the recipient of ‘know-how’ from elsewhere, but by contrast actually has much to offer to a plural, qualitative research domain. The traffic between ‘educational research’ and ‘English’ can and should be twoway. In that sense, subject-inflected pedagogic research might be seen as bearing some correspondence with the novel itself: a prosthesis that enables us to articulate and enter into dialogue over the meaning of the experience of learning – including the articulation of the precarious ambiguities of the teaching relationship itself. In its curiosity about the inferencing work of readers and listeners, English has already much in common with the constructivist tradition in education. Poetry, remarked Jerome Bruner, is a ‘vehicle for searching out unsuspected kinship’ 1, and poetry and narrative have been woven through his work ever since.

It is of course open to any member of the subject community to systematically collect and reflect upon information on a thousand topics: about the varying success of different forms of assessment or group activity; about the changing nature of the curriculum; about the experience of entering university from school. In fact, we warmly encourage you to carry out useful bits of participant ethnography on our subject activity. But further still, it would not be entirely fanciful to suggest that different traditions within the subject might generate intellectual resources for particular areas of work. Cognitive poetics, we might suggest, would provide a fertile basis for the investigation of the metaphors of learning and the conceptual architecture of learning occasions; new historicists would understandably want to explore the subject in terms of discourses of regulation and social management; humanists in terms of the enlistment of literature and literary discussion in a project of human development and fulfilment; ecocritics in terms of intellectual habitats and the representation of the nonhuman world; psycho-analytic critics might profitably build on the work of Wilfred Bion to explore the affinities between narrative and group process, and language people use linguistic analysis to understand the processes of the classroom. And so on.The point is that engagement in the focused and systematic analysis of learning and teaching need not represent a betrayal of the discipline. More positively, that our family of disciplines is and always has been rich with conceptual languages for the understanding and enhancement of learning.

A Way with Words – Creativity, Enterprise and the English Graduate The English Subject Centre is publishing a DVD demonstrating the creativity and enterprise of English graduates in establishing small businesses and freelance careers. The DVD is aimed at English undergraduates and profiles nine individuals currently working in the cultural and heritage sectors as script writers, film festival organisers, publishers and television producers. All nine are English graduates. The aim of the DVD is to encourage undergraduates to consider the possibility of working for themselves (as an alternative to a more conventional job) and to demonstrate that ‘eenterprise’ isn’t just about cash-flow projections and dot com companies, but can be a rewarding lifestyle for those keen to work in culture and heritage. If you would like a free copy of the DVD, please e-mail esc@rhul.ac.uk

1. On Knowing, Essays for the Left Hand (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press,1962). 14

Developing the Independent English Student Chris Hopkins, Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University, reports on the findings of a recent symposium and an associated Subject Centre project on the place of independent learning in English study. symposium held at Sheffield Hallam University on 14 October, 2004 provided a forum for university English teachers to discuss the current status of independent study as a key aspect of learning on undergraduate English degrees, and to think about how we might support English students in becoming increasingly independent learners during the course of their degrees. The symposium arose from the English Subject Centre funded small grant project ‘Developing the Independent English Student’ at Sheffield Hallam, led by myself and my colleague Dr Matthew Steggle. The symposium gave us a chance to report on our research into student perceptions of independent learning and to present the resources we have developed to encourage independent learning. It also allowed us to compare our experiences and understanding of independent learning with those of colleagues at other institutions and to hear presentations by two colleagues (both National Teaching Fellows) with real expertise on the topic: Dr Bill Hutchings from the University of Manchester, and Dr Pam Knights from Durham University.The programme for the day was made up of a presentation on our work at Sheffield Hallam, a hands-on workshop looking at the independent learning resources we produced, and presentations by Pam Knights on her use of virtual (and highly physical) learning environments to teach a course on Children’s Literature, and by Bill Hutchings on how he has used problem-based learning to teach eighteenth-century literature.The day ended with open discussion of current challenges to independent learning in English degrees and of what solutions there might be.

Our project suggested that there are grounds for considerable hope in terms of the openness of English students to the central importance of independent study in the subject, but also grounds for the need consciously to develop student ability and confidence in learning independently. Thus our conclusions about student perceptions of independent learning at Sheffield Hallam are, in some respects, very cheering, in that a decisive majority of students responding to questionnaires felt that they had become or were becoming increasingly independent learners during the course of their degrees, and that almost all felt they had gained much from independent study. Most respondents in the third year of study felt that the quality of their independent learning

had developed over each year of the degree. However, there was also significant mention in questionnaire responses of perceptions of substantial difficulties with independent study. Obstacles to independent study raised by students fell into three main groups: 1. Not being confident about how, or what, to study independently. 2. Other pressures on study time, especially having to take paid employment in order to sustain studies (or, anyway, lifestyle), and family responsibilities. 3. Lack of library resources / knowledge about how to find appropriate resources in the library or on the web. A number of student responses articulated a paradox which became central to the Sheffield Hallam project – that they needed more support to become independent learners. Thus several responses to the question: ‘what would help you do more independent learning?’ were ‘more help from tutors’. Though this kind of response might seem initially comic, and bound to upset anyone tempted by the Frank Furedi line on the ‘infantilisation’ of students, we concluded that this could be interpreted as a reasonable request for help with learning to learn. This student perception also accorded with the feelings of academic colleagues at Sheffield Hallam and elsewhere that students did not necessarily arrive in higher education with a very highly developed ability for, or understanding of, independent study as defined in the higher education context. When we first designed the project, we noted that on the BA English Studies degree at Sheffield Hallam, there were already specific modules aimed at developing independence at level four (first year undergraduate) and level six (third year undergraduate). At level four, the module ‘Introduction to English Studies’ seeks to support transition from A-level and access modes of study to the more independent kinds of approaches to study to which higher education aspires. At level six, the dissertation module, following tradition, allows students to select and research their own project, which may be a literature, language or creative writing task, and to carry it through with a relatively small amount of supervision.There was an evident progression in the level of independence required by these two modules, which is also echoed by other aspects of course design at levels four and six. However,

Developing the Independent English Student

though there were no doubt expectations that students would develop further independence at level five, there was little explicit indication to students of what form this might take. We therefore decided to concentrate on building some resources into level five which would enable students to build independence of a kind which bridged the gap between transition-to-HE and final-yeardissertation. We located these resources in two core modules, ‘Drama 1880-1960’ and ‘British Poetry 17801850’, while also trying to suggest links to other level five modules and to level four and six modules as well. From the outset we adopted certain principles in the design of the learning resources. Firstly, we did not in any way want directly to motivate their use through assessment, since this seemed entirely opposed to any true independence in learning (though we did alter assignment titles to make sure that there were opportunities to pursue directions which might be suggested by the independent learning materials). So, we did not, except for the purposes of evaluation, track whether individual students had used the resources, or make them in any way compulsory. Secondly, we chose topics which might have been touched on in lectures and seminars, but that were unlikely to have been developed in much depth. In this sense the independent learning resources were intended to constitute a kind of parallel curriculum to the one delivered: they linked to topics covered, but were deliberate sideways steps. For example, the learning resources associated with Ibsen’s The Doll’s House look at different translations of a scene, while the resource for O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock explores the geography of Dublin locations referred to in the play. Thirdly, we chose to construct our resources mainly through using existing web resources, and delivered it all through a VLE (Blackboard), though we still wrote a good deal of new material both to orientate students towards sometimes unfamiliar-seeming explorations and to suggest ways in which material might be linked together. This last principle was to make visible the constructed nature of literary interpretation so that students could see – or experience rather – that texts do not have ready-made meanings which can be scooped up: it is the job of critics to construct meanings from a variety of source materials, which may at times be conflicting: textual, linguistic, historical, geographical, performance history, previous

interpretations and so on. Students using the learning resources were given support and guidance in making their way through material, particularly in how to construct appropriate enquiries to pursue, but there were generally no model answers. For the Drama module we provided an independent learning resource for every play and author covered by the module, as well as a resource on the topic of ‘Realism and Naturalism’. For the poetry module, we did not achieve quite such thorough coverage (or have not yet . . .). In both cases, we designed resources which could each be used in their own right, but also designed the activities as a sequence, so that there was more support with resources associated with material studied early in the semester and an increasing level of independence and ambition with later material. We also tried to take a different kind of sideways step in each resource, making this explicit in our commentaries. By the end of the project we had ‘made’ sixteen resources for two modules, the flavour of which is given by the examples below: • Chekhov: Text and History: The Case of the Cherry Orchard • Synge: The Playboy of the Western World, Language and Irish Theatre • O'Casey: Juno and the Paycock and the History of Modern Ireland • Brecht: Brechtian Theatre (and its Stanislavskian Contrary) • Miller: Key Words in Death of a Salesman • Williams: from Page to Stage to Celluloid • Beckett: Bringing in Other Texts: Beckett and A Piece of Monologue Of course, the most important question is: did all this absorbing activity have any impact on students? Evaluation suggests there were a number of different ways in which students made use of the resources. Starting at the low impact end, some respondents said ‘what resources?’, while others gave the more sophisticated variation:‘These look as if they might have been really useful – I wish I’d known about them’ (the simple moral here is that explaining independent learning resources in the first three weeks of a module, is, somehow, never enough). Many students – a majority – did make use of the resources, but in quite varied ways. Some were regular users, logging on pretty much every week, though of these

