The Magazine of the English Subject Centre
April 2009 • Issue 1
The English Subject Centre Newsletter has a new look and new title
Doing academia with Bob Eaglestone Creative Writing’s delicate balancing act
Could English graduates be the financial sector’s new secret weapon? Walcott and wikis The many faces of English at Brighton ISSN 2040-6754
WordPlay Issue 1 • April 2009 ISSN 2040-6754
WordPlay is published twice a year by the English Subject Centre, part of the Subject Network of the Higher Education Academy. The English Subject Centre provides many different kinds of help to lecturers in English literature, Creative Writing and English language. Details of all of our activities are available on our website www.english.heacademy.ac.uk. Inside WordPlay you will find articles on a wide range of English-related topics as well as updates on English Subject Centre work, important developments in the discipline and across higher education. The next issue will appear in October 2009. We welcome contributions. If you would like to submit an article (of between 300 and 2500 words), propose a book or software review (perhaps a textbook review by one of your students) or respond in a letter to an article published in WordPlay, please contact the editor, Nicole King (nicole.king@rhul.ac.uk). Views expressed in WordPlay are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the English Subject Centre. Website links are active at the time of going to press. You can keep in touch with the English Subject Centre by subscribing to our e-mail list, www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/ english-heacademy.html, coming to our workshops and other events or exploring our website. WordPlay is distributed to English, Creative Writing and English language departments across the UK and is also available online at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/wordplay. If you would like extra copies, please e-mail esc@rhul.ac.uk The English Subject Centre Royal Holloway, University of London Egham TW20 0EX T 01784 443221 F 01784 470684 E esc@rhul.ac.uk www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
The English Subject Centre Staff Jane Gawthrope
Manager
Jonathan Gibson
Academic Co-ordinator
Klara Godo
Administrative Assistant
Keith Hughes
Liaison Officer for Scotland
Nicole King
Academic Co-ordinator
Ben Knights
Director
Payman Labbaf
Website and Systems Development Assistant
Brett Lucas
Website Developer and Learning Technologist
Rebecca Price
Administrator
Candice Satchwell
Project Officer for HE in FE
Design: John Gittins
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20
24
26
Starters
Creative Pedagogies
02 Welcome
20 Connotations and Conjunctions: research on English studies at Brighton
03 Events Calendar
24 Why Haven’t You Got Wordsworth? The Poetry Archive
04 IT Works!
26 WikiOmeros: technology and textual research in the first year
Features 06 Text in the City: the value of literary analysts to City financial institutions
30 Voices in Further Education 32 Two Legs of a Relay
10 Doing Academia: an interview with Bob Eaglestone 14 Keeping Your Balance: Creative Writing and part-time teaching
The Student Experience 34 Poetry and Film for Students: greater than the sum of our parts
Book Review 36 Beginning Old English
Endnotes 38 Desert Island Texts 40 The Last Word
Recycle Cert no. SA-COC-1530
when you have finished with this publication please pass it on to a colleague or student or recycle it appropriately.
WordPlay • Issue 1 • April 2009 01
Welcome Nicole King Perhaps our most basic ambition at the Subject Centre is to be the conduit for discussions about good and innovative teaching. We aim to both initiate and broker such conversations among you because we believe there are still too few occasions to collectively share and champion good practice. Increasingly, we are creating opportunities for such sharing through our website (such as our T3 resource – Teaching, Texts and Topics) and at bespoke events for specific constituencies, such as heads of department, early career lecturers and postgraduates who teach. In addition, we continue to offer events (day-long or mini workshops) on specific topics or curriculum areas, such as close reading, teaching Milton or using technology to teach Creative Writing. (Do you have an idea for an event you would like us to organise? It’s easy to propose an event on our website.) Twice a year, we use these pages to assemble your writing on the broad topic of teaching and learning in English literature, Creative Writing and English language. To that, we add student perspectives, book reviews and articles and research that address the connection our subject – and the many different ways we approach it – has with schools, further education colleges, universities abroad and the wider world beyond our campuses where our students hope to find work and careers. And so I welcome you to the first issue of WordPlay, the publication formerly known as The English Subject Centre Newsletter. We have chosen this name because of the connections it has to what we all do in English literature, Creative Writing and English language: we carefully select, study, invent and, indeed, play with words. And although our research will sometimes find us playing (and working) with words as typical solitary scholars, we derive no small measure of joy from word play done in concert with our students – and with our colleagues. It is, perhaps, more significant that the Subject Centre chose to name its publication at all. It represents the evolution of a modest newsletter to a more ambitious ’magazine‘. Back in August 2001, then Director of the Subject Centre, Professor Philip Martin, introduced Issue 2 of the Newsletter by surveying what he eventually called ‘the condition of the subject‘. Martin observed: ‘colleagues are discovering that others share the problems and difficulties that might sometimes seem to be theirs alone, but frequently the evidence suggests that the teaching of English is accompanied by a great deal of pleasure and a vigorous interest in students’ experience of the subject. Thus, the interchange between colleagues is also about success, the discovery of different teaching techniques and discovering new approaches to the subject.’ Like its predecessor, WordPlay will continue the Subject Centre’s tradition of fostering interchange while also highlighting the pleasures of ‘doing’ what we do.
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Why do students choose to do a BA in Creative Writing? How is Shakespeare taught at university in the 21st century? How is British literature taught in Japan and Italy? How is Black British literature taught in the UK? What demographic of student is attracted to Literature degrees? These are the topics of articles that we have recently published. In the present issue, we have gathered together equally diverse experiences of our subject. In our lead story, ‘Text in the City: the value of literary analysts to City financial institutions', literature coincides with the economic crisis gripping the world. How long the recession may last is difficult for anyone to pin down, but of one thing we can be sure, the analysis of this crisis, its causes, its villains and victims will be front-page news for some time yet. Authors, Ceri Sullivan and Eben Muse are convinced that ‘the City’ should be one of the employment destinations seriously considered by English graduates. Perhaps we wouldn’t be in the recession we’re in if, instead of toxic derivatives, City workers (and their Wall Street counterparts) were more au fait with close reading and studying the archives of sound financial management? Employment issues also surface in ’Keeping Your Balance’, by Maggie Butt, who reprises her keynote address at a January Subject Centre event on the issue of part-time teaching and Creative Writing. We think her survey of the part-time landscape is relevant to all of us, whether part-time or not, Creative Writing lecturers or otherwise. In my interview with Bob Eaglestone, he is concerned with how, among other things, we can better prepare postgraduate students for their first years as lecturers, revealing his own quest for that elusive permanent post which ended only after he made over 100 applications. Innovations in how we teach and learn are captured by Caroline Hawkridge, who, as a postgraduate student, used Subject Centre funding to call attention to a relatively new genre – poetry film or film poetry. Amanda Hopkins, at Warwick University, discusses her use of wiki technology to help students learn and understand Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros. My Subject Centre colleague, Jonathan Gibson, takes over the Last Word page with a pointed discussion of what more we should be doing to help our students with disabilities to negotiate our family of subjects. As ever, this magazine reflects the collaborative ethos of the Subject Centre, so my thanks go to each contributor and my colleagues, all of whom helped to shape these pages. Please send us your comments and ideas for future features.
Nicole King Editor
Events Calendar English Subject Centre
Spring 2009/Autumn 2009 For further details about any of these events please visit our website www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events
English Literature and Scottish Literature 30 April 2009 – University of Edinburgh This first Edinburgh Evening Discussion Group will address questions such as: how do we/should we integrate Scottish and English literature as dual strands in Years 1 and 2? Does a focus on two ‘national’ literatures offer opportunities for teaching students the problem of the ‘national literature’ paradigm? The evening is an opportunity to share ideas about teaching with colleagues in an informal atmosphere. Refreshments and a warm welcome will be provided.
Changing Academic Practice: implications for future English academics 30 September 2009 – Oxford In partnership with the Centre for Excellence in Preparing for Academic Practice, this one-day colloquium is offered to colleagues at various stages of developing academic careers in the English family of subjects. Designed to bring together doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, junior and senior academics, sessions and workshops will address the questions: What does academic practice encompass in today’s world? What are the challenges and opportunities of preparing for and developing an academic career?
Modularity killed the cat! Creating intellectual coherence in modular degree schemes
Networking Day for Admissions Tutors
10 June 2009 – London This London Evening Discussion Group will address the questions: Are we able to create intellectual coherence in modular degree schemes? Are programmes and departments moving away from modules and back to year-long courses? Do certain institutions encourage a mixture of the both models? The evening is an opportunity to share ideas about teaching with colleagues in an informal atmosphere. Refreshments and a warm welcome will be provided.
20 November 2009 – London This one-day workshop will give admissions tutors (or those in an equivalent role) an opportunity to share experiences, ideas and issues of common concern. There will be opportunities to compare procedures and standards and to discuss issues such as: using Web2 technologies in course promotion; 'non-standard' students; the impact of the recession on recruitment; students who 'trade-up' after surpassing predicted grades; new and 'non-standard' qualifications.
Networking Day for Humanities Careers Advisers
English and Diversity
10 July 2009 – University of Liverpool The English Subject Centre, in collaboration with Anne Benson (Head of the Careers Service at UEA) is convening the fourth meeting for HE Career Advisers with an interest in the humanities. The meeting will provide a forum to discuss and share ideas and experiences. This year, the theme will be: ‘weathering the storm: helping humanities students through the recession‘.
4 December 2009 – London The variability of human experience and the valuing of marginalised voices are at the heart of the disciplines of English and Creative Writing. To what extent, though, are our courses hospitable to the diversity of today's student population? This free, one-day event, will give lecturers the opportunity to discuss the current position of 'nontraditional' students in English and Creative Writing and to assess the value of an inclusive approach to teaching. It will also include a session summarising a new Subject Centre report on the experience of disabled students.
Teaching Threshold Concepts in Gothic and Popular Fiction 12 September 2009 – Brighton This event will explore current teaching practice for both Gothic and Popular Fiction. Sessions will address Meyer and Land's theory of threshold concepts, interdisciplinary teaching, and how new technologies and new pedagogies assist the teaching of gothic and popular fiction, including fantasy and horror. The idea for this conference stems from a successful HEA English Subject Centre project ‘Conjunctions and Connotations’ focusing on developments in and variations of English studies at Brighton.