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a smaller proportion actually attempted the interactive learning activities, rather than reading, as they sometimes put it ‘for the information given’. Quite a large number of respondents looked at the resources only when they began writing assessed essays and /or when they began revising for the exam. In this kind of use, the overall developmental sequence of the resources was, perhaps, lost, since the resources were used selectively. Still, overall, the resources did seem to support some study beyond routine preparation for contact hours, and we were able to see in some particular cases that original work had been done using resources or tools or levels of independent enquiry which stemmed from the independent learning resources. Bill Hutchings and Pam Knights in their presentations suggested that there are many and varied ways of encouraging English students to be more independent. While we had designed additional learning resources of a particular kind, Bill Hutchings’ problem-based learning in his third-year poetry options takes the almost opposite approach of providing nothing but a series of literary problems or enquiries.1 The students themselves have to work from the research question and formulate ways of approaching it, have to find out as a group what they need to find out and where they might find it, select what primary and secondary courses to use and so on - acting in short more like professional researchers than undergraduates. Pam Knights’ presentation began by thinking about how during the course of her teaching career forces of conformity and utilitarian values had transformed many of the discourses and expectations of what higher education is for and what the experience of being at university is. Her approach certainly does make

use of different kinds of assessment – particularly involving students on her children’s fiction course in working at schools and with children – but equally as striking is her practice of motivating independence through pleasure, through trying to break out of mechanically systematic, compulsory modes of learning. Thus her website for children’s fiction makes much use of links to current news stories and controversies, of writing and reading projects with local schools and so on (see http://www.dur.ac.uk/pam.knights/childfic/ to get the real atmosphere of this approach). Discussion among participants in the symposium suggested that there was a shared feeling that enabling students to become more independent in their approaches to, and conceptions of, studying English was central to university English, and that this is to an extent under threat. There was a shared sense that the current A-level experience and the general conditions of being a student in contemporary higher education do not always automatically promote the development of independence in students and that there is at times a mismatch between our expectations and those of at least some of our students. Most importantly, there was a shared sense that course design and shifting of expectations could be achieved through intervention by course teams or individual tutors. We hope further to develop insights gained from the day in our work in English at Sheffield Hallam and more broadly in our contribution to the university’s CETL (Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) for ‘Promoting Learner Autonomy’.2 Many thanks to the colleagues from the English subject community who participated in the symposium.

1. For a more detailed account, see Bill Hutchings and Karen O’Rourke, ‘Re-Writing Problem-based Learning for Literary Studies’, English Subject Centre Newsletter 2 (August 2001), pp. 12-13, available online at http://www.english.ltsn.ac.uk/explore/publications/newsletters/newsissue2/hutchings.htm 2. http://www.shu.ac.uk/cetl/autonomy/index.html 17

Two Types of Interdisciplinarity Jonathan Gibson, Academic Co-ordinator at the English Subject Centre, writes about the increasing emphasis in English courses on issues connected with space and place. A version of this article was delivered as a paper at a colloquium on ‘The Disciplinary Identity of Area Studies’ held in London on 29 November 2004 and organised by John Canning of the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. n this article, I want to look at two ways in which the concerns of higher education English link up with those of other disciplines: in terms of time (or, rather of time period: the Victorian Age, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages) and in terms of space and/or place.

The traditional framework for interdisciplinarity in English – and, indeed, the traditional framework for English Studies as a whole – is, of course, chronological. In most higher education institutions, English BA degrees are structured predominantly in terms of time period. Nowadays, few departments aim to make all undergraduates study literature from all periods. Nevertheless, a majority feature period courses, and my impression is that most (or, at least, very many) require students to do at least one pre-nineteenth-century period course. Why are time periods so important in English degrees? Well, for a start, this method of structuring things allows for considerable flexibility. It might appear, on the face of it, that periodicity would dictate a rather limited approach – an emphasis, perhaps, on literary history, on the relationships existing between literary texts of a given period and other texts from the same period. This is obviously true up to a point. But, at the same time, the period-based course is such a general – such a vague – way of linking disparate texts together that it provides openings for all sorts of more or less eccentric links between texts and between texts and the world – openings for all kinds of intertextuality and interdisciplinarity. In other words, the ordering of BA degrees by period allows the subject of English to retain its characteristically self-confident flexibility – its potential for free play. It is a framework that can be used simply to look at relationships between texts (literary and literary, literary and non-literary or – as is increasingly the case –

non-literary and non-literary). Or it can be used to take literary texts out into the social and physical world. This is an important advantage, I think – and I’d like to stress that in this article I won’t be trying to argue that this dependence on time periods should necessarily change. What I would like to highlight, though, is a shift that I think has recently been taking place in our subject – primarily at the research level, but increasingly entering teaching: a shift towards space and place as an interdisciplinary framework for English. Shortly before starting work on this paper, I had a quick look at the notice-boards at the English Subject Centre’s host institution, the English department at Royal Holloway, confident that I would come across conference announcements that I could use to illustrate the discipline’s current preoccupation with the relationship between literature and place (and space). I found two almost immediately. The first was a call for papers for a conference due to be held at the University of Greenwich this June called ‘The Metropolitan and Urban Imaginary’.1 The conference will ‘explore the different and complex ways in which literary texts inform and shape our perceptions of the city and the urban environment in the cities of China, the new Europe, the Americas, England post-devolution Wales and Scotland’. The second conference, held in Manchester in December 2004, focussed on a particular writer: its title was ‘Ford Madox Ford and Englishness’.2 According to the publicity material, Ford’s Englishness encompasses a variety of characters (both historical and imaginary), personalities, place-myths and classes. His life-long fascination with the Englishness of English, as expressed in his fairy stories, novels, poems, essays, regional studies, and the editorship of the English Review, will be explored in the conference. The topic coincides with a recent, post-devolution interest in a surviving, or reconsolidated Englishness. Great Britain may have lost its empire and a defined world role, but it is rediscovering ‘virtual’ Englishness; just as Ford was negotiating national ideas in his lifetime.

1. See http://www.gre.ac.uk/pr/pressreleases/Metropilitan.htm 2. The conference was organised by Professor Dennis Brown of the University of Hertfordshire. 18

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The ‘spatialisation’ of the curriculum is most visible in BA second and third year option courses and in MA modules. One obvious focus for this spatialisation is the area closest to the university in question: for example, London. At Queen Mary, the description for a course on ‘Dickens’s London’ tells students ‘You are advised to keep a map handy to clarify for yourslves the locations used in Dickens’s writings.’ One of the learning outcomes of this course states that ‘Students will have explored aspects of the social and physical geography of London in the nineteenth century’. Other option courses at Queen Mary with a ‘spatial’ emphasis (and a big ‘field trip’ element) include ‘Text, Art and Performance in London’, ‘an event-based course which examines the role of text in art, performance, installations, and public spaces in the city – specifically in London’ and ‘Representing London: the Eighteenth Century.’ Twenty percent of the mark for this latter course is taken up by the students’ walking journal.3 At King’s College, London, meanwhile there is an MA course on ‘The Twentieth-Century City: From Modernity to Postmodernity’. This course focuses on ‘a number of the most significant topics in urban cultural production of the twentieth century’, including ‘global corporatism, postcolonial otherness, urban textualities, dystopias, the city as history’ and ‘the shift from metropolis to ‘postmetropolis’’, looking at not just London but also New York and Los Angeles.4 The creeping ‘spatialisation’ of English is clearly linked to the work of postmodern geographers such as Edward W. Soja (looking back ultimately to Henri Lefebvre), though the extent to which English researchers situate themselves in this tradition varies. I would put this spatialising turn in English among the reactions to new historicism, the dominant paradigm of the 1990s – a very text-based form of ideological criticism against which many critics have

reacted by stressing physical contingencies of one sort or another: the body, the physical constraints on book production and consumption (the ‘history of the book’) and, of course, space. The point I want to stress about this ‘spatial’ framework for the interdisciplinarity of English is that per se it forces the the study of literature out into the physical world, and thus necessarily engages a whole set of issues that periodbased courses might (and often do) engage with, but that they needn’t necessarily. In other words, it looks outside the inter-relationship of written texts. The ‘spatialised’ curriculum of English can be subdivided into a number of different elements. Firstly, there’s the long-established link-up between English and the set of disciplines that have recently been gathered together under the umbrella term of ‘Area Studies’. Most English degrees contain courses on things like ‘American Literature’, ‘Irish Literature’, ‘Canadian Literature’ and so on, in an obvious overlap with Area Studies, and, indeed, some English departments are institutionally merged with departments of American Studies. In Scotland, the study of English literature is balanced with the study of Scottish literature: students can in some institutions do degrees in English literature, Scottish literature or English and Scottish Literature. Courses on the literature of an area, as part of English degrees, often open up into wider study of the ‘area’ in question.5 Arguably, as Dick Ellis has suggested, English is itself an Area Study. According to Ellis, English’s problem is that it does not recognise itself as an Area Study. The fact that English is an Area Study too, albeit, as taught at present, a culture-bound one (and still, mostly, a high-culture-bound one) remains hidden. English literary culture and its supports and ramifications are,

3. Details of all three courses are available on the Queen Mary website: http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/converted%20pdf/2004_05/Dickens.pdf http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/converted%20pdf/2004_05/TAP.pdf http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/converted%20pdf/2004_05/RepLon.pdf 4. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/english/PG1/C20/city.html 5. The English Subject Centre is holding an event on ‘Teaching Scottish and Irish Literature’ at the University of Manchester on 21 October, 2005. For further details see the Events Calendar on p. 4 of this newsletter. 6. R.J. Ellis, ‘Decentering Area Studies’, available online on the website of the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies at http://www.lang.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/paper.aspx?resourceid=2171 19

Two Types of Interdisciplinarity

sometimes, instead, supposed to make English sufficient unto itself, and no sense of English as an area study need exist.6 Ellis, of course, deplores this situation. Perhaps the developments I am pointing to in this article are the stirrings of self-consciousness about English’s status as a sort of Area Study. Where I’d differ from Ellis, I think, is in seeking to stress that this is something which is and should be just one dimension in English Studies. Two other elements in the ‘spatialised’ English curriculum deal with the crossing of spatial boundaries: travel writing and post-colonialism. I won’t say a great deal about them, as their significance for the argument of this article is self-evident. Travel writing is a flourishing subdiscipline with a national centre – the Centre for Travel Writing Studies at Nottingham Trent University – and a journal founded in 1997, Studies in Travel Writing. The Centre’s Director, Tim Youngs, argues that ‘Without travel narratives there would be no Canterbury Tales, Divine Comedy, The Tempest, Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, The Ancient Mariner, Don Juan Moby Dick or Ulysses.’7 Post-colonialism is of course very well-established as a category of literary analysis and there are many courses in English departments with this specialised form of Area Studies emphasis.All I’d like to say about it here is that my perception is that, increasingly, post-colonial studies are being structured (in both research and teaching) area by area, region by region, with fewer totalising courses in just (say) ‘Post-Colonial Literatures in English’. Eco-criticism, which has been described as the work of scholars ‘who would rather be hiking’, is an area of English Studies more important in the US than here, but nevertheless making inroads. Eco-criticism focuses on ‘the way in which nature is represented in literature’, on the ‘interconnectedness between nature and culture’ and ‘cultural representations of relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world’. Central to it is the analysis of space and place.

The interdisciplinary links of eco-criticism are profoundly different from those usually found in English Studies. In the States, graduate students in Literature and Environment – according to the ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature in Literature and the Environment) graduate handbook – ‘take classes in geology, geography, ecology and biology’.According to the American eco-critic Michael P. Cohen, the idea is ‘Not that we should think like scientists (or economists or game theoreticians) but that we should know how they think’.8 As I said earlier, I am not arguing that English Studies needs further ‘spatialisation’ – that (say) space should begin to replace time period as the structural basis for most English degrees. But I do want to end by suggesting that the ‘spatialised’ area of the curriculum I’ve been talking about has two particular types of potential. First, there’s clearly the potential to forge a whole new set of interdisciplinary links between English and other subjects, such as Geography, Environmental Science, Economics and Area Studies. These links don’t at the moment extend far beyond the research level – but there’s considerable potential for pedagogic development here. Secondly, it’s clear that the developments in English Studies that I’ve been discussing in this article can, potentially, be used to tick lots of currently significant boxes. Emphasis on issues of space and place can open up a wide range of interesting and intellectually stimulating ways for our discipline to respond to important themes (and pressures) such as employability, widening participation, the need to encourage a variety of learning styles and so on. The Subject Centre’s forthcoming work on Education for Sustainable Development, discussed by Jane Gawthrope on p. 36 of this newsletter, is just one of the ways in which the ‘spatialisation’of English can be taken forward.

7.Tim Youngs, ‘The Importance of Travel Writing’, The European English Messenger 12.2 (2004), pp. 55-62 (p. 57).The Centre for Travel Writing Studies is holding an international conference in Hong Kong in July 2005: see http://english.ntu.ac.uk/centrefortravelwriting/ 8. Michael P. Cohen, ‘Blues in the Green: Ecocriticism under Critique’, Environmental History 9.1 (January 2004), pp. 9-36, available online at http://www.asle.umn.edu/archive/intro/cohen.html; ASLE Graduate Handbook (http://www.asle.umn.edu/pubs/handbook/handbook.html). 20

News and Reports Current Subject Centre Mini-Projects The Subject Centre delivers much of its programme through a series of projects, including ‘mini-projects’ based in English departments and funded directly by the Subject Centre. Each project receives a maximum of £5,000. Current mini-projects, which started in autumn 2004, are listed below.We expect to announce later this month another set of projects starting in autumn 2005. For more information about the Subject Centre’s http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/projects/index.php.

First Year Curricula in English Undergraduate Programmes The purpose of this project is to propose a model, with a rationale for its adoption, for a first-year curriculum in English undergraduate programmes. First-year curricula are particularly important to universities for several reasons. Whereas the ‘traditional’ first-year programme of study is to acculturate students to the study of established or canonical disciplines, the contemporary curriculum has to fulfil broader functions: because of the different backgrounds of the students that universities increasingly recruit, because of diversifying aims of English programmes at universities, because of the nature of the teaching-learning environment and because of the need to actively recruit as opposed to selecting students. English programmes in contemporary universities thus have to offer an attractive curriculum to recruit students and have to take a more fundamental view of ‘preparation’ and a more proactive attitude to ‘support’ in order to ensure the retention and progression of students through the degree programme. This mini-project will survey current practice amongst a range of universities, and build upon current strengths in the English department at Derby University, to explore a range of strategies for first year curricula and assess their effectiveness against such criteria as subject benchmarks and student survey questionnaires. Project Leader: David Ellis Department of English University of Derby Telephone: 01332 591347 Email: d.ellis@derby.ac.uk

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Teaching metrics using EVS (electronic voting system) handsets This project is a pilot scheme for developing possible uses of electronic voting system (EVS) handsets in English Literature lectures. Handsets have proved a very effective teaching aid in large-group contexts in other disciplines, but their use has not yet been explored in literary pedagogy. The handsets allow students to participate directly, anonymously and interactively in lectures by answering multiple-choice questions on the lecture material, seeing how their own understanding of the material compares with that of their peers, and registering reflections on their learning experience. In turn, the lecturer can alter his/her teaching immediately based on the students’ responses to questions, which can range from basic and factual to sophisticated and designed to initiate discussion.This initial project will use the topic of metrical analysis to open an investigation of the potential of handset use in large-group teaching. The topic is often perceived by students as difficult and anxiety-inducing; by introducing a novel, interactive and anonymous method of engaging with the material and undergoing rapid formative assessment, students will be encouraged to develop confidence and expertise. Metrical analysis, which begins with learning simple, objective information and progresses to interpretative activities, is particularly suited to teaching using this innovative medium. Project Leader: Alice Jenkins Department of English Literature University of Glasgow Telephone: 0141 330 5296 Email: a.jenkins@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Current Subject Centre Mini-Projects

Web-based resources for teaching, research and general use, on Robert Bloomfield and Thomas Chatterton The project will develop web-based resources on the less well-known Romantic poets Robert Bloomfield and Thomas Chatterton. This material will be useful as a source of postgraduate research and general information, but its primary focus will be on creating a resource for teaching, particularly at undergraduate and sixth-form level.The current websites at Nottingham Trent University will be developed further to provide a valuable teaching resource and to make them useful and accessible to students.The intention is also to reach a wider audience, and the site will be designed to encourage such participation. It will also include more advanced material of interest to postgraduates and specialist scholars, creating a dynamic link between university research and learning possibilities at all levels.The site will be developed in consultation with appropriate disability support agencies such as the RNIB to maximise compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act (2004) and make the site as friendly as possible for disabled users.

Teaching the contemporary: fiction Contemporary fiction is a growing area in literary and cultural studies, but often taught in an ad hoc fashion without necessarily responding to the availability of support materials which hampers student work and intellectual development. This project is intended to review such teaching of contemporary fiction in academic English (and affiliate) departments by considering a range of issues, including exactly what literary and theoretical texts are taught and on what courses, and additionally assess the use and availability of different kinds of supplementary literary-critical support materials.This will be achieved through an empirical study by conducting semi-structured interviews with academics offering such courses and also from material submitted via the web by practitioners. Project Leaders: Dr. Mark Addis and Dr. Philip Tew School of English University of Central England in Birmingham Telephone: 0121 331 5613/ 5470 Email: Mark.addis@uce.ac.uk; Philip.tew@uce.ac.uk

Project Leader: Professor John Goodridge Arts, Communications and Culture Nottingham Trent University Telephone: 0115-8483375 Email: john.goodridge@ntu.ac.uk

But what do you do all day?

Pilot online writing resource

Secondary school pupils find it difficult to imagine what a day spent reading and notetaking might be like, as shown by their naive and worried questions at HE fairs and open days.Their transition to university would be eased, and our recruitment and retention levels increased, if they were able to shadow an undergraduate through the work side of the day. There are plenty of films showing the social side of university (indeed, we've all coped with tutees with the Brideshead syndrome), none showing what we do nine to five. This project will produce a DVD and video-clip of a typical student's working day, which could be attached to the Subject Centre website for use by admissions tutors in all English departments.

The trAce website went live in 1997 and is a substantial collection of original new media writing. It has been selected for archiving by The British Library as one of the UKâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 100 most nationally significant websites in terms of innovation, culture and research. This pilot project will select and contextualise key materials from within the site to create a portal for higher education teachers and researchers working with online writing, and will make recommendations for development of the project beyond the pilot stage. Content will be selected after extensive consultation with English staff in the partner institutions to ensure that it is appropriately integrated into existing curriculum. Special attention will be paid to the needs of staff who are unfamiliar with new media. Some materials will be downloadable, others web-based.