Beyond the Classroom: English in the community 11 December 2009 – London Increasingly, English and Creative Writing departments are looking beyond the seminar room and the lecture theatre, devising modules which give students the opportunity to develop their studies through activities in the wider world. This free, one-day event, will be a forum for the discussion of the benefits and challenges of community engagement in our disciplines and will showcase innovative projects, including work with local writers at the University of Brighton and projects based at The Reader organisation at the University of Liverpool.
IT Works! Brett Lucas casts his eye over recent developments in the world of e-learning.
Resources British Periodicals Collections I and II
Brett Lucas is the Website Developer and Learning Technologist at the English Subject Centre.
These terrific resources trace the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the 17th century through to the Victorian ‘age of periodicals’ and beyond. The collections comprise six million keyword-searchable pages and form an essential record of more than two centuries of British history and culture. Each collection is available, free of charge, to universities, colleges and research councils. www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/british_periodicals
The Burney Collection This archive represents the largest single collection of 17th- and 18thcentury English and news pamphlets gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757–1817). The collection includes nearly one million pages from more than 1,000 pamphlets and newspapers from the period, including the first successful London daily and first illustrated newspaper, all dating from 1600–1800. The newspapers and news pamphlets were published mostly in London, however, there are also some English provincial, Irish and Scottish papers, and a few examples from the American colonies, Europe and India. The collection is available, free of charge, to universities, colleges and research councils until December 2013. www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/burney
Publications • The Theory and Practice of Online Learning – Second edition Edited by Terry Anderson Publisher: Athabasca University Press, 2008 Text is available as soft-cover or e-book
Focus On … JISC Digital Media - Is the newly rebranded service (formerly TASI) which focuses on providing all the information you might need when using digital media (i.e. moving image, still image and sound) in your teaching. There are tutorials on topics like uploading images/video to popular websites like Flickr and YouTube, optimizing large images, creating your own image archives, basic audio editing, where to find copyright-free images, etc. The site details a comprehensive range of training events (e.g. Building a departmental image collection on 23rd June), contains a useful blog highlighting new trends in digital media and even has a helpdesk offering free advice! www.tasi.ac.uk/index.html
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IT Works!
Tools Create a multi media timeline Dipity is a free, online ‘time creator’ that is very easy to use. Create a timeline on an interactive web page and either save it online or embed it in your own website/web page/online course using JavaScript. You could create one for use in a live seminar or lecture instead of PowerPoint. It is also possible to attach your own photos and link to YouTube videos as well as add geographical info. Think about how this could be used with texts/authors or themes you are working on that have would benefit from a visual perspective. There are examples on the Dipity website. www.dipity.com
Record audio from the web MP3myMP3 is another free and easy-to-use recording tool. This software will record any audio that is playing on your desktop. You might, for example, want to record the audio from a Skype conversation as an MP3 file. This could be useful if you are providing oral feedback on work and you would like to keep a record of it, or your student could record the conversation for storage in an online portfolio. http://tinyurl.com/bgwvu
Capture audio from YouTube FLVto is another simple to use audio tool with a more specialised function. FlvTo will extract the audio from a YouTube video as an MP3 file, which is great if you want to decrease file sizes for students and/or if the video is not central to your needs. Simply browse to the web page below and copy and paste the YouTube link (usually to the right of the viewing window in YouTube), the online converter creates the file for you. http://flvto.com/
Highlighting text on web pages If you want your students to focus on a particular part of a web page they are accessing from a link you give them, it can often be frustrating to wade through the text to find the key point or paragraph. The Awesome Highlighter works from a web browser or, more conveniently, as a Firefox extension. Key in the page URL from the web link below, highlight the text on the page, then circulate the URL generated. Easy as! www.awesomehighlighter.com/ Firefox extension www.awesomehighlighter.com/user/welcome/
Other Bits ... What is a Tiny URL? Some of the URLs that you see on this page, and throughout this issue, were generated by a free utility which takes long URLs and resizes them for you. Access the utility yourself at http://tinyurl.co.uk
... and Bobs • You may need to consult your humanities librarian about access to some of the resources mentioned in this area • Where possible, I try to recommend software that is open-source, free of charge, copyright cleared, shareware or freeware • All URLs on this page were last accessed in March 2009 • You can access all the links on this page directly in the online version of WordPlay
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Features
Text in the City: the value of literary analysts to City financial institutions When is making money making meaning? Ceri Sullivan and Eben Muse research the potentially lucrative intersection of literature and finance in an English Subject Centre project. ‘This isn’t business’, said Charles, tapping his book, ‘It’s not about buying and selling real commodities. It’s all on paper, or computer screens. It’s abstract. It has its own rather seductive jargon – arbitrageur, deferred futures, floating rates. It’s like literary theory’ (David Lodge, Nice Work). The phrase ‘credit crunch’ makes what has recently happened in the financial markets seem rather laudable: an exercise to trim flab, so getting back to basic values. Yet the trimmings are largely not coming off where they’ve been laid down. They are coming off social services which taxes should fund. Frankly, the City has never been so much in need of creative thought which is both imaginative and sceptical. The English Subject Centre funded us to see how English graduates used their skills as literary analysts when working in finance. We interviewed 16 English graduates, now at senior and junior positions in accounting (both public and private sector), investment, project or systems management, tax advice and merchant banking. Most interlocutors distinguished between skills encouraged by the humanities and those raised by English alone. Key among the former were: • rapid reading and assimilation of large volumes of text
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• robust analytical and evidential skills • debating skills • self-starting and independence Typical comments were: Economics and business degrees tend to produce graduates who rely on rigid models, whereas humanities teach an enthusiastic humility before new ideas, which are then assessed on their own merits. There were some crossovers between my studies of literature and philosophy which the bank benefits from, particularly a sort of science of argument, a sense of what patterns are emerging for analysis and an interest in human identity. My employer [in a large manufacturing company] made it difficult to get through the recruitment system, but I think they were losing out. I think they should have had more of a mix. Getting business graduates is useful because they hit the ground running when they first come in. But their perceptions, once they are in, can be very limited. I think it helps to have some people with more exotic degrees, whether it’s English or classics or history. Otherwise, they start running down tram-lines and being very procedural.
Specifically, however, interlocutors felt that graduates in English – as opposed to other humanities subjects – excelled at: • Taking a diversity of approaches to a problem. They were experienced at discerning layers of meaning in literary texts, could keep the text’s diversity alive, were prepared to keep an open mind and even allow fuzzy logic as the structure unfolded – basically, they enjoyed originality and complexity. This quality is inherent both in the literary text itself and in the way the discipline approaches that text: ‘find a new angle’, ‘be interesting’. • Presenting a narrative about this new angle, which was both exact and persuasive. This was made up of three elements: taking the right tone for the audience concerned; drawing out analogies and themes; presenting the results with engagement and energy. Typical comments were: Financial management isn’t all about numbers. It’s much too important to be all about numbers. It’s at least as much about words. Things are becoming more legally based, and that’s the area where English graduates are strong. I suspect that if we were having this conversation with me as a lawyer, rather than as a tax expert, there’d
Features be a lot more English graduates in my profession – but it is changing. Fiction works easily with a ‘what if’ scenario, which is essential in strategic planning. Learning to read poetry closely was particularly helpful in learning to read a document alertly – it was one of the few occasions when it was considered sensible to spend time on an intense analysis of style.
Frankly, the City has never been so much in need of creative thought which is both imaginative and sceptical. I enjoyed entering different worlds, finding out about individuals’ lives, learning about the past, contextualising the novels. This is still at the core of what I do as a manager – what gets called emotional intelligence now – taking a balanced view that respects other people’s positions. The further up the bank you go, the more rhetorical and left-of-field responses are appreciated, and the more you have to think in terms of unravelling codes and uncovering secrets, of moving between visualised layers of meaning – say in a merger and acquisition situation. Going straight to the numbers misses the narrative. I tell stories about numbers, especially to engineers. In a contract, the definitions tell the story before the contract itself begins, and remembering this helps to get the whole picture rather than being stuck in detail. If I use analogies, a storyline and some characters, I can get a meeting to approve a project of over a hundred million pounds. English can encourage a combative rather than judicious attitude, which is unhelpful in team terms – although at least it ensures a range of ideas are considered. E-mails sent overseas especially benefit from me being sensitive to how to say what to whom, given we deal with different cultures.
I often use literary examples and quotations: the City is a combination of a business and an entertainments industry, with clever people who need to be entertained if they’ve got to read a hundred pages. Respondents felt that these two features – openminded innovation and narrative skills – are particularly important to financial work because: • Firms are founded on keeping ahead of the market. Innovation is key to success. Even in the case of the public services, resource constraint must be overcome imaginatively – particularly in a credit crunch. • Financial narratives depend on verbal explication to be taken up. This becomes ever more the case with increasing seniority, where risky and significant decisions must be made. Typical comments were: You’re only as good as your next idea. Innovation is an institutional demand. Business is inherently creative: the transfer of a concept into some sort of reality through legal or numerical expression. Taking an idea and making it real, actually achieving it, requires creativity. You are looking forward and can’t be certain about what impact it might have – economic, legal, human resources – you are creating a scenario about all this, and a methodology to get somewhere with it. The mode of teaching in English affected these interviewees as much as the subject of literature. Almost all felt that independent study encouraged sustained and deep attention to difficult texts. Small group discussion, where your opinions could be heard and challenged, encouraged keeping options open, risk taking, winging it in speech. The two together produced a flexible and open-minded approach. A few commended lectures for exploring new ideas or research by the lecturer. None, however, felt that large classes were useful, either for listening to new ideas by others or trying out one’s own ideas.
Eben Muse is a Welsh Medium Teaching Fellow in Bangor’s School of Creative Studies and Media. At the Research Institute for Enhancing Learning at Bangor University, he developed a variety of multimedia learning technologies, including Edisus, the GO Wales Reflective Diary and the NeGES e-guidance system. He’s now working on how digital media facilitates a form of self – or communal expression that is not limited by the vocabulary of any one language, and teaches modules in this area.
Ceri Sullivan is a Reader in the School of English at Bangor. She was previously a chartered accountant with KPMG, a finance director with VSO and an overseas accountant with Oxfam. She is currently trying very hard to relate Weber’s idea of rational-legal bureaucracy to the brute fact that so many poets, novelists and dramatists were also men of affairs, and teaches modules which hop between the two disciplines, agitatedly.