Project Leader: Dr. Ceri Sullivan Department of English University of Wales Bangor Telephone: 01248-382102 Email: els047@bangor.ac.uk

Project Leader: Helen Whitehead School of Arts, Communication and Culture Nottingham Trent University Tel: 0115 848 6360 Email: Helen.tew@ntu.ac.uk

The First-Year Experience of English Ben Knights, Subject Centre Director, reports on a one-day Subject Centre workshop hosted by the Bristol English Department on 28 January 2005.

his day event stemmed from the recognition that in the higher education English community the first year has become a matter of widespread concern. Colleagues are acutely conscious of how much there is to achieve within what has come to be widely seen as a foundation year. The Subject Centre is aware that many are worried about a group of related issues: a perceived lack of student preparedness for studying at university level – perhaps as a result of the training they have received for school assessment regimes and specifically under ‘Curriculum 2000’; signs of increasing dependence on being given notes; exaggerated expectations of teaching hours and support; an unwillingness to read beyond the syllabus (or even within the syllabus) going with a strategic approach to learning and a lack of intellectual curiosity or risk-taking which risks making nonsense of institutional ambitions to create ‘autonomous learners’. Too many of the 18 year-old cohort (it was reiterated during the day) are ‘assessment-led’, and simultaneously lack both wide reading and the patience for reading in depth. There is a feeling abroad that these are not simply widening participation issues – or, alternatively, a grumpy recycling of complaints lecturers have made over the years. In some institutions there are associated worries about student retention, and there is in any case extensive apprehension that all the problems sketched above will intensify as the era of ‘variable fees’ confirms the emergent identity of students (and their increasingly vocal parents) as consumers. At one and the same time, many departments, responding to the pressures of oncoming research assessment, have delegated major portions of their first year teaching to visiting lecturers or postgraduate part-time teachers. The day was organised so as to explore some of the pressing questions which arise from this situation, questions, for example, to do with the substance of the curriculum, with the pacing and structure of assessment, with how to foster dialogue within seminar groups and establish norms of self-managed study, with the nature and resourcing of support and tutorial systems, and with how to support and mentor colleagues on fractional or hourlypaid contracts. Twenty colleagues from a number of different universities attended the day, and packed a vigorous discussion into the time available. While the event was

more in the nature of a colloquium, short presentations were given by Gary Snapper (Institute of Education and former Head of English at Impington Village College) on the impact of Curriculum 2000, and by Peter Childs (University of Gloucestershire and National Teaching Fellow) on models for the first year curriculum. Gary drew attention in particular to the effects of unitisation and Assessment Objectives on the experience of A-level, but also reminded us of long-standing features of A-level pedagogy. Peter gave examples of curricula which sought to represent a variety of periods and kinds of discourse. Areas raised in discussion included: • The need to treat the narrative from AS to level 2 holistically. • Hospitality to strangers: when and how you pace the giving of information. • Academic literacy: integrated or added? • Strategically planned curricula: is planning still dominated by habit rather than attention to student needs? • Collaboration between personal tutor systems and other university agencies (counsellors, librarians, careers, ICT). • Ways of modelling self-managed learning – taking responsibility for the contexts of teaching. • Who represents the interests of Level 1 within the staff team? • The complaint that the litany of ‘transferable skills’ is not actually helping students make connections even between modules and years at university. As always, much of the denseness and richness of the discussion eludes capture in a short report. Naturally, there were disagreements: some were most struck by students’ lack of an abstract conceptual language, others by how poor so many were as close readers. Nevertheless, allowing for the variety of individual institutional circumstances, certain pointers for wider investigation and development emerged.These included: • The need for locally specific knowledge about student working hours.

The First-Year Experience of English

• The need to address the isolation of those who only come onto campus for specific hours. • The need to improve the level of dialogue between A-level and higher education teachers over essays, feedback and the curriculum more broadly. • Sensitivity to the culture shock experienced by students entering university. • Giving thought to enabling learning communities to form (we cannot just assume that a student group knows how to learn together). • Preparing for the effects of ‘variable’ fees on the teaching relationship. • The possibility of exercising an ‘equal and opposite force’ to the cultural and economic pressures experienced by students. • Conversely, the possibility of tapping their energies, enthusiasms and diverse learning styles; or building on their knowledge of cultural production and consumption.

• The need for departments to think through what they themselves regard as central: period? genre? context? survey courses designed to compensate for A-level students’ atomised knowledge of texts? • Demonstrating the courage to make intellectual leaps or to set off into the dark. • Recognition of the social and intellectual merits of the lecture as a form. • Recognition of the difficulty of the seminar and the imperative to prepare content through the prism of learning. • Can current pastoral systems substitute for the passing of one-to-one contact in mitigating the shock of the first year? In this context, readers’ attention is also drawn to the latest English Subject Centre Report, Andrew Green’s Four Perspectives on Transition (Report No. 10) and its appendix by Adrian Barlow (see p. 40 in this newsletter).

Two New Reports from the English Subject Centre: Living Writers in the Curriculum: a Good Practice Guide, edited by Vicki Bertram and Andrew Maunder, March 2005. This guide examines the demands and benefits of living writers in the curriculum. As well as discussion of pedagogical and curriculum issues, it contains practical tips and an account by a writer of her experience of university teaching, as well as invaluable legal guidance on copyright as it relates to contemporary literature. Colleagues planning new courses or writers’ visits will find this guide helpful, as will those who have been working with living writers for some time already. Four Perspectives on Transition: English Literature from Sixth Form to University by Andrew Green, February 2005. This report offers an insight into the complex and problematic issue of transition from sixth form to higher education English. It explores the extent to which a gulf exists in the pedagogy of the discipline at the two levels, and the implications of this for the experiences and expectations of school students, university students and their teachers.This report is of interest to anyone teaching English at university level; especially to those with responsibility for level one students and retention issues. Both reports are available as PDFs on our website at: http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/reports.php. Please email esc@rhul.ac.uk if you would like a printed copy.

Teaching Victorian Fiction Andrew Maunder, Subject Leader for English Literature in the School of Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire and Academic Co-ordinator for the English Subject Centre, describes a recent Subject Centre event on an important area of the curriculum.

ne of the most popular areas of the undergraduate curriculum is Victorian fiction, taught on first-year introductory modules, second-year period or genre courses and on final-year special option courses.Yet at a time when many students struggle to keep up reading assignments because of the demands of part-time work, or of the difficulty in juggling four different literature modules, it is often the long Victorian three-decker – the `baggy monsters’ as Henry James famously labelled them – which are put aside. This event, held at Woburn House, London on 4 February and attended by 30 delegates, was an attempt to assess some of the challenges facing teachers in delivering Victorian courses in 2005. Amongst the questions considered were: • What do we teach when we teach the Victorian novel? • Where on English Literature programmes do we teach the Victorian novel? • What do we want students to know about the literary, cultural and historical contexts of Victorian literature? • What imaginative strategies can develop a more intense engagement with long novels? • What role might the short story play on Victorian fiction courses? • How might the teaching of Victorian texts and narratives be enhanced via the integration of film and television adaptations? • How might Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) be used in Victorian modules? The event also aimed to address the changing nature of the Victorian fictional canon and how what is taught might reflect this. When English Departments in the 60s, 70s and even 80s relied on traditional readings of the canon – prompted perhaps by F. R. Leavis’s statement in The Great Tradition that `The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad' (p. 9) – there was at least some broad agreement about what students might read. Since then our picture of the Victorian novel has been broken up and the resurgence of

interest in ‘lost’ women writers and in different genres – sensation, horror, `New Women’ – has helped ensure that consensus is much less possible. Whilst delegates agreed that this was a healthy development, they also recognised that it posed challenges about how a 12-week module might be structured. How do you fit it all in? As delegates noted, the choices teachers make in departments about the place of particular novels in the degree programme and the selection of texts and anthologies affect the picture of Victorian literary history that students are invited to engage with. In the opening session, Elizabeth Jay (Oxford Brookes) and Maureen Moran (Brunel) chaired discussions on the role of ‘context’ in the teaching of Victorian fiction. For students who are approaching university with little or no prior knowledge of the period, the cultural concerns, ideological reference points and generic conventions utilised by Victorian novelists may be unclear.The period is one that invites cliché (particularly where women’s roles are concerned) and delegates asked themselves whether their own lectures encouraged this. The groups tackled a range of questions: • What contextual material do we want students to know? • How do we encourage them to learn it? • Do we, in fact, want them to know anything? • Might the much complained-of lack of contextual knowledge be viewed as an opportunity, since it forces students to start to rely more on their own close textual reading skills and judgements? One suggestion was that rather than trying to give students potted history lessons, it is the assessment component which can go some way to refining students’ ideas about Victorian contexts – those instances, for example, where students are required to read contemporary documents alongside fictional texts as part of a close-reading exercise. The following session led by Dr Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow) addressed issues surrounding VLEs and the ways in which these could be used to expand the class discussion outside the seminar room. Using a third year option

Teaching Victorian Fiction

module on Victorian Popular Fiction as a case study, Dr Jenkins described how the use of the VLE worked most effectively as a supplement to classroom provision rather than as a substitute for it.

Finally, delegates were asked to consider which single text they would always try to include on a Victorian fiction module because it inevitably provoked fruitful discussion. The top three choices were as follows:

Afternoon sessions focused on a range of curriculum issues. Valerie Sanders led a discussion on the teaching of long novels, an aspect of the Victorian novel which provided considerable challenges for students and teachers, due in part to the financial demands which required students to take part-time jobs, and the sense on the part of teachers that they need to cover a broad and various selection of material over the 12-week semester. Martin Willis led a discussion on the short story and the ways in which this genre might be used to give students a sense in microcosm of some key Victorians concerns, as well as encouraging close reading and renewed sensitivity to structure and language. Simon Dentith chaired a discussion on the ways in which 21st-century students sometimes impose their own conceptions of identity and selfhood on their readings of Victorian novels and debated some of the strategies for overcoming this. In the final session, Terry Wright outlined ways in which film and TV adaptations of Victorian novels might be used on Victorian fiction courses. Taking screen versions of Middlemarch and Tess of the D’Urbervilles he demonstrated how getting students to consider different media could be a way of making them reflect on how narrative functions in a range of Victorian texts as well as of introducing them to a range of narrative theories.

1. Middlemarch

Royal Holloway, University of London Archives 26

2. Jane Eyre 3. David Copperfield Other votes were cast for The Woodlanders, Mary Barton, North and South, Shirley, The Woman in White, Miss Marjoribanks, Wuthering Heights, Bleak House and The Small House at Allington. Delegates were also asked to say which novel they would not teach. The list of blackballed texts included: Dracula (‘over-rated’), Hard Times, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, Armadale (‘takes too long to say too little’), Marius the Epicurean and The Way of All Flesh (‘reinforces stereotypical views of the Victorians’). Overall the day’s discussions suggest that there is considerable interest in thinking about the challenges of teaching Victorian fiction, in particular how teachers introduce students to it and what they want students to be able to do with it. As the feedback from delegates suggested, these are discussions which are ongoing and which might usefully be continued at a later date.

Teaching Holocaust Writing and Film Robert Eaglestone, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London, writes about an English Subject Centre event held on 18-19 February 2005.

s one of the delegates pointed out, talking about Holocaust survivors as a resource was at the very least in bad taste, and probably morally dubious. She was right: carried away by the conversation on teaching Holocaust literature and film, the conference had slipped into pedagogy jargon (‘What resources can we use?’ ‘Visits by survivors are extremely moving’) before reflecting on what the wider connotations and meaning of the word. This sort of issue underlies many of the problems in teaching this subject, and adds an extra layer of complexity to an already difficult field. This conference, organised by Nicola King (University of West of England), Sue Vice (University of Sheffield) and myself, aimed to focus on exactly these involved and uncomfortable areas, which are often informally discussed but rarely reflected on more rigorously. The demand for this event was reflected in the rapid growth of the conference at the planning stage – from an intended one-day event to a two-day event with nearly 50 delegates. As the Subject Centre’s 2003 survey of the English curriculum showed1, supporting anecdotal evidence, there has been a rapid growth in courses on Holocaust Literature and Film in English departments, and of the use of these sorts of texts on other courses. Moreover, as the interdisciplinary research culture in Holocaust Studies bears out, there is a growth in this field right across the arts and humanities: in history, of course, but also in modern languages, cultural studies, media studies, geography and in what are (to us) remoter areas (nursing, the medical humanities, tourism). Our conference, while focussed on the teaching of literature and film, drew on this growth. Many of the issues that arose repeatedly during the conference are common to all areas of English and film studies: how to fit all these texts, theories and ideas into a term-long course; how much and what sort of extra reading to recommend; the role of ‘theory’.The discussion returned several time to the issue of ‘how much history do we teach our students?’: the answer was either not enough or too much.2 However, there was a strong feeling

that the literary and film texts that came from or reflected on these events were doing something much more than teaching ‘history’ by another means and that these texts stood in their own right as important artistic events, rather than as illustrations to a historical narrative. Some issues were more specific. There was also some concern that we, as teachers, were too squeamish. One odd phenomenon that I have noticed in myself while researching in this area – and I am secretly glad that others shared this – is that the more I study the Holocaust, the more squeamish and upset I get when I come across an account of some atrocity, rather than becoming (as I had originally thought I might) calloused and hardened to descriptions of mass death and suffering. This same feeling led people to self-censor when teaching, and there was some discussion over whether this was the right thing to do. It is clear that the ‘empathic unsettlement’ that scholars such as Dominick LaCapra have noted in reading or viewing Holocaust texts is also present in the experience of teaching and being taught the subject. One of the many positive things about this field that emerged was that the level of student commitment was in general felt to be extremely high: students who opted for these courses invested a great deal of time and energy into them. Conversely, this commitment sometimes led to issues of identity and identity politics over a whole gamut of identifications (Jewish, British, Israeli, German, European, American) erupting with great and often disturbing force in the seminar room. Another part of the conversation concerned how teaching Holocaust texts ‘spun off ’ into courses and debates over memory and trauma, other literatures and issues of colonialism and slavery.There was also a discussion over the growth of a canon of Holocaust texts (see the appendix). I noticed with some interest how many of the conversations and papers circled around (what used to be called) ‘binary oppositions’: do we?/should we?; silence/speech; history/fiction; literary/non-literary; testimony/fiction; perpetrators/victims; isolating Holocaust studies/locating it in the mainstream; affect/rigor ;

1. Halcrow Group Limited, with Jane Gawthrope and Philip Martin, Survey of the English Curriculum and Teaching in UK Higher Education (English Subject Centre, 2003), available online at: http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/reports.php 2. Cf. Philip Martin’s article, ‘With or Without? Is there any History in this Class?’, English Subject Centre Newsletter 7 (November 2004), 18-21, available online at: http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/index.php 27

Teaching Holocaust Writing and Film

appropriate/inappropriate; scholarship/respect for the dead or memory. Many of these reflect research or debates in the field (the last one mentioned, for example, has been the focus of a series of acrimonious debates between historians, curators and others). But, as one delegate pointed out, to see them as oppositions is a mistake: perhaps they are in a dialectical process, awaiting working through as research and reflection on Holocaust pedagogy develops and deepens. This event, in the UK at least, may have played an important part in this process.

Appendix: A Holocaust Literature and Film Canon? The conference also put together a very rough indicative list of ‘canonical texts’ – those that were most often taught in these courses. In literature, extremely popular were Primo Levi, If this is a Man; Elie Wiesel, Night; Art Speigelman, Maus. Many also taught the following: Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved; Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After; Anne Frank, Diary; George Perec, W; Paul Celan; Tadeusz Borowski, This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen; Anne Karpf, The War After; W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz; Robert Harris Fatherland; Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces. There were a few teaching these texts: Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead; Anita Broonker, The Latecomers; Zofia Nalkowska, Medallions; Sara NombergPrzytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales; Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl; Stephan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair; ‘Benjamin Wilkomiriski’, Fragments; Eva Figes, Child of War; Jorge Semprum, Literature or Life? Ida Fink, Stories; Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated; Sylvia Plath; Geoffrey Hill; Kindertransport poets. One thing that was a bit odd about this list was the omission of several well-known novels and accounts such as Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow, and D. M.Thomas’s The White Hotel. Perhaps their time has passed. For films, the four most central were (perhaps predictably); Schindler’s List; Shoah; Night and Fog and Life is Beautiful. Others that were taught were Sophie’s Choice; The Pawnbroker; Memorandum; Landscape After the Battle; Human Remains; The Believer and the BBC documentary, The Liberation of Belsen.

Museums and curating also play a part in pedagogy, and again there was a ‘canon’. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Beth Shalom were mentioned, as was the new Jewish Museum in Berlin. There was also much (justifiable) praise for the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust exhibition, which seems to be an underused resource for Holocaust literature and film teaching. Despite the discussion of history, relatively few historians were actually considered ‘canonical’ or taught on literature courses: Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (certainly canonical among Holocaust Historians), Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men and Michael Marrus’s The Holocaust in History all got one or two mentions: but clearly, these are not widely taught. (This itself is interesting because among historians, there has been for many years a lively – and effectively literarycritical – debate over the language used to discuss the Holocaust). Among critics, the leading figures were James Young, Dominick Lacapra, Sue Vice, Shoshona Felman, Cathy Caruth and Peter Novik, whose cultural history of the ‘history of the Holocaust’, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, caused a stir a few years ago. Again, noticeable absences from this list were Lawrence Langer and Des Pres’s The Survivor, possibly the first book in this field. Again, this shows, perhaps, how much interest there is in this area, and how the field is developing. Among philosophers and theologians, selections were used from a range of the following: Hannah Arendt, Theodore Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Emil Fackenheim, Zygmunt Bauman, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-François Lyotard. There was praise for the new reader, The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg for Edinburgh University Press.

Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning CETLs – ‘Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning’ – are the result of a major HEFCE initiative designed to raise the profile of learning and teaching across higher education. Each CETL will receive recurrent funding ranging from £200,000 to £500,000 per annum for five years, and a capital sum ranging from £0.8 million to £2 million. The CETL programme constitutes HEFCE's largest ever single funding initiative in teaching and learning with 74 successful bids. (A separate, but similar scheme operates in Northen Irelend.) English colleagues are involved in a number of CETLs and those with a particularly strong inflection in our area are listed below.The English Subject Centre looks forward to working with all the successful teams. More information may be found at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/tinits/cetl/.

ArtsWork: Learning Labs Bath Spa University College Bath Spa's ArtsWork CETL will define new models of arts education, allowing students to explore innovative ways of learning and teaching so that they can enter the creative industries with a portfolio of skills and completed projects that have been shaped, developed and assessed in the context of the marketplace.The CETL will involve students in Graphic Interactive Multimedia, Commercial Music and Creative Music Technology, Creative Writing, Fashion, Performing Arts, and English.ArtsWork will consist of six highspecification learning laboratories where students will work with high-quality practitioner staff to create learning outcomes and opportunities that are valued creatively and commercially. www.bathspa.ac.uk/departments/artswork/ Contact: Professor Neil Sammells n.sammells@bathspa.ac.uk

The Capital Centre (Creativity And Performance In Teaching And Learning) University of Warwick The Capital Centre (Creativity And Performance In Teaching And Learning) will bring the expertise of the Royal Shakespeare Company – the world’s largest classical theatre company – to the higher education community. It will offer a unique interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning by creating a shared space for academics, teachers and students, and practitioners, writers and actors to inform each other’s work. The key idea behind the centre is that making theatre through ‘the rehearsal room experience’ offers a model for great teaching, relying as it does on the arts of imagining other minds, role-play and improvisation, trust and teamwork and discovery through the creative process. www.warwick.ac.uk/go/capital Contact: Professor Jonathan Bate j.bate@warwick.ac.uk

C4C: Collaborating for Creativity York St John College C4C at York St John College will build on existing excellent practice in English and Theatre Studies to offer learners an enriched curriculum for the arts delivered through collaborative projects with real-world partners. Students, staff and partners will work together in an exciting new centre which will include a Showcase Studio with lighting, sound and provision for public performance and exhibition; workshops for collaborative learning; reception area, meeting rooms, new media workshop, audio and video recording facilities. A resource bank of learning materials will be made available to other institutions. Contact: Jenny Grainger j.grainger@yorksj.ac.uk

Student Writing Centre: St Mary’s University College, Belfast For the past four years, the Writing Centre at St Mary’s University College, Belfast has offered tuition in academic writing across all the disciplines to its students in the form of seminars on writing, individualised tutoring by members of staff and peer tutoring by trained student tutors. Our CETL is looking to discuss best practice with UK and Irish universities that have a current provision for the teaching of writing to their students or are interested in offering such a provision in the future. Contact: Matthew Martin or Jonathan Worley m.j.martin@stmarys-belfast.ac.uk or j.worley@stmarys-belfast.ac.uk

Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

The Centre for Employability Through the Humanities (CETH) University of Central Lancashire The CETL will build on UCLAN’s experience of developing employability in humanities students through active learning. It will be akin to a teaching hospital, with employability being nurtured alongside and intertwined with the theoretical and academic content offered in traditional programmes to lead a transformation in the teaching of humanities in the UK. Students will study new modules based in Realistic Work Environments including exhibition space, a theatre and a media/publishing house, so gaining practical experience within the curriculum. An incubator unit for knowledge exchange in the humanities will be created to support recent graduates starting out in business.