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Features Typical comments were: Tutorials taught me to shape arguments; colleagues who don’t have this training in coherence get told by clients and managers: ‘I sort of see what you are saying, but you just haven’t said it’. Tutorials were a ‘fire … ready ... aim’ situation, which encouraged rapid, although not necessarily original, thinking. It took three years to build up enough context to substantiate the positions I took up at first! Small classes gave you the opportunity to speak up, to be controversial, to stand up for what you said, to listen to what other people said, to change your mind, and things like this. That was incredibly useful, because it was being done in a safe environment, and you could be wrong, and nobody was going to be terribly upset if you were wrong. Even now, I need to be a devil’s advocate on occasion; if somebody presents something to me I need to give it a jolly good kicking to see that it works. However, many respondents said that acting on good ideas is even more important than talking about them. The words ‘do-able’, ‘accepted’, ‘get a result’ and ‘act on it’ were echoed when people considered what was seen as creative. The academic environment was critiqued by the business community for assuming that talking about an action is just as good as doing it. This may be a stereotype of dons – but the respondents find it rings true. Typical comments were: City space requires meetings demand a rapid and panoramic, but not a deep, grasp of ideas and situations – however, if you can convince people about the intellectual merit of something, then they’ll get up and do something about it. Good ideas are those that get a result, which are responded to (there’s no such thing as a good idea per se), and these come from instinct (a nose for trade) and rigour in analysis (including reading round the subject). In the firm, there’s a purpose to all the debate, a drive to give a solution, to move into action, to complete a project, which thrills me. Most people were up-front about the relatively high salary. They also enjoyed the high status of being financial experts. Both the excellent training schemes and the constant requirement to work at the very
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top of their ability inspired interviewees. They felt they were achieving real results, supporting and changing society. The idea of understanding a major sector of the economy, and – still more – affecting it by their actions, was deeply attractive. Their pride in joining an intellectual elite and making a difference was evident throughout. Yet English, a few interviewees added sardonically, was not taken seriously by some employers – even though they relied on the high-level communication skills developed by an English degree.
We’ve got to be more bruising when the topic of resources comes up: no, we cannot teach a range of understandings without a decent library allocation; no, we cannot model interactive, creative discourse without groups small enough to let people speak; no, we are not there to mop up students who think they ought to get a degree, but don’t love reading. Conversely, if we are all serious about the knowledge economy – if we are all behind the idea that soft skills power innovation as much as technical skills – then we all
If we are all serious about the knowledge economy – if we are all behind the idea that soft skills power innovation as much as technical skills – then we all need to champion the specific excellences the English degree trains up. Typical comments were: I would like to see more educated and female entrants in finance. I’d tell them that it is a challenging environment in which you have to prove yourself, and so grow at a rapid rate; it diversifies your CV; employers take financial experience seriously. It was amusing to see the surprise of the economics and business BAs on the graduate programme when I passed the qualifying exams. You could see them wondering if a literary person could really be that numerate. Money is one of the resources that underpins what you do with your life. As such, it is too important to be ignored, or left to the amateurs. It needs imaginative people to make good and cogent decisions. That side of perceiving the world which comes from literature still has a place – business is too important to be left to people who can do no more than do the sums. Making and using money properly is a responsibility. One interviewee said, ‘you can tell the arts graduates in my company: they dress and carry themselves with a bit more flamboyance‘. As a subject, we’ve let ourselves decline into the ornamental far too easily. We have to show that we are not about sighing appreciatively over lovely, lovely prose, or about walking down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in our medieval hands.
need to champion the specific excellences the English degree trains up. Soft skills, here, are not the worthy but unexciting ones of note-taking and timetabling. They are the specific ones produced by literary study: encouraging diversity in opinions, imaginative apprehension of ‘what if’ scenarios and rigour in interrogating each position. Thus, English departments must, in all cases • Value small group teaching and individual approaches. There is a move to reify English’s subject matter, to standardise it, and to teach in large groups. Resist this, passionately. • Make students aware in our teaching (not just in careers advice sessions) that how they learn to think now affects what sort of job they can get, and how well they will do it. And, if they want to interact with the largest sector in the British economy – even now – departments could also: • Offer modules that look at how the financial world uses fictions and is, in its turn, represented. • Understand the range of knowledge transfer grants that allow staff to approach companies to share research – and go find the companies that need that expertise. They will be delighted.
English Subject Centre
You are probably familiar with the day-long workshops and occasional two-day conferences the Subject Centre runs. We have also successfully piloted short, less formal ‘evening discussion groups’ in London and Birmingham. Perhaps you’d like to organise one in your area? Below, David Roberts summarises the first discussion group in Birmingham. The next London Evening Discussion is 10 June 2009, 2 Gower Street, 5.30–7.30, on the topic ‘Modularity killed the cat! Creating intellectual coherence in modular degree schemes’. Further details can be found on the website.
What is Literacy in HE Today? An Evening Discussion 26 February 2009 – Midlands Regional Networking Event With the sound of trombones and soprano voices drifting round the corridors of the Birmingham Conservatoire, colleagues gathered on 26 February for the Subject Centre’s first regional evening conversation. If nothing else, the event demonstrated the elasticity of the term ‘regional‘, or perhaps simply the enthusiasm of academics prepared to travel from Crewe and Middlesbrough for the pleasure of two hours’ conversational traffic (well lubricated, admittedly, by wine and canapés) on a subject guaranteed to generate heat and light. What do we mean when we refer to students’ literacy – or lack of it – today? What standards do we expect from entry to graduation? To what extent should the curriculum recognise competing models of literacy? Functionalist approaches to teaching academic discourse began the evening and supplied a running theme. Students who fail to fulfil their potential very often don’t have a secure grasp of rhetorical structure in what remains our standard form of assessment, the essay, and our academic systems (modularity in particular) do not necessarily promote the ‘little and often’ regime needed to teach it. While we want students to master a repertoire of different written genres, the very diversity of those genres presents a problem, since, increasingly, the short-winded conventions of digital writing discourage the crafting and linking of paragraphs. Even the ‘anaphoric-implicatory’ style of Facebook interaction might interfere with students’ ability to articulate ideas at length. It is not a pleasant irony that there is now so much excellent academic work – needless to say, in well-crafted, extended prose – on the limitations of the essay as a form of assessment. ‘We do essays, you do Facebook’ is not a healthy creed. A number of associated issues arose. Is the essay part of the ‘social capital’ students aspire to, along with knowledge of texts, contexts and ideas? Colleagues generally thought so; indeed, the organic relationship between ‘skills’ and ‘knowledge’ in our discipline – or perhaps any academic discipline – makes it hard to separate the value of articulating thoughts in the long, deep and structured way facilitated by the essay from the value of appreciating key texts. Everyone spoke up for the ‘cultural literacy’ that comes not just of knowing some ‘great books', whatever their definitional problems and however fleetingly they may appear in the curriculum, but equally important was the primacy of the primary – the idea that the really ‘literate’ student discovers and articulates primary texts in a completely individual way. The ‘slow’ reading needed to do so might need to be complemented by ‘speed’ reading of critical and contextual material. Still, we all know students who need to be taught speed reading and seem to find slow, long reading excessively demanding: ‘we can’t read Shakespeare’ or ‘Dickens is too long’ are frequent complaints. How do we encourage them to be ‘literate’ in any but the most instrumental sense of the term? If the digital revolution attracted poor reviews for its impact on writing, everyone recognised its enormous value for seminartype discussion and research projects. There are outstanding examples, even of second-year undergraduate work, that exploit resources such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). They allow students to exercise digital literacy in a secure disciplinary context and to surprise their tutors with unfamiliar material – ‘transferable skills’ blended perfectly with academic objectives. What better way to defend our discipline from instrumentalism and encourage a truly literate dialogue between tutor and student? David Roberts is John Henry Newman Chair at Newman University College, Birmingham, and an English Subject Centre Advisory Board member. Readers are welcome to propose further Midlands evening discussions and David will be happy to help organise them.
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Features
Doing Academia: an interview with Bob Eaglestone In January, Nicole King spoke with Bob Eaglestone about the joys of deconstruction, teaching and, in general, getting on in academia.
Bob Eaglestone is a raconteur par excellence. He can weave a narrative, offer an opinion and keep you laughing with the skill and daring of a master juggler plying his trade – not a ball dropped, not a fingertip singed. Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, at Royal Holloway, University of London, Eaglestone easily conveys his enthusiasm for the multi faceted life of an academic. Over the course of our interview, I gained a sense of drive, not untouched by ambition, which has propelled his career thus far. A prolific scholar, he is the author of
strong, and his textbook, Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students (Routledge, 1999) is going into its third edition this year. Last year, with Barry Langford, he co-edited Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (Palgrave, 2008) which is part of the English Subject Centre’s Teaching the New English series. Barely 40 with two small children and as onehalf of a dual-career household, my sense after our interview was that Eaglestone literally derives joy from doing his work – it sustains him, although, as I discover, sometimes he does push himself too far.
In the republic of letters, our ideas will be all that matters, but, for now, gender, class and status still come into play. The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004), Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (Icon Books, 2001), Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh University Press, 1997) and is the coeditor of many others, including, with Simon Glendinning, Legacies of Derrida: Literature and Philosophy (Routledge, 2008), not to mention a very long list of articles, book chapters and various projects in press and forthcoming. Scholarship and teaching, and how we – lecturers and students – ‘do’ English are inseparable for Eaglestone. As such, he is also the editor of the Routledge Critical Thinkers series, which is now 36 volumes
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I met him on a very rainy day in January, at his home in south London. It was a Monday, and that afternoon he would be returning to Brussels, his current homefrom-home, where he is a Visiting Fellow at the Flemish Academy of Arts and Sciences for two months, commuting each week. He is part of a research cluster on Trauma and Literature, and the communal work there he describes as ‘a really nice, nice thing. Last week I absolutely got tons and tons of work done. I read so much it was like being a graduate student again. It was uncanny‘. He admits, sheepishly, that time expands in a profound way when you eliminate the school run, cooking and tidying up. I concur, with a hint of envy.