Centre for Promoting Learner Autonomy Sheffield Hallam University The CETL will build on work in several subject disciplines which have developed significant ways of promoting students as autonomous learners through transformative models of autonomy. It will draw on innovative pedagogies, learning processes and learning environments.The CETL will promote learning through diverse activities including peer tutoring, student-led conferences, student-led assessment, simulations and internationalising student activity. New opportunities for learning will be created through digital media. Students will have the opportunity to engage with other students nationally and internationally through partner arrangements already developed by centre staff including work with the Higher Education Academy.

www.uclan.ac.uk/ceth Contact: David Bagley dbagley@uclan.ac.uk

Contact: Professor Anthony Rosie A.J.Rosie@shu.ac.uk

Centre for Excellence in Assessment for Learning University of Northumbria at Newcastle

Centre for Career Management Skills (CCMS) University of Reading

The CETL will accelerate a transformation in assessment, building on excellent practice in Education, Childhood Studies, History, English, Psychology and Engineering. Northumbria’s approach to Assessment for Learning means that students will benefit from assessment which does far more than simply test what they know. They will take part in activities that are valuable long term, help them to develop and provide them with guidance and feedback and they will learn how to assess themselves as future professionals. There are plans to embed Assessment for Learning across the university and to share experience with colleagues across the higher education sector.

Employability is a key issue for today’s graduates.The Centre for Career Management Skills will build on the career management skills programme the university has run since 2002.Academics, careers staff and employers use lectures and online materials to develop students’ career management skills. These award-winning materials are used in around 60 higher education institutions. The centre will support a network of HEIs in developing career management skills. Reading’s existing material will be used as the cornerstone of a ‘learning ladder’ web-site. This will support students from foundation to postgraduate degree level courses to manage career transitions throughout their higher education experience.

www.northumbria.ac.uk/cetl_afl Contact: Liz McDowell liz.mcdowell@unn.ac.uk

www.rdg.ac.uk/ccms/ Contact: David Stanbury d.r.stanbury@reading.ac.uk

Thinking Outside the Box: English, Film and New Media Lesley Coote, University of Hull, reports on a recent Subject Centre event. ‘

hinking Outside the Box’ was held in the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, on 18 March 2005. The event, jointly sponsored by the English Subject Centre and the university’s Centre for Learning Development (CLD), was organised by Brett Lucas, the Subject Centre’s Learning Technologist, and Dr Lesley Coote, of the Department of Humanities at Hull. Besides being a lecturer in English and Film Studies, Lesley is also an Associate of the CLD, and a University Teaching Fellow. The subject of the day, using ‘new media’ and film in the teaching of English literature, forms part of the remit of her teaching fellowship. One of the main objectives of the day was to bring together a variety of practitioners, drawn from higher, further and secondary education, with an interest in using the opportunities presented by technological innovation to develop the learning and teaching experience in their subject. This was, in fact, what happened; the attendance was almost equally split between local teachers, lecturers from Hull, and higher education staff from around the country. It is extremely important that links are built between different sectors of post-16 education, as practitioners in all of these areas have much to give to one another, so time was allowed for ‘networking’. The interstices between the organised parts of the event proved both valuable and enjoyable. The other main objective was inspiration. To this end, speakers from Hull were joined by others from around the country, in order to demonstrate the ways in which they are using ‘new media’, such as digitised materials, and technologies such as virtual learning environments (VLEs) and film, to enhance the learning experience for English literature students. After a filmed introduction and welcome by Ben Knights, Subject Centre Director, the speakers informed, inspired, and entertained their audience as follows: • Stuart Lee (University of Oxford) introduced ideas and methodologies for teaching the structure of poetry using film, using film for discussion and the challenging of perceptions, and as a way of deploying students’ tacit knowledge to help them understand the unfamiliar.

• Kevin Burden and Theo Keuchel (University of Hull) spoke about the motivational aspects of digitised material, the production of scripts and storyboards in the making of films, and making interactive presentations using concept maps. • Gweno Williams (College of St John, York and Ripon) introduced a new DVD compiled by her students, partly funded by her National Teaching Fellowship award. Gweno discussed the issues involved in students and/or teachers producing their own media, and the formats used. • Beth Swan (University College, Chester) demonstrated her Dracula course, which is centred on the creative use of a VLE. She introduced some of the issues involved in the compilation and delivery of such a course, along with the benefits accruing to students, copyright and licensing issues. • Duco van Oostrum (University of Sheffield) also uses a VLE, in the teaching of contemporary American literature. Duco introduced several aspects of his VLE, including his innovative use of discussion boards, and his co-operative links to the university library. • Mary McNally (University of Derby) demonstrated different aspects of the VLE with her Shakespeare course, featuring the selection and presentation of resource materials, and their uses in making Shakespearean texts accessible to a variety of students. • John Regan (BBC Hull), demonstrated ways in which the BBC in the Hull area is working with teachers and groups of older students, in the production of digitised film, both moving and still. The films illustrated texts and concepts, as well as short pieces of music, and were creative tools in the understanding, as well as the illustrating, of their subjects. The local BBC wants to encourage more students to make and submit such work, as part of its community ‘remit’. Finally, as a short codicil to the day, Lesley Coote and Brian Hoyle (University of Hull) introduced and explained their

Thinking Outside the Box: English, Film and New Media

innovative use of digitised material in a VLE, and suggested ways in which these might be deployed with or without specialist equipment, in making the written text more accessible to a widening student base. The afternoon refreshment break featured a visit to the Hull Immersive Visualisation Environment (HIVE), where Emma Smith-Howe gave a demonstration of the possibilities of three-dimensional imaging. There were many smiling faces on leaving, and early feedback from the event reveals that the objectives were successfully met, with many of the participants being inspired to adopt or adapt the ideas they had seen. A film has been made of the proceedings, which Brett and Lesley hope to digitise and edit, both as a record of the event, and as an educational resource.

Teaching to be Proud of? £150 for Case Studies The day-to-day experiences of English lecturers, it goes without saying, have always been central to the work of the English Subject Centre. For us to tailor what we do as usefully as possible to the requirements of teachers ‘on the ground’, and be able to disseminate good practice we need information about what is going on in seminar rooms and lecture halls across the United Kingdom. For this reason, we are issuing a call for case studies for publication on our website. You are invited to contribute a case study on any aspect of your work in teaching and learning (or in ‘outreach’ or pastoral activities) which you feel would be of interest to other English lecturers.There is no prescribed list of topics. Possible areas might include the following: • Innovations in teaching practice and curriculum design. • The solution of a specific problem in teaching and learning. • The experience of working with students with particular requirements (eg. disabled students, students for whom English is not their first language). • The use of technology in teaching. • Collaborations with other organisations, inside or outside your institution. Case studies should be at least 1,500 words long. Authors of full-length case studies accepted for publication will receive a fee of £150. If you prefer, you can contribute a shorter case study of about 500 words, for which no fee will be paid. Before submitting the full text of your case study, please send a one-paragraph summary to Jonathan Gibson at the Subject Centre (Jonathan.Gibson@rhul.ac.uk) and visit the Subject Centre website at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk, where you will find guidance about the form your case study should take.

Supporting Blind and Visually Impaired Students:Tactile Graphics Resources for HE Diana Maniati introduces the work of the National Centre for Tactile Diagrams.

et the National Centre for Tactile Diagrams (NCTD) help you improve your expertise in supporting blind and visually impaired students.

If you have blind or visually impaired (VI) students at your institution you will know how much information presented in graphical form they may miss out on – in textbooks, lecturers’ overheads, maps, photographs, book illustrations, etc. The NCTD is a non-profit organisation, sited by HEFCE at the University of Hertfordshire in 1999. With current Strand Two HEFCE/DELNI funding the NCTD designs and produces tactile diagrams, maps and pictures and provides a variety of training and consultancy services to improve university expertise in supporting blind and visually impaired students. With other funding the NCTD also supports blind individuals, businesses and organisations with tactile graphics and related services. Tactile graphics translate visual graphical information into a ‘feelable’ format, which blind people can explore with their fingers. Most images need considerable redesign to be effective in tactile form, and the NCTD has a skilled team of staff who specialise in this process. We design new materials on request, but may have existing materials in our archive which may suit your requirements – thus saving time and money. The production of these materials can be paid for from the student’s Disabled Students Allowance. To help HEIs and Subject Centres understand how tactile graphics can be used effectively in the learning and teaching process, we have compiled and sent out a ‘Tactile Graphics Handbook Pack’ to every university disability office in England and Northern Ireland. This Handbook Pack includes sample tactile diagrams, guidelines for students on how to use the diagrams, guidelines for HE staff on how to select images and how to support students, and a selection of case studies. The pack also explains why some visual material is unsuitable for translation into a tactile format and gives guidance on the selection process.