Starting out I asked him how he got started as a lecturer. His answer, as is so often the case, began with his English undergraduate studies. ‘I had a lovely time as a student in Manchester in the late 1980s, and I did lots of other things. With my friends, I was very involved in theatre-in-education projects with some local schools and I was very involved in the student union and politics. And then, in the November or December of my final year, the theory part of the course just completely ignited me. And I thought, my god, this is just really, really, really interesting, and it was all about deconstruction.’ He went on to describe how, when he realised he didn’t want to stop academic work, he sought guidance from Professor Richard Hogg, who immediately told him to apply to do a Masters at either Southampton, or Sussex, since Eaglestone was so interested in theory. He chose Southampton and then ‘I applied for a British Academy grant and, amazingly, I got one – I was the last person in the world with a 2.1 to get a British Academy grant! And the course was amazing and I never looked back. It was like being lit up inside. I was so excited by it‘. From ‘being lit up’ in his final year, he worked incredibly hard for his finals (but only got that 2:1) and then carried on pushing himself through the summer and his first semester of the MA degree, after which he slowed down considerably, from tiredness. Masters completed, he returned home and worked for a year. I asked what his parents made of his next decision to go on and do a PhD and become a lecturer.
Features He took a deep breath and chose his words carefully: ‘In the end it was all lovely, but they didn’t think I would do it. They were quite pleased that I was interested and so on, but I found school very hard: I’m dyslexic and my mother said that they would write on my gravestone “good ideas, bad presentation“. We both laugh at this. ‘And my three sisters and my brother are all extremely clever and they all went off to Oxford and they all found schooling quite easy and did really well, and I found it terribly, terribly hard. And I think my family thought that I would try and then, you know …’ He trails off, thinking about his family with palpable affection and bemusement, ‘… but of course that’s one of the reasons you do it, to show you can,’ he says, referring to his PhD. ‘But not just that, of course. The thing about being lit up on the inside was that it was all just so interesting. I was addicted.’ So, while working for a library, he saw a postgraduate teaching assistantship advertised at Lampeter, applied, received and accepted it. ‘There is very little for a graduate student to do in Lampeter except work, so I worked and worked really hard and had a fantastic supervisor, Lawrence Normand. With some friends, I set up an interdisciplinary seminar group that met every two weeks and read things. I spent lots of time in the Philosophy department. I did a course on Heidegger with a philosopher called David Walford. We read Being and Time, often page by page, sometimes paragraph by paragraph and occasionally line by line. And sometimes just word by word. It was life-changing.’
Lonely and miserable But Eaglestone did not get a job on finishing, so he stayed on and taught part-time in the English and Philosophy departments, recalling that it was ‘a bit lonely and miserable’, because many of his friends had left. By his second year out, he did what so many have to do, which is eke out a living wage by doing temporary contract teaching at several universities: ‘I moved to London and I taught at Middlesex, Royal Holloway, Westminster and then, in the second term of that year, I had a three-month contract in Hull and I carried on teaching at Royal Holloway. I’d teach at Royal Holloway on Monday and then go to Hull on Tuesday on the very earliest train.’
Perhaps not surprisingly, by the time the summer came, Eaglestone was again suffering from exhaustion, but this time it was much worse. ‘I went to the doctor in the end. And I think back and see that’s when I went, as it were, physically from being in my twenties to being in my thirties. It was really quite frightening, as all I could do for about six weeks was sleep, and it was just because I’d been working so hard: over that year, I’d also written my book.’ Before his post at Royal Holloway, he had doggedly applied for well over a hundred jobs: ‘I didn’t get
Loving the academic life It sounds like, I remark, that even in the ‘dark years’ and through all the struggle that the idea of the research and doing the research remained energising. ‘Oh I loved the research. I meet people who say “oh, I hated my PhD”, and I understand that, because it can be a terrible process, but I still loved it and still love the research and still love the life of it, because that’s the heart of what we do. My three awful years taught me to be
The essay is where English – and other subjects too – do what they do. You go from this mass of information, feelings and complex things all buzzing about in your head and you have to turn it into a clear bit of thought or a clear bit of writing. That’s the trick, isn’t it? any of them. And every time I didn’t get a job it felt worse and worse. I remember not getting a job at one particular university after what I thought had been a good interview and I just ended up lying in a meadow near my parent’s house looking at the sky for ages. I remember feeling “this is just awful, simply awful”. I asked whether, at those moments, he ever thought about doing something else?
cynical about universities and not to trust anything until it’s there on a bit of paper in front of you. And it taught me to be very keen to meet lots of people and to try and work out what the secret rules are, to work out what’s expected of you. And then to try to achieve what’s expected of you. One of the things that makes me quite cross is that at the end-of-PhD stage,
‘What I said to myself was, if I hadn’t got a job by the end of the calendar year (itt was hing 1997), I would give up and do something d my else. I was still living like a student and future wife was supporting us and it was e just really, really tough. Then I got the e interview at Royal Holloway and there were nine candidates, including me, all really able people. But when the panel asked, “what are your research plans?” I was able to say, “my book is coming out in September”, because I had made certain I had written it, and I’m sure that was the clinching thing. And that’s why I say to people just coming out that, in this really competitive job market, you have to have your PhD and have your book or, at least, your book contract.’
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Features people aren’t often told how actually to do things. You’re told get a book contract but no one says, for example, this is how you actually write a book proposal. So one of the things I really enjoy doing is talking to graduate students or people who have just
the opportunity to see him teach, which he executed with the same ebullience and conviction with which we were now discussing his days as a student. So I asked him when he became excited about teaching.
I applied for a British Academy grant and amazingly I got one – I was the last person in the world with a 2.1 to get a British Academy grant! And the course was amazing and I never looked back. It was like being lit up inside. finished and saying “look this is how you do a book proposal, here’s the process, bang, bang, bang”. I love doing that, I think it’s important and we don’t do it enough. I think some people have no idea about the enormous stress and difficulty around getting an academic job. Indeed, some colleagues see not getting a job as a sign that you are not quite clever enough, and that’s just not true.’ Having gained a sense of Eaglestone’s scholarly beginnings, I steered our conversation onto the topic of his teaching. A few years ago, I had
‘One part of the answer, which is going to sound awful, is that my mother was a wonderful, wonderful teacher. So I find that bit of teaching, being in the classroom, being enthusiastic and listening to people, I find that very easy.’ Worried that this indeed sounds bad, he explains that both of his parents were educators: his mother taught general studies at a comprehensive and his father taught modern history and international relations. He learned a lot from watching his mother teach, which he often observed when he went along to her night classes and hearing her talk about teaching. One can understand why it feels like teachin is in his blood. ‘Occasionally I teaching ne get nervous, because I have to lecture to 200 nineteen year olds, and they’re looki at the style of your shoes looking w or whatever. But, in general, I love doin seminars and watching them doing thin and talk and argue with each think oth other.’
Slow reading Sl R Regarding the specifics of E Eaglestone’s pedagogical approach, he told me about the slow reading he practices with both undergraduates and postgraduates. ‘One has quite a lot of different tools in your toolbox, obviously, and one of the things I am a great fan of doing is reading something closely – often with a bit of theory, which works well.
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You go through it and try and disentangle the knot of meaning with a paragraph. If you can go through it with a group, you can untangle the whole thing, or at least begin to untangle the whole thing, or at least start to teach them how they might do it. So one thing I do – that I learned from David Walford – is to literally number each paragraph and try and work out, slowly, what’s going on in each paragraph – particularly in a theory or philosophy text – and then you can, as it were, break down the argument. In a lecture on Gender Trouble, I’ll say, “there are 33 paragraphs in this section and we are going to go through and see what each paragraph is saying. That way you will get a sense of the argument and also what bits say something and what bits don’t”; you can go through and see in which paragraphs the argument is being done and which paragraphs are just colouring it in or nuancing it.’ Does the technique of slow reading have a knock-on effect in terms of student writing and their ability to construct an argument, I ask. ‘Well, the thing that I try to do with students one-on-one (we have individual essay feedback sessions at Royal Holloway), is to concentrate on the structure of their essays. So when you have a student who has written a poor essay, I walk them through what they did – the five basic steps of thinking about the question, researching, planning, writing, editing – and, through conversation, find out at which stage it went wrong. Sometimes they have gone about the work in the wrong way, or don’t know how to do the researching bit. But it’s often the link between the researching and the planning. They haven’t sat down and thought it through, they haven’t structured it … it is always about structuring the essay, because I think that’s where English – and other subjects too – do what they do. You go from this mass of information, feelings and complex things all buzzing about in your head and you have to turn it into a clear bit of thought or a clear bit of writing. That’s the trick, isn’t it?’ Learning how to coax out a clear bit of writing, accessible to A-Level students and first-year university students is something Eaglestone learned when he wrote his textbook Doing English, which is now recommended by an A-Level exam board for advanced students.
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Royal Holloway, Egham, Surrey.
Advice for early career lecturers Since that seems like a crucial skill to have, I ask if he recommends that early career lecturers balance writing their monograph books and writing textbooks? ‘No, no, my advice would be to get your PhD monograph out as soon as possible. That’s your calling card. After that, well, I think the discipline of writing a textbook is really good. I found it really clarifying both for my mind and for my prose style. But if you don’t want to do that, you shouldn’t. Some people like working in research groups, some people like working by themselves, some people like going to archives, some people like to go to conferences, some people like to write for newspapers, there’s lots of different ways to be an academic. But I would advise graduate students to get out and meet and talk to as many people as possible. The more people you meet the better.’ In fact, Eaglestone attributes his current Fellowship, in part, to academic networking. He explains that when you do things, such as review books for presses, or meet people at panels at conferences or simply follow-up on contacts given to you by your supervisor, you meet people. If you are a jolly and pragmatic soul, as Eaglestone is, you keep in touch with these people, not for the sake of it, but
because, together, you have forged some sort of an intellectual connection. Then, when opportunities come up, one has a pool of candidates to suggest, and, likewise, they might suggest your name when an opportunity arises in their part of the world. A ‘networky friend’, as Eaglestone termed it, did just that with the Flemish Academy Fellowship: they put Eaglestone’s name forward and he was subsequently invited to apply.
The next big thing There are other lessons, as well, and not just for those at the start of their career. ‘I appreciate that many people feel grim about universities, but I’m actually very chipper about working in higher education, although I do wish someone had taught me how not to tread on toes. It is important to learn how to strike a balance between the world of ideas and the hierarchies of higher education. In the republic of letters, our ideas will be all that matters, but, for now, gender, class and status still come into play.’ When asked what lies ahead for English studies, Eaglestone declared that one never knows what’s coming next, because English is always evolving as a discipline. ‘The glorious amazing thing about English is its unpredictability. Ten years ago, if we had said Creative Writing is the next big thing
no one would have believed us.’ But, he, warned, ‘I think English should work to preserve its openness to new ideas.’ Eaglestone seems genuinely energised by the scholars he surrounds himself with, whether in Egham or Brussels, or running international seminars at the British Council headquarters in London. Despite the mass of books, articles and edited volumes to his name, he hopes he has, in his words, what might be ‘a really clever book’ gestating. The book he is looking forward to writing is ‘a book which says what I think. And, every now and again, I can just see what the shape of it might be, over the horizon. I might not reach it, but that’s what I’d really like to do‘. Despite Eaglestone’s acknowledged enthusiasm and energy in the classroom, and despite his palpable love of a well-told tale, I imagine his students most value his sensitivity and humbleness as a teacher. The best class he ever taught, he tells me, was on Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. He took attendance and said no more. He told me how he felt something in that classroom – the electricity of argument and posturing, the topic of authenticity reflected from the book onto the class – and realised the best thing to do, the absolute best thing, would be to let his students do the talking, all of it.
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Keeping Your Balance: Creative Writing and part-time teaching As the keynote speaker at ‘Creative Writing and Part-time Teaching: no longer just an apprenticeship’, Maggie Butt gave the following presentation on the difficulties and pleasures of juggling life as a writer and a teacher. We felt strongly that her advice and comments, although aimed at the diverse group of lecturers and postgraduates in Creative Writing gathered in Cardiff in January, were useful and relevant to part-time teachers across our discipline.
I had three different titles for this talk. First, I was very tempted to appropriate my friend Helena’s title for a paper she recently gave on this subject. Her title, Can You Do Mondays?, amply, and succinctly, captures one of the major dilemmas of the parttime tutor – that you have to fit your writing and your need to earn a living around so many other people’s timetables.1 You are expected to be an expert in your field, to be a practising artist and to be able to drop everything to fit in on days which you often have no choice about. I’ll return to that. Then I decided I shouldn’t plagiarise – even as homage. So I changed the title to Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, because this is where I suspect all Creative Writing academics – but especially part-time tutors – live. The Devil, on the one hand, is not having enough money to live on. The Deep Blue Sea is not having enough time for your writing. I’m sorry to say that this problem never goes away: an old school friend of mine said to me recently, ‘It’s funny how you wanted to be a writer but you ended up being a manager.’ I could have explained to him that poetry is writing, but I actually just felt rather sick and pointed out that we have two daughters to support.
The Devil can be kept at bay with a salary, but the cost is the weight of bureaucracy and the expectations of an evermore demanding employer. So maybe I’ve sold my soul? There are times when the part-time life seems attractive, then I remember the difficulties, because I worked part-time for many years while my kids were small. Let’s reiterate the problems: • the uncertainty – will you have a contract next term or next semester? • the holidays, that vast swathe of time without any income • the time it takes to plan, prepare classes and mark work • student access – students can see full-time staff outside class time, and they expect that they can see you too and you may feel bad about turning them down. With e-mail, students think they can have access to you at all hours of the day, all days of the week. It’s no good telling them you are only paid for four hours a week, on a Monday. • no office space, or hot-desking, having to meet students in the canteen • the difficulty of claiming pay
1 ‘Part-time’, ‘hourly paid’ and ‘visiting lecturer’ are all names for the same thing. Research shows that the lecturers themselves prefer to be called Visiting Lecturers.
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Features • the danger of working over the odds to prove how great you are, so your employers ask you back again, or so you can cite your achievements in future job applications, or so you can prove your worth in a Visiting Lecturer to Associate Lecturer conversion • the difficulty of teaching a module designed by someone else • giving adequate support to students who begin to write emotionally difficult content • pay is low when you’ve factored in preparation and marking time, and money earned can easily be eaten up in travel costs and the need to buy books, so you might agree to squeeze more classes into a day than is really sensible • a feeling of invisibility, that part-timers don’t get to take part in the normal processes of departmental decision making, even though they are essential staff • gender issues – there may be more women than men trying to juggle part-time teaching with caring responsibilities • the ‘can you do Mondays’ problem, of trying to negotiate the timetables of, often, two or more employers • not just time, but the energy and headspace which teaching takes from your creative self And here’s the inherent conundrum – you are being hired because you are a writer, but, because you’ve been hired, you don’t have enough time to write. We often hear about ‘work/life balance’, and, for most people, this is a dual-aspect problem, but for us as writers/teachers, it’s a triple problem – we have to balance work, life and writing. This is balancing on a three-legged stool. When I told my husband this, he said, ‘Ah, but a tripod is the most stable structure.’ I’m not an engineer, but that idea of stability is also a psychological one, and those of us who are afflicted with the writing bug need to have all three things operating to feel psychologically stable. Some research was done a few years ago which established that ‘being a writer’ was as central to our image of ourselves as our gender. It is what we are, who we are, and we have to be able to sustain that part of ourselves. So back to the title of this talk, Keeping Your Balance. That’s what we have to work out how to do. Unless we write bestsellers (and definitely not poetry) we have to have a job – Larkin chose libraries, Trollope chose the Post Office. They didn’t have the option of teaching Creative Writing. But we do, and I think it’s an excellent choice. For many years, artists and musicians have supported themselves by passing on their craft, and I think it’s probably the best solution we can devise. I’ll tell you why, but, first of all, some number crunching. Here’s the good news: in 1990 there were a few MAs in Creative Writing in the UK. The first BA started in 1990. Now we have dozens of MAs, and undergraduate courses in 79 universities. Numbers
are quite hard to come by, but we may have as many as 400 current PhD students across the country. We are a growth industry. According to HESA figures, there are 6,465 Creative Writing students in the UK. I suspect that’s an underestimate. The government continues to press for an increase in the number of undergraduates across all disciplines. The ratio of full-time staff to students has fallen across the country. At the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), we are working hard on the development of a Creative Writing A Level. That will mean more need for writers in schools, but could also further boost the numbers of BA students and tutors for the teachers in the schools. And the Internet has opened up the possibilities still further. I am the External Examiner for the Open University’s outstanding online Creative Writing courses. In the year it was first offered, they had over 2,000 students enrol. This year, they have 259 tutors across the country. And the programme is rolling out year by year, up to MA level. So the need for tutors will grow, there and at the Open College of the Arts. These online tutoring jobs have one great advantage of course – they overcome the ‘can you do Mondays’ problem. You log on when you want to. If you prefer to get up in the morning and write, you can choose to be a part-time tutor in the afternoons. It’s sometimes assumed that part-time lecturers are full-time lecturers in waiting, undertaking a teaching apprenticeship, but for many people it’s a life choice, so they can continue their writing. You may well not want to take up formal administrative roles and get into my managerial predicament.
Maggie Butt is head of the Media department at Middlesex University, London, where she has been teaching Creative Writing since 1990 at undergraduate and postgraduate level. She is also Chair of NAWE. Her first poetry collection Lipstick and her edited collection of essays Story – The Heart of the Matter were both published in 2007.
Here’s the inherent conundrum – you are being hired because you are a writer, but, because you’ve been hired, you don’t have enough time to write. Creative Writing will continue to depend heavily on part-time staff, but there is ongoing debate about who should be teaching Creative Writing in higher education and what qualifications should be required. In many ways, it’s still a fledgling subject in this country, and, as we only produced the benchmarking statements this year (see references), we are still working out what the qualifications ought to be. Some universities have discovered that having a big name writer on the books will increase student numbers, which boosts the income, and, in a happy circle, creates more work for part-timers. Many big-name writers are very good and understand the needs of academia, but some are less fully engaged with, for example, the careful work which has gone on into developing rigorous assessment criteria. At the other end of the scale, I know a number of people who are brilliant teachers and editors, who aren’t writers themselves at all, but who know how to bring out the best in their students. And in the middle are the growing number of writers who are
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Features working part-time. Many of them have BAs in English literature, although a growing number have studied Creative Writing at undergraduate level. Quite a lot have MAs in Creative Writing. Many are aware that the entry level to higher education teaching for older subjects, like English and history, is the PhD, so lots are combining their own writing with getting a qualification, by taking a practice-based doctorate, where their own writing is the object of study. So what is, or should be, the entry qualification to work as a
time for if we were earning a living in a less complicated way, like working in McDonald’s, and certainly provides more intellectual stimulation. We know that writing, is essentially, solitary, but this job keeps us in touch with a community of writers who understand this strange compulsion, with all its attendant joys and disappointments. Lecturing in higher education is still an occupation with a high degree of autonomy, which suits creative people. The difficulty of managing our time makes us more disciplined and
Find out how you can avail yourself of university training and staff development. Ask about the criteria for visiting lecturer to associate lecturer conversion. Creative Writing tutor – do you have to be a published writer (and what constitutes ‘published’ – is it a few poems or is it three novels?) or could you be an unpublished writer (you are still a writer – it’s still who you are) who has a PhD in Creative Writing and really understands the academic subject? My sense is that we are moving towards a greater professionalisation of this as an academic career, and, in the future, we will be hoping to find tutors who are published, who have teaching experience and who have an MA in the subject, so understand from both angles the questions of academic progression. With grade inflation, that MA may soon become a PhD. Increasingly, universities are expecting their staff to have a teaching qualification – a Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education (PGCHE). Should people who are working hard to gain those qualifications be pipped at the post by best-selling authors without any understanding of the subject discipline? I’ve talked about the problems and the debates. Let’s take a minute to think about the advantages. The first is that the teaching feeds your own writing. We can learn from the mistakes of students and be inspired by the work of our students. It makes us search out examples, keeps us extending our own reading (and we know how reading feeds our writing – if only we could persuade all our students of this). It enables us to think and talk about writing in a way we might not have
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focussed as writers, making better use of our writing time. And one of the greatest things for me is the pleasure of sharing what we know, and seeing emergent writers bloom under our care, in many cases giving them what we wish we’d had ourselves when we were starting out. So I think part-time teaching can be a wonderful way of getting this three-legged stool to balance, and Creative Writing departments gain enormously from the energy and enthusiasm of visiting lecturers who aren’t burdened with administrative tasks and RAE or Enterprise expectations. There are a number of things which parttimers can do to help this to work even better. First of all, make an appointment to talk to your head of department: ask for a peer teaching observation so you can find out how to improve your teaching; ask if you can observe permanent staff teaching (I love doing peer observations – I always learn something); ask if you could have an appraisal; tell them what other things you could teach; if the timing is right, ask them to include your details in module and programme handbooks so students see you as a real member of the department. Find out how you can avail yourself of university training and staff development. Ask about the criteria for visiting lecturer to associate lecturer conversion. Find out if your institution offers part-timers a right to funding for research and staff development. Think about working with other part-timers and volunteering on
a rota basis to attend meetings. If you are new, make sure you understand the assessment expectations of your programme, and ask to see marked work from the last assessment point. Ask if you can be added to distribution lists so you know what’s going on in the department. Ask for a mentor. Make friends with the administrative staff and caretakers. Offer to debrief at the end of the module so the programme leader knows what was good. Find out if you can get reduced rates on the PGCHE course or other training sessions, so you can increase your employability. Second, make sure you understand your rights as a part-time employee. Find out about your right to holiday and maternity pay, join UCU, the College and University lecturers‘ trade union. They campaign actively for part-time staff. Third, read and download the English Subject Centre’s excellent resources for part-timers, Part-time Teaching: A Good Practice Guide, and Creative Writing: A Good Practice Guide. Also have a look at Robert Sheppard’s report on the role of critical discourses in teaching and learning Creative Writing on the English Subject Centre website tinyurl.com//cheolz. Fourth, join NAWE, or, better still, persuade your employers to take out institutional membership, so you get copies of our journal, Writing in Education, and a reduced rate for our annual conference. Fifth, find out about the organisation literaturetraining, which offers the most comprehensive service to enable you to take charge of your own career development. Finally, and most importantly, somehow carve out the time and space to keep writing. It’s who you are, and it’s what will keep you stable and ensure that you keep your balance.