To help HE staff to develop and deliver an inclusive curriculum for blind and visually impaired students we run a range of courses and presentations suitable for all university staff. Topics include techniques for the delivery of accessible teaching for blind and VI students, the provision of accessible learning and teaching materials, technology for blind and VI students, tips on how to make the graphical parts of a student’s university life accessible and guidance on how to select, obtain and use tactile graphics in learning and teaching and to support students’ wider university life. We can come to your institution, saving you travelling time, and can tailor a training course to suit your needs, as a cost-effective method of getting you up to speed. We also run a one-day, off-site course with the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) on ‘Supporting Blind and Visually Impaired Students in HE'. Please contact us for details. National Centre for Tactile Diagrams University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Herts, AL10 9AB. Director: Dr Sarah Morley Wilkins Tel: 01707 286 348 Fax: 01707 285 059 Email: info@nctd.org.uk www.nctd.org.uk For information on tactile graphic provision, ask for Dave Gunn,Technical Manager.

‘A tactile campus map with Braille labels

If you need further assistance, the NCTD can help you choose which graphics to produce in a tactile version and undertake the production. A student ‘looking’ at a tactile graphic 33

Enhancing Careers Services for English Students Jane Gawthrope, Manager at the English Subject Centre, describes a scheme designed to support Careers Service inititatives for English students.

t is a widespread view that English graduates are not good at ‘selling’ themselves to employers. This is not to say that they lack the skills, attributes and enthusiasm that employers seek: research conducted by the English Subject Centre shows that English graduates are doing as well as, if not better than, most other graduates three to four years after graduation. Employers value the skills in critical thinking, communication and analysis that English graduates usually possess, but our students tend to underestimate the relevance of these skills to the workplace. (The ‘student profiles’ project undertaken by the Subject Centre produced a template which helps students link the skills listed in the English Benchmark Statement to those typically sought by employers.1) English students need assistance and encouragement in articulating, in a way that is interesting and relevant to employers, the skills and attributes they have developed whilst studying and engaging in extra-curricular activity.

University of Bradford – Interview Workshops Bradford is providing a series of workshops for undergraduates studying English and Creative Writing, with the objective of developing confidence and improving performance at interview. The workshops will be supplemented by supervised individual use of ‘The Interviewer’, an interactive software package, including webcam, which will enable students to experience a ‘mock’ interview which is recorded and played back. ‘The Interviewer’ simulates a real selection interview and provides the opportunity to practice interview skills in a supportive environment.The workshops will focus on the skills English students gain from their degree level studies and the ways in which these skills can be communicated to employers, or other opportunity providers, at selection interviews. Contact Details: Heather Marshall University of Bradford H.D.Marshall@Bradford.ac.uk

For this reason, the English Subject Centre has been sponsoring small projects in Careers Services which tailor materials or events specifically to the needs of English students. About ten projects are under way, covering such activities as interview technique workshops, alumni presentations, web-based resources and careers open-days. If your department or careers service would be interested in a £500 grant to undertake something similar, please contact Jane Gawthrope at the Subject Centre (Jane.Gawthrope@rhul.ac.uk). .

University of Liverpool – Careers Newsletter for Academic Staff Liverpool is producing a monthly newsletter to for academic staff in the School of English entitled Careers Matters! Features include case studies of English graduates, destination information, careers service activities, vacancy information and student quotes. Once the initial bid period has passed and the newsletter has gained a high profile within the department, it will become an e-newsletter so that the momentum may be maintained. Once it has become an e-newsletter it will be possible to select relevant features to send to the students themselves at appropriate times in their studies. There are over 550 students studying English but fewer are engaging with the Careers Service. Because the department is so large and students can choose a variety of options it is difficult to find a time slot in the timetable for careers talks. Also students are delaying planning their careers and often waiting until after graduation to use the Careers Service either in person or by email.The university is currently piloting PDP with the aim that all personal tutors will be responsible for managing this process. Keeping academic staff up to date with careers issues will enable those who are personal tutors to encourage their students to plan their careers from an early stage. Contact Details: Diane Appleton University of Liverpool d.Appleton@liv.ac.uk

1. See http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/projects/archive/careers/careers5.php 34

News and Reports

Oxford Brookes University – Mock Interview Programme Oxford Brookes is establishing a short mock interview programme that allows English students to access the dynamic, interactive exchange that occurs between the candidate and interviewer and use evidence-led assessment by the student to improve performance. During a short interview the candidate’s responses are recorded on videodisk and then played back directly. Candidate and interviewer observe and discuss, with the candidate making short notes on a proforma feedback sheet. To an increasing extent, students are expected to engage earlier with the job market in order to improve their employability and career management skills. Many courses now provide workshops or related training sessions on jobhunting skills including CV design and interviews. Problems remain, however, for students attempting to gain relevant practical experience with interviews. This project will build knowledge and confidence about critical communication in selection interviews. Contact Details: Lorna Froud Oxford Brookes University lhfroud@brookes.ac.uk

Sheffield Hallam University – Interview Workshops Sheffield Hallam aims to develop English undergraduate students' awareness of the skills required to perform effectively at interview. This will be achieved by the development of an interview skills workshop, which will include interactive interview skills development using McMasters techniques and a demonstration of the Sheffield Hallam University 'Interviewer' interactive software package. As students on a non-vocational course of study, the career management needs of English undergraduates include being able to identify and articulate the skills and attributes that they have developed from their English course in a way that is appropriate to the specific post for which they are applying. The interviews skills workshop will enable them to do this in a supportive environment . Contact Details: Alison McHale Sheffield Hallam University A.McHale@shu.ac.uk

Swansea University – Careers Open Day Swansea is running a Careers Open Day specially for students studying English.The vast majority of students choose to study English because of interest, enjoyment and ability to do well in the subject, and only few would think about or make the links to their future careers. Hence some find the transition from study to the world of work tough upon graduation. By inviting students studying English to attend the Careers Open Day, the Careers Centre will be able to showcase its services, resources and facilities. The idea is to get English students to think about how they can better prepare themselves during their time at university for the world of work. A team of careers advisers and project staff will be on hand for the day which will follow a loose structure: welcoming students, accompanying them for a guided tour of the Careers Centre, showing them what resources and facilities are available and outlining the services provided, a short talk from Job and Placement staff. There will be opportunities for students to sign up for various workshops for a later date and a clinic service to deal with queries and guidance will be available throughout the Open Day. Contact Details: Jean Brokenshire Swansea University j.brokenshire@swansea.ac.uk

University of York – Alumni Information Seminar York is running an alumni careers information afternoon for second-year students featuring speakers drawn from a range of occupational areas. Students from single and joint honours will be invited.The afternoon will provide an insight into the range of opportunities open to English graduates and the experience and qualities needed for a number of career areas. Students will also gather information on the nature of career paths and routes to entry for a number of careers. As a significant proportion of students are interested in areas such as media, publishing and PR which have few large graduate recruitment schemes, it is important that they understand the need to be proactive and to seek out vacancies and experiences. Contact Details: Claire Rees University of York Cr13@york.ac.uk

Enhancing Careers Services for English Students

University of Central England – Careers Fair and Web Resources

University of East Anglia – Brochure Linking Academic and Career Values

UCE will enhance an established Faculty-based Careers Fair to make it more relevant to the needs of English students. The Fair will be developed into more of a Conference-style event. A variety of sessions will run throughout the day to complement the exhibition part of the Fair which will as usual feature a range of employers and other representatives of the next steps after graduation. External speakers will be invited (both employers and alumni) to work with Faculty and Careers staff to deliver targeted help to English students. A high-quality brochure will accompany the event, containing careers information and advice as well as exhibitor and event details to help students make the most of this opportunity.

UEA will design, produce and issue brochures for English Literature students in such a way that careers are actively projected out of academic programmes, with more detailed reference to specific units, or combinations of units, and their possibilities. The main aim will be to give more sense of the way in which academic values relate to, and can be transformed into, career values. At the moment we tend to work backwards rather than forwards – from relatively vague career outcomes to a general sense of the kind of courses which produce these outcomes.The aim is to help students’ academic planning, making it not so much ‘vocational’ in a narrower sense as simply more career orientated.

It has been observed that some UCE students, while very able, find it particularly difficult to identify and articulate the transferable skills they offer and that this can result in poor performance at the application and interview stages. To address this, small group sessions designed to help students understand employability skills – what they are and what evidence might be provided to demonstrate them – will be offered. Confidence is another issue which may affect the destinations of UCE graduates and this would also be addressed, since it is essential that students have a clear understanding of the potential value of their skills, personal qualities, experience and achievements. Student interaction with employers and alumni will, it is hoped, be motivational and boost the students’ confidence in their own abilities, helping them to raise their aspirations.

Contact Details: Anne Benson University of East Anglia a.benson@uea.ac.uk

Additionally, a web-based resource on employability will be developed as a sub-section of the recently re-developed School of English website at http://www.lhss.uce.ac.uk/englishweb/. The first focus of the proposed resource will be information to develop students’ awareness of the full range of career options – both those commonly sought by English graduates and those open to all – and thus encourage them to broaden their horizons and explore a variety of opportunities that may suit them. The other elements of the website would be a focus on the transferable skills UCE students can offer employers as part of a confidence and skills-boosting advice section.

The workshops will enhance the confidence of English students in their transferable skills, increase students’ understanding of commercial awareness, encourage students to consider a wide range of careers with their degree and improve students’ interview techniques.

Contact Details: Alexandra Hemingway UCE in Birmingham alexandra.hemingway@uce.ac.uk

Contact Details: Anna Preston University of Warwick a.preston@warwick.ac.uk

University of Warwick – Interview Workshops Warwick is providing a series of four workshops targeted at improving the interview techniques of English students. Twenty students could attend each workshop and they will last one and a half hours each. Specific materials will be produced to support the workshops for students to take away with them.

The English department is keen for careers activities to be targeted at its students who often perceive that they have particular needs. These workshops will enable the Careers staff to dedicate some additional time to developing and delivering the workshops and thus enhance the interview techniques of English students.