References NAWE – The National Association of Writers in Education www.nawe.co.uk Creative Writing Teaching and Research Benchmark Statements www.tinyurl.com/d4foqv literaturetraining www.literaturetraining.com
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One Part-timer’s View Emma Hardy, University of Salford I began teaching in 2007, and, in a relatively short space of time, I have developed a portfolio of rewarding part-time teaching jobs and I’ve established the work/life-/writing balance, that Maggie Butt describes as our ‘three-legged stool’. Since fellow part-timers are often surprised that I have a positive relationship with the higher education institutions I work for, I decided to try to capture what works well for me at the University of Salford. The key issue for many Creative Writing part-timers is the difference between how we view our role and how our institutions do. Part-timers in Creative Writing are writers who teach, so teaching part-time is, increasingly, a positive choice for us, rather than settling for second best. Since most writers do not earn enough from their writing to survive, there’s no way of skirting round the fact that part-timers teach for the cold hard cash. Yet we are passionate about teaching Creative Writing and can instil in our students the enthusiasm and focus of the jobbing writer. Like other part-timers, I work at several institutions, including Salford and the Open University. I also teach in community and adult education, in schools and on residential courses. I work to my own timetable and have an ever-changing portfolio; teaching within HE is just one part of my job as a freelance Creative Writing tutor.
Good practice Colleagues at the English Subject Centre event in January raised a number of issues that I haven’t had to deal with at Salford. What does this institution do to makes things so much easier? Colleagues have been keen to give me their time and support. In return, I have given my time and dedication to the role. It is a two-way process; the part-timer needs the institution and the institution needs the part-timer. Contractual issues are the prime worry for part-timers. I have my contract for the year established at the start of semester one. Additional work may be offered at the start of semester two – without any pressure for me to take the offer up. My colleagues treat my time with respect; I can request that my teaching work is allocated on certain days of the week and I know that my request will be accommodated if possible. There’s more to teaching than the time spent in the classroom, and this is acknowledged by Salford by allocating office hours per module in my contract, alongside teaching and marking hours. Being in the loop is vital. I attend departmental team meetings on an unpaid basis, but then colleagues do try to schedule them to take place on days when I am on campus and would otherwise be on a break. I’ve also been paid to attend non-teaching events, found out about other work and been offered funded places at conferences on the back of my enthusiasm for my role and my willingness to be involved with the department. I believe my ‘going beyond the essential’ approach to teaching and working as a part-timer has helped me to progress quickly.
At Salford, each member of the Creative Writing team is viewed primarily a writer. We have readings of all tutors’ writing each semester. Information about the creative work of all team members is promoted to students and via the university intranet. The department has its own Creative Writing workshop group which gives us the opportunity to appreciate one another’s approach to writing. We attend productions and readings of each other’s work whenever possible. In addition to the advice provided by Maggie Butt, there are a few other key points I have for departments and individuals in a part-time relationship:
Key points for departments • Allocate your part-timer a tray in the post room and give hem a proper e-mail address. A student isn’t going to be filled with confidence if they have to e-mail next week’s assignment to ‘temp876@youruni.ac.uk’. • Make bookable rooms/offices available for part-timers to use, if required. • On initial appointment, provide your part-timer with your assessment procedures, including samples of marked work. • Provide practical information with your part-timer’s contract. Give your part-timer an administrative guide to the department. How else will thet know where to get their timesheets processed, who the school administrator is and where the photocopiers are hidden? • Put photographs of your staff up on a wall near the faculty office. Putting a face to a name helps all members of the department.
Key points for part-timers • Let your colleagues know you want to attend team meetings; they will appreciate your input. You can’t raise issues that you have come across as a part-timer if you aren’t there to do so. • Attend campus events and meetings and use them to demonstrate how you are an involved, dedicated member of staff. • Ask if there is a discretionary fund to attend external courses, such as English Subject Centre or NAWE events. When you can, go along, even if you won’t be paid for doing so. • Have other work you can fall back on should teaching work dry up for a semester: exam invigilating, support tutoring and personal tutoring are popular choices. • Know your university and make use of the services and facilities available to you such as IT facilities, libraries, sports centre and health services.
WordPlay • Issue 1 • April 2009 17
Letters On receiving my copy of Issue 15 of The English Subject Centre Newsletter, I was pleased to see an article entitled ‘Black British Literature in British Universities: A 21st-century Reality?’ My area of expertise is Black British writing and I teach works by Black British authors on three undergraduate modules at Nottingham Trent University. It was with some surprise, therefore, that I read in the article that only South Bank, Warwick, Leeds and Edinburgh universities offer options to study Black British, or postcolonial, literatures. Black British literature has been taught at Nottingham Trent University for the past 20 years. In the English department alone, aside from several modules that feature Black British writing alongside other British writing (for example, a ‘Twentieth-Century Texts’ module includes literature by Bernardine Evaristo, Olive Senior and Fred D’Aguiar), we offer two relevant undergraduate modules: ‘Black Writing in Britain’ and ‘Postcolonial Texts’ (the latter includes a unit on Black British writing). Both modules are very popular, attracting a high number of students each year. While I concur with many of the points raised in the article, I wonder if a more thorough investigation into modules taught at British universities may have unearthed similar modules elsewhere? Dr Abigail Ward Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies Centre for the Study of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies Nottingham Trent University
I am very grateful indeed to Candi Miller for her thoughtful review of my book, The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived, English Subject Centre Newsletter 15, October 2008). I’d like to correct one error, and respond to her comments about what she thinks I have left out. First, I am, indeed, seriously taking Creative Writing to task for its isolationism. Creative Writing regularly rejects (or is suspicious of) the work of English departments and the (controversial, sure) intellectual achievements of theory, while claiming that Creative Writing can ‘teach’ it all just as well, if not better. This is what I mean by ‘colonisation’. Second, Miller is absolutely right that I don’t take account of ‘large-group Creative Writing teaching’. Whatever method is used, Creative Writing puts great stress on students’ practical work, and this can only be done in a seminarsize group. While universities glory in the popularity of Creative Writing, teachers then have to argue for manageable-size classes. My outline of alternative approaches does not include addressing technology, since it is mainly concerned with contact teaching in groups. However, as a teacher on a distance learning MA in Creative Writing, I would praise whole-heartedly the value of work conducted in writing, on the page, via e-mail, between teacher and student. It gives me a chance to respond to the work submitted (not in workshop fashion!) and raise appropriate related writerly and theoretical issues, and it also enables the student to have material to consult, keep, and build up as a record of the pedagogic exchange. There is no reason why this couldn’t form part of undergraduate procedures, particularly in relation to students’ third-year dissertations. Michelene Wandor, London
Working with Secondary Schools a guide for higher education English This first in our new series of ‘Seed Guides’ provides ideas and inspiration for ways to work with those teaching and studying English in the secondary sector. The new A-Level specifications have created an excellent opportunity for schools, colleges and HEIs to build new relationships of mutual benefit, and this guide encourages thinking about the best ways of doing this. The Guide provides just enough information to ‘get you going’, and is illustrated with examples from current practice. It also contains a briefing on secondary qualifications and sources of further advice and information. The Guide is available in PDF format from the Publications area of our website www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/index.php or in print form by e-mailing esc@rhul.ac.uk. Further ‘Seed Guides’ are being ‘germinated’ to help lecturers looking for fresh ideas or pointers in an unfamiliar area.
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Newsletter 15
‘ The Teaching the New English series is a welcome and timely contribution to the changing canon, curriculum, and classroom practice of English in higher education. Imaginatively conceived and professionally edited, the series will be required reading for instructors in English studies worldwide.’ – Professor Elaine Showalter, Professor Emerita of English, Princeton University, USA, and Author of Teaching Literature
NEW!
This innovative new series is concerned with the teaching of the English degree in universities in the UK and elsewhere. The series addresses new and developing areas of the curriculum as well as more traditional areas that are reforming in new contexts. Although the series is grounded in intellectual and theoretical concepts of the curriculum, it is concerned with the practicalities of classroom teaching. The volumes will be invaluable for new and more experienced teachers alike. Published in association with the English Subject Centre. Series Editor: C. B. Knights
All titles in the Teaching the New English series are available at the special discounted price of £12.99 each + postage and packing (RRP £16.99). Just enter the code WTEACH08a into the promotional box on the checkout page when you order from www.palgrave.com
WordPlay • Issue 1 • April 2009 19
Creative Pedagogies
Connotations and Conjunctions: research on English studies at Brighton Amidst plans for changes in how English is delivered, a University of Brighton research project explores how lecturers and students conceptualise the discipline. ‘How is English conceptualised as a discipline and how does this, or should this, feed into the ways it is delivered and developed in universities?’ This was the question asked, in 2007, by the University of Brighton’s Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT). Semi-structured interviews with English lecturers and student focus groups revealed how they saw English as a discipline, how it is taught at Brighton and how its delivery is organised now and might be in the future. Supported by a grant from the English Subject Centre, we set out to document the development of a new discipline identity of English at Brighton and to map the institutional and disciplinary traditions which led to its current state. The impetus for this research project was a transitional moment for English at the University of Brighton, which provided a rare opportunity to explore these questions. The history of English at Brighton saw it first established within the School of Education as part of a teaching degree, and later as part of joint honours degrees and interdisciplinary courses in three other schools. In 2006, a Steering Group was set up to guide and inform the strategic development of English at the university. The Group is progressing plans to integrate English across three of the four schools where it is taught, with the aim of promoting a clear identity for the subject, more coherent course structures,and a strong community of students and staff sharing and developing understandings about the nature of the subject, its epistemology, its threshold concepts, its worldviews and its practice. We saw this as a golden opportunity to research the subject’s identity.
English as a discipline The broader context for our research is the increasingly diverse and interdisciplinary nature of English in UK universities, attributed partly to the increasingly central role of literary theory (Eaglestone, 2000a). Is this breadth and plurality a problem?
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Cartmell and North (2000) argue that ‘the very fact that so many English departments are in the process of restructuring their curricula may itself suggest a neurosis about what constitutes “standards”‘. Childs (2005: 33) talks about the ’importance of English developing a better narrative about itself’, and, Eaglestone (2000b: 7) draws attention to the ’inherent conflict and incommensurability between many of the different strands that make up English’, and argues that ‘there is no “metalanguage” of criticism, no one strand that explains and justifies all the other strands’.
The way lecturers at Brighton talked about English reflected this broad definition, an English with very permeable boundaries. But Eaglestone goes on to argue that we should not worry about this ‘lack of a core’, the way that ‘English has become so plural, so ”undisciplinary”. Eaglestone compares English to a thread made up of many overlapping fibres: ‘Being made of different fibres may make it hard – or impossible – to write critical guides for the whole subject, but it does make it a much stronger subject, institutionally speaking, not least because it makes it more open to change’ (8). The way lecturers at Brighton talked about English reflected this broad definition, an English with very permeable boundaries. I’m not a great respecter of discipline boundaries. I think they are there to be broken down (Lecturer 3).
Creative Pedagogies Some lecturers expressed excitement at the possibilities for developing teaching and research relationships with colleagues in other schools and discipline areas and developing new approaches to the study of ’English’. But lecturers who teach English in Education state that inescapable boundaries exist around their courses because of the requirements of external agencies and strategies such as Ofsted guidelines and the National Curriculum, and the need for standardisation in the training of English teachers. And one lecturer implied that having too broad a definition of English sometimes causes problems by introducing conflicting and competing ideas and interests: … there are lots of sorts of subjects dancing round the edge of English, which maybe causes more trouble because it’s quite difficult to get people working in harmony together with the same vision, and, in fact, I don’t think people have the same vision in our department. But, at the moment, things are … going quite smoothly, but people definitely have different interests in what they would perceive as English (Lecturer 1).
‘Research, ha! ... [we] have such a high teaching workload that we have very, very limited opportunity to research …‘ However, the majority of lecturers we spoke to in the Schools of Languages and Education do conceptualise English as being, in essence, a focus on the study of texts – written and otherwise – and on the study of language, with both text and language seen as socially located. … it’s about language as a social process … language acquisition, the process of becoming interactive and the importance of ... [students making] connections between themselves as language users, readers, writers and speakers … (Lecturer 10). In the School of Historical and Critical Studies, English, especially the study of literary and other texts, is taught as one element of two interdisciplinary courses. Despite not seeing or teaching ‘English’ as a discrete discipline, lecturers broadly shared a similar definition of English to other lecturers in the university, but with more emphasis on the benefits of interdisciplinarity for the study of texts: I find working in an interdisciplinary way incredibly energising and interesting … it opens up so many new doors … (Lecturer 8).
Threshold concepts To help reveal the shape of this ‘fuzzy’, ‘undisciplinary’ subject, as it is taught at Brighton, we drew upon the theory of threshold concepts introduced by Meyer and Land (2003). Meyer and Land explain threshold concepts as critical points when students make ‘learning leaps’, when they move their work beyond descriptive fact-finding, to conceptual levels of understanding. These ‘aha’ moments, or ‘new ways of seeing’, represent ‘leaps of faith’ beyond their comfort zones when students acquire new perspectives on the subject and their own work. Thus, they experience conceptual paradigm shifts regarding their studies and themselves. Drawing on evidence from several subjects, Meyer and Land consider threshold concepts to be: • ‘transformative’ – leading to significant, and probably irreversible, shifts in perception • ‘integrative’ – exposing previously hidden interrelatedness of something • ‘bounded’ – bordering into new conceptual areas • ‘troublesome’ – conceptually difficult, counterintuitive or alien In our research, we asked lecturers if they knew what was meant by threshold concepts and explained our view of them as ‘key concepts which must be recognised and overcome by students in order to progress in the subject and on their course; places where ”learning leaps” take place, or where the ”penny drops“; ideas which change the way students look at the subject and inform their reading and work afterwards'. The idea seemed to chime with their experiences and to be thought-provoking: It’s not a concept itself that I have thought of directly, but when you put it to me like that it really did set me thinking about the key moment or the key ideas (Lecturer 8). We gathered particularly rich data on this area of the research. Many of the lecturers we spoke to spent considerable time explaining the multiple threshold concepts on their courses:
Gina Wisker is Director of the Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) at the University of Brighton and a lecturer in English and Women’s Studies. She has worked in educational development since the early 1980s, specialising in postgraduate student learning and supervisory practices. In English, she specialises in women’s and postcolonial writing. Recent books include Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature (2007).
Maria Antoniou was Senior Research Fellow at the CLT until 2008. Her publications include ‘What can academic writers learn from creative writers? Developing guidance and support for lecturers in higher education’, (with J. Moriarty, Teaching in Higher Education, 2008).
… they have to get to grips with the theory of ideology because it’s the absolutely core concept that helps them to theorise the relationship between literature and society (Lecturer 11). … language is central to identity and culture …because language is so tied up with making sense of life and making sense of experience, then they need to understand the diversity of human experience (Lecturer 10). Other threshold concepts they identified included the social context and construction of texts and language; intertextuality; the reading process and critical literacy; representation and signification; enquiry and research and the engaged learner.
Stuart Cameron is a Research Officer at the CLT. He works with CLT and other colleagues on research into learning and teaching in higher education.
WordPlay • Issue 1 • April 2009 21
Creative Pedagogies Lecturers also testified to the transformative effects of threshold crossing; for instance, one heard a student describe the impact of learning critical literacy: ... she said, ‘It’s really funny, I watch TV in a different way now‘ (Lecturer 6).
The coupling of English with other disciplines in joint degrees was identified as a strength at Brighton However, the majority of lecturers discussed the problems students had with grasping these threshold ideas, and especially in making the transition from A Level to university level conceptualisation. … what they tended to focus on was what they’d done at A Level ... So they tended to tell me what Joseph Conrad or, you know, Dan Brown did … What they didn’t do was engage with the conceptual landscape, ie the concept of intertextuality (Lecturer 7).
English at Brighton: strengths, weaknesses and the future The lecturers we interviewed praised the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of English at Brighton, and noted the enthusiasm of their colleagues and of students. Some praised the pedagogically sound and innovative practices resulting from having roots in the School of Education, while others regretted the traditional lack of emphasis on research: I’m conscious of pedagogy when I’m teaching literature. ... I think that’s the plus of having Education people teach literature, hopefully it’s more interesting and not just some boring old fart standing up there and talking all the time. I try to make it interactive and I’m conscious of their learning outcomes (Lecturer 7). Research, ha! ... [we] have such a high teaching workload that we have very, very limited opportunity to research … (Lecturer 10). The coupling of English with other disciplines in joint degrees was identified as a strength at Brighton, although some suggested that current organisation and delivery of joint degrees, and communication between the various schools and lecturers, could be improved. ... the fact that English is always with half another subject is a good thing, because it gets synergies from those other subjects … actually, it is going to give English a particular strength here because it is always in dialogue with those other subjects, and I think that relates to the development (Lecturer 5). I think the downside is that the students often don’t see a great deal of connectiveness between the subjects they’re doing English with … I think they get a sense that it’s almost a different kind of protocol, different approaches to the nature of higher educational study … (Lecturer 6).
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Concerning future plans for English at Brighton, there was a notable lack of agreement among the lecturers. A few expressed a desire for a single base or department for English, particularly for English literature. Lecturers in the School of Historical and Critical Studies, which is located on a different site from the other schools where English is taught, were keen to preserve their interdisciplinary way of working and to discuss ways in which they could work with other schools more.
What the students said The students we interviewed said they mostly enjoyed their English courses, appreciating the opportunities for personal engagement, creativity, reading and learning about diverse social and personal experiences, and developing critical reading skills. … before I started the degree I’d read a book and go, “That’s a nice book”. But now I kind of look in-between the lines and think about it, and I do that more with situations in real life (Group 1). But they found the relationship between the two halves of their joint degrees difficult and confusing, in both epistemological and practical terms. Students taking English with Sociology perceived a lack of co-ordination between staff and systems on the two sides of their course. And they were particularly aware of, and uncomfortable with, the different pedagogic cultures of the two disciplines: … English is [about] my open feeling and interpretation. [They] always encourage us to write and form our own ideas and bring in our interpretations … [while in Sociology] it’s much more kind of a lecture, “Sit down and listen while we tell you the theory”, and you go off and read about it kind of thing (Group 2). These students would like to work in a more interdisciplinary way, blending the two disciplines by, for example, discussing literature in a sociological context. Student A: I don’t know if there’s been a lot of work which really looks at like a sociological perspective of a novel … or if there is then we haven’t been shown it Student B: Yeah, I think it would be better to have the module that combines that A: Yeah B: Because they keep saying, “oh there’s combined modules” but really no … A: They’re just Sociology with a little bit of English tagged on or English with a little bit of Sociology tagged on, kind of thing … I think it must be difficult as well because there doesn’t seem to be that many teachers that have shown they can do both sides equally, and I think if we had a teacher that could teach both sides, had the same knowledge in Sociology as they do in English, we’d get, I don’t know, just maybe it would work … (Group 2). All students in the focus groups said they enjoyed opportunities to bring themselves and their own opinions to their studies. They praised lecturers who were open to students’ opinions and were critical of a minority of lecturers who, they felt, rejected or derided students’ personal views. They enjoyed Creative Writing because it encourages personal engagement and develops their critical thinking and writing skills, and would have liked to do more of it.