Education for Sustainable Development and English Studies Jane Gawthrope, Manager, English Subject Centre

ducation for Sustainable Development (ESD) is working its way towards the top of the higher education agenda. HEFCE recently published a consultation paper on sustainable development1 and has funded a Higher Education Academy initiative to promote and enhance ESD across the disciplines. ESD isn’t just an issue for those teaching in disciplines such as geography, environmental studies, biology and engineering. Although there are many and various definitions of sustainable development, the most widely used is the one developed in the Brundtland report Our Common Future: Sustainable Development is ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ 2. This definition stresses the concept of intergenerational justice. We have no right to degrade our planet to prevent future generations living as we do. Most definitions also recognise the social dimension of SD as well as the economic and environmental ones. What is meant, then, by ‘Education for Sustainable Development’? Although both the term itself and the notion behind it have been criticised for their underpinning ideological assumptions, there is consensus about the main elements in ESD: ESD enables people to develop the knowledge, values and skills to participate in decisions about the way we do things individually and collectively, both locally and globally, that will improve the quality of life now without damaging the planet for the future. 3 ESD is a vision of education that seeks to balance human and economic well-being with cultural traditions and respect for the earth’s natural resources. ESD applies

transdisciplinary educational methods and approaches to develop an ethic for lifelong learning; fosters respect for human needs that are compatible with sustainable use of natural resources and the needs of the planet; and nurtures a sense of global solidarity. 4 It will be apparent that English can relate easily and fruitfully to ESD as defined in these ways. Students of English are intellectually habituated into sensitivity towards encounters with ‘the other’, be this in terms of culture, spaces or materiality. There is a vibrant strand within English literary studies of concern with the relation between cultural texts and environment, and since the early 1980s this has given rise to ‘eco-criticism’. There is a thriving association for the study of literature and the environment (ASLE-UK http://asle.co.uk/) chaired by Dr Greg Garrard, Bath Spa University College. Several UK programmes contain units in this field, and more broadly on writing and landscape.5 More generally, ‘green’ approaches have influenced the curriculum in many areas, often leading to the reframing of classic texts. Students can be encouraged to ask questions about how far humanity is represented as part of, or apart from, the rest of nature in a particular work, or how the idealisation of the pastoral in the Romantic period or the construction of science fiction informs our understanding of how we relate to our physical environment. Such approaches, with their emphasis on respect for the environment, on mutuality, and on the habitats in which cultural reproduction takes place, have major implications not just for the content of the curriculum but for forms of pedagogic interaction. The English Subject Centre, in collaboration with Dr Greg Garrard and Dr Richard Kerridge at Bath Spa University College, is conducting an initial study of the scope and nature of teaching related to the environment,

1. ‘Sustainable Development in Higher Education: Consultation on a Support Strategy and Action Plan’, HEFCE 2005/01 (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2005/05_01/). 2. ‘Gro Harlem Brundtland (chairman), Our Common Future (Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), p. 43. 3. Sustainable Development Education Panel: First Annual Report (1998), p. 30. 4. ‘Education for Sustainable Development’, UNESCO (www.unesco.org/education/desd/). 5. Cf. also the article by Jonathan Gibson in this newsletter (p. 18). 37

Education for Sustainable Development and English Studies

ecology and sustainability on English literature, language and creative writing degree programmes. Firstly, we are trying to map the extent of teaching within English that relates to the environment, ecology and sustainability in their broadest sense. We are aware that although there are directly relevant modules such as those on eco-criticism, there are also modules focussed on themes, periods or theory that consider the relationship between man and the environment in other ways. These may be modules on travel writing, landscape, nature writing, science fiction or pastoral for example.

With the help of colleagues from ASLE, Greg and Richard have been undertaking a wider audit of the relations between English and ESD: reviewing current practice in ESD in the discipline, considering how the discipline relates to the SD agenda and the related skills and attitudes acquired by our graduates. Their report is available at www.english.heacademy/explore/resources/sustain/index .php and it identifies how the Subject Centre can best develop work in this area. If you would like to find our more about this project, please contact me (jane.gawthrope@rhul.ac.uk).

Advisory Board The Subject Centre is fortunate in being able to draw on the expertise of an Advisory Board consisting of distinguished academics from across the discipline.The Board meets about three times per year. Current board members for 2004-2005 are listed below: Professor Judy Simons - Chair (De Montfort University) Professor Janet Beer (Manchester Metropolitan University) Professor Graham Caie (University of Glasgow) Professor Warwick Gould (Institute of English Studies, University of London) Professor Robert Hampson (Royal Holloway, University of London) Professor Chris Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University) Professor Elisabeth Jay (Oxford Brookes University) Dr Vivien Jones (University of Leeds) Dr Bethan Marshall (King's College, University of London) Professor Maureen Moran (Brunel University) Professor Lyn Pykett (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) Professor Rick Rylance (University of Exeter) Professor Elaine Showalter (Princeton University) Professor Ann Thompson (King's College, University of London)

IT Works! Our regular survey of teaching-related developments in IT, compiled by Brett Lucas, Learning Technology Officer and Website Developer at the English Subject Centre.

E-tutor of the Year 2005 Are you using e-learning tools in a novel way to improve your students’ learning experiences either individually or as part of a team? If you are, then why not enter the ‘e-tutor of the year’ competition? The competition rewards those who can demonstrate such things as innovative practice, sound pedagogic design and implementation, an improved student experience, an enhanced learning environment and high levels of interactivity. This prestigious award has been running since 2001 and is sponsored by the Higher Education Academy and the Times Higher. For more information about how to submit and about judging criteria visit the Higher Education Academy website at http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/etutor.

Cognitum Co-Citer (http://www.cognitum.com) This is a nifty little free tool that I discovered a few years ago and can’t do without. The program enables you to create collections of texts from the internet. It captures the text you highlight as well as automatically capturing the internet address of the page, its title and the date of capture – fantastic for retracing your steps in long research trawls on the web – and, what’s more, you can add comments, sort records into different folders and even publish your list to a web page!

Effective Practice with E-Learning The first good practice guide produced by the JISC as part of its elearning pedagogy framework contains a wealth of information on how to use these new technologies effectively. The guide is especially useful as a source of ideas and contains an informative CD-Rom with 10 case studies from various disciplines and sectors, five of which are presented in video format.You can download the guide and access all the case studies online as well as an ‘Effective practice planner’ or send an email to the JISC and get some hardcopies for you and your colleagues from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=elp_practice.

ALT-C 2005: Exploring the Frontiers of E-learning: Borders, Outposts and Migration The 12th international conference of the Association for Learning Technology is being held at the University of Manchester, 6–8 September, 2005. This is the premier event for those interested in the latest developments in the field. Early bird registration closes on 30 June, 2005: see http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2005/.

JISC Plagiarism Advisory Service (http://www.jiscpas.ac.uk) Plagiarism remains a constant source of concern amongst colleagues in English studies. The JISC Plagiarism Advisory service has advice, tools and resources to help you navigate the issues and deal with plagiarism cases.The JISC also make available to institutions the TurnitinUK plagiarism detection software, a demo of which is available from the informative website.

Have you got the digital picture? The AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) is trying to find out how you are using digital images in your teaching. Their aim is to build up a cohesive overview of the use of digital images and the issues involved. If you are interested in letting them know your thoughts, please go to http://www.ahds.ac.uk/visualarts/projectsdigital picture/index.htm

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 0 90219 443 7 Report no. 2, The English Degree and Graduate Careers, John Brennan and Ruth Williams, January 2003 ISBN 0 90219 463 1 Report no. 3, Postgraduate Training in Research Methods: Current Practice and Future Needs in English, Sadie Williams, February 2003 ISBN 0 90219 4 68 2 Report no. 4, Good Practice Guide: Access and Widening Participation, Siobhán Holland, February 2003, ISBN 0 90219 473 9 Report no. 5, English and IT, Michael Hanrahan, December 2002 Report no. 6, Good Practice Guide: Creative Writing, Siobhán Holland, February 2003, ISBN 0 902 19478 X Report no. 7, External Examining, Philip Martin, March 2003 ISBN 0 902 194933 Report no. 8, Survey of the English Curriculum and Teaching in UK Higher Education, the Halcrow Group, Jane Gawthrope and Philip Martin, October 2003 ISBN 0 902 194291 Report no. 9, Good Practice Guide: Part-time Teaching, Siobhán Holland, August 2004, Jane Gawthrope and Philip Martin, October 2003 ISBN 0 902 194291 Report no. 10, Four Perspectives on Transition: English Literature from Sixth Form to University, Andrew Green, February 2005, ISBN 0 902 19498 4 Report no. 11, Living Writers in the Curriculum – A Good Practice Guide,Vicki Bertram and Andrew Maunder, March 2005, ISBN 0902 19414 3

English Subject Centre Administrator: Jackie Fernandes Manager: Jane Gawthrope Academic Co-ordinator: Dr Jonathan Gibson Director: Professor Ben Knights Website Developer & Learning Technologist: Brett Lucas Academic Co-ordinator: Dr Andrew Maunder Administrative Assistant: Rebecca Price

The English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX Tâ&#x20AC;˘ 01784 443221 F â&#x20AC;˘ 01784 470684 esc@rhul.ac.uk www.english.heacademy.ac.uk

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

English Subject Centre

The newletter’s aims are:

Newsletter

• to provide information about resources, developments and innovations in teaching • to provide a discursive or reflective forum for teaching and learning issues

Issue 8 June 2005

• to evaluate existing and new teaching materials, textbooks and IT packages We welcome contributions. Articles range from 300–3000 words in length. Editor: Jonathan Gibson

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

ISSN 1479–7089

Royal Holloway University of London

Linguistics in an English Department

Pedagogical Research in English

Two Types of Interdisciplinarity

Nigel Fabb

Ben Knights

Jonathan Gibson

Writing Culture

Developing the Independent English Student

David Kennedy

Chris Hopkins