Creative Pedagogies Reflections Debates about the state of English studies have been common since its inception. Our small scale, local study is intended to be useful to others considering the conceptualisation of the subject as it develops in the face of debates about interdisciplinarity, discipline boundaries and identities, and beyond that into personal development planning, what used to be called ‘graduate skills’, and employability. Many of the issues which lecturers and students from the University of Brighton have highlighted could be seen as common throughout the sector: issues of engaging students with threshold concepts and ways of engaging both their critical conceptual and their emotional and creative responses; issues about the transition from pre-university study to university study and the tensions between multi- and interdisciplinarity and the development of an English research culture. Others, to do with specific subject combinations and the ways in which the subject is taught, are specific to the University of Brighton, but while this provides local insights, it might also provoke thoughts about the diversity of disciplinary culture between different universities. English is certainly undergoing a moment of transformation at Brighton, in which some are reflecting their sense of liminality, a troublesome moment which brings the experience of studying the subject into a new perspective. We think many of our findings are significant for the English subject sector as a whole: the need for a coherent identity for the subject; an enhancement of the student experience in terms of identity, location and social learning; a focus on both epistemology – the knowledge creation and basis of the subject – and ontology – the identity of the subject and the identity of those studying and teaching it. We would urge colleagues in other institutions to undertake similar studies, particularly where changes in the configuration of English teaching are afoot. Our findings drew on a relatively small
sample – 11 members of staff and 10 students – and so were not necessarily representative of the staff and student body as a whole. It would have been desirable to include all staff and students, perhaps using an online survey. If repeating the study, we would also probably try and engage lecturers and students more in the development of the project, to ensure they had more ownership of it. This might mean developing an action research project, with concrete proposals to address some of the issues raised as an output. As it was, though, the findings have already been useful in informing discussion on the development of the subject. The full Connotations and Conjunctions report is available on the Subject Centre website in the project archive.
References Cartmell, D. and North, J., 2000. ‘The way forward for English studies’, CCUE News, 13. Childs, B., 2000. ‘What is an English curriculum?‘, CCUE News, 13. Eaglestone, R., 2000. Doing English, London and New York: Routledge. Eaglestone, R., 2000. ‘Undoing English’, CCUE News, 13. Meyer, J.H.F. and Land, R., 2003. ‘Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines‘, in C. Rust, Improving Student Learning: Improving Student Learning Theory and Practice – Ten Years On. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development.
Beyond the Placement: Creative Writing and employability 23 October 2008 How best to foster thinking about employability in Creative Writing programmes and modules was the subject of this well-attended English Subject Centre event, organised in collaboration with the National Association of Writers in Education higher education Committee and Artswork at Bath Spa University. Steve May, of Bath Spa, opened the day with the thought-provoking findings of his recent English Subject Centre funded mini-project, Student expectations and experience of the Creative Writing BA. A group of Bath Spa Creative Writing students then provided their own, refreshingly frank perspective on employability, and this was followed by lively small-group discussions around integrating employability into Creative Writing courses. In the afternoon, short presentations by Andrea Duncan (The University of Northampton), Martin Goodman (University of Plymouth), Georgina Lock (Nottingham Trent University), Samantha Smith (Transition Tradition) and Mimi Thebo (Bath Spa University) kick-started discussions around the role of professional development planning in enhancing employability and how to encourage students to boost their employability by making the most of opportunities while at university to gain relevant experience. While it was clear from the day that there is no single, ‘one size fits all’ approach to integrating employability into the Creative Writing curriculum, a number of key factors that can help were identified. These included the use of language – both how we talk about employability itself (‘survival skills’ or ‘paying the rent’ were offered as alternatives) and how we can help students to translate what they do during their university years into a language that employers can understand – and the importance of helping students to recognise, and value, the transferable skills they develop in a Creative Writing course. Philippa Johnston, Literaturetraining English Subject Centre
More details and information about presentations can be viewed on our website in the Events Archive.
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Creative Pedagogies
Why haven’t you got Wordsworth? Jean Sprackland describes a rich resource for both students and lecturers interested in hearing what poems sound like when their authors read them aloud.
Jean Sprackland is a poet and Education Manager for The Poetry Archive. www. jeansprackland.com
Among the many e-mails we receive at The Poetry Archive, there is occasionally one demanding to know why Wordsworth, Keats or Shakespeare are not included. How can we have overlooked such towering literary figures?
invention‘. Listening to this fragment is rather like looking at a 19th-century photograph: it’s a powerful reminder that ‘they‘ were like ‘us‘: they went to parties, got excited about new technology and forgot their lines every now and then.
Since our e-mail correspondence is largely anonymous, it’s impossible for us to know what lies behind this entertaining question. But, in its own way, it gets right to the heart of what The Poetry Archive is and why it matters.
The historic dimension to The Poetry Archive is
Recording technology is, of course, relatively young, although people are often surprised to find that we have a fragment of Robert Browning’s voice dating from 1889. This predates, by one year, the more famous recording of Tennyson reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade‘, and it’s a treasure made all the more unusual by its context: it was recorded at a dinner party, to which one of the guests has brought a phonograph. Browning is initially reluctant, but eventually relents and can be heard reciting from his poem ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix‘. Unfortunately, he forgets the words after a few lines, tries again and then gives up, but can be heard expressing his astonishment at this ‘wonderful
the voices of living poets. When a poet dies without
24 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
crucial, as it’s here that all these treasures of the past are collected together, set in context and made available to everyone who wants to hear them. Equally important is the Archive’s role in capturing making a recording, a precious resource is lost for ever, and, as time goes by, that loss is felt more and more keenly. Our e-mail correspondent is not alone in wishing to hear Keats and Byron reading their work. If only recording had been possible in the early 19th century! Yet, even in the 20th century, when recording technology became universal, there was no systematic attempt to record all significant poets for posterity, and even some major poets – Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman, for example – died without having been recorded at all. A major part of The Poetry Archive’s mission is to make sure that this never
Creative Pedagogies happens again. A continuous programme of recording significant
have always provided marvellous opportunities to hear the voices
contemporary poets means that the Archive goes on growing
of poets, but to listen to a poem whenever you like, as many
and developing, extending its range to include work in all styles
times as you like, and to explore voices of the past as well as the
and from every part of the English-speaking world. We are
present: this is a new pleasure, made possible by the Internet.
currently working in partnership with the Poetry Foundation in
There is something particularly satisfying in using the power
Chicago to add 100 American poets to the Archive, and we are
of our defining contemporary technology to revive the aural
discussing similar collaborative projects with organisations in
tradition and restore to us the imaginative joys of listening.
other countries. The Archive has made a strong start, but there is much more to do.
The Poetry Archive is accessible to all, completely free of charge. At the last count, there were 175 poets to listen to, including
Why poets reading their work? Why not get actors to do it? Some
Simon Armitage, Margaret Atwood, Sujata Bhatt, e e cummings,
actors read poems very effectively, and poets sometimes read
T S Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Kathleen Jamie,
other poets’ work with intelligence and sympathy. But The Poetry
Jackie Kay, Edwin Morgan, Les Murray, Don Paterson, Sylvia
Archive is driven by a passionate conviction that hearing a poet
Plath, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Edith
reading their work is a uniquely illuminating experience. It helps
Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Derek Walcott and W B Yeats … to name
us to understand the work as well as helping us to enjoy it. Writers
but a few. Tours and trails lead from one poet’s work to another,
have a particular right to their own work, and we are taken to a
making it a great place for independent study and research. The
deeper level of understanding by hearing how they speak it. To
website is also home to a wealth of supporting material, including
students of poetry and to all lovers of literature, such a reading is a
biographical information, filmed interviews with poets and
powerful source of insight and enjoyment.
browsers which you can use to search by theme and by poetic
Real, concentrated listening is a creative as well as an interpretative experience. Poetry began as a spoken art form, long before most people could read or write, and its internal music was vital. It was how a poem was memorised, and it was the thing that gave it colour and life. In the age of near-universal
form. In 2008, we added a unique glossary of ‘poetry vocabulary’; it contains definitions of useful terms (like ambiguity, metaphor and stanza), sound files which demonstrate the way the words are pronounced and links to real-life examples in poems. We welcome comments and suggestions, so please visit
literacy, this aural dimension has lost some of its status, so that
www.poetryarchive.org and send us an e-mail telling us what
many people encounter poetry exclusively on the page.
you think. We are especially keen to go on developing new
As Andrew Motion puts it: ‘When Frost said “the ear is the best
resources which are genuinely useful to students. But the Archive
reader“, he didn’t mean to say that he preferred the fleeting
is fundamentally about the listening experience, which is truly
voice to the substantial page, but to give them both equal
educational in itself. Our mission is to encourage people to listen
value, and to remind us how they depended on one another.‘
more widely, more adventurously and with greater enjoyment.
Seamus Heaney has spoken of that same equal valuing, of the
As the Guardian put it, ‘Every day is improved by going to The
twin pleasures of ‘reading out‘ and ‘reading into yourself‘. The
Poetry Archive‘.
two do not compete but complement one another. Live readings
Teaching Milton 7 November 2008 This day workshop at the University of Manchester’s Centre for Enquiry Based Learning (EBL), considered the teaching of Milton, with particular emphasis on the deployment of new technologies and innovative pedagogies. The panellists and contributors agreed that Milton still proved popular to a select group of undergraduates, but that some of the complex issues associated with his work and times meant that teaching Milton, while rewarding, took care and attention. The day was ably opened by Sharon Achinstein (Oxford) and Karen Edwards (Exeter), who discussed the challenges of teaching such a complex poet to undergraduates. Martin Dzelzainis (Royal Holloway) and Gordon Campbell (Leicester) then debated the consequences of interdisciplinarity to pedagogical practice, with Martin offering a particularly rich reading of a Milton sonnet as an example of the multiple concepts that would need to be communicated to a class. Two further sessions looked at ways in which e-learning and new web-based technologies could enhance teaching. Rosanna Cox (Kent) talked of her experiences of making educational podcasts. Marcus Nevitt (Sheffield) gave a small case study of his use of EEBO in a third-year class. Tom Corns (Bangor) and Jerome de Groot (Manchester) both talked about ways of utilising the multiple web resources devoted to Milton – both textual and contextual – in order to augment traditional teaching methods. After a presentation on the use of EBL pedagogy in teaching, the workshop then broke into smaller groups to discuss the issues that had arisen throughout the day. Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester English Subject Centre
More details and information about presentations can be viewed on our website in the Events Archive.
WordPlay • Issue 1 • April 2009 25
Creative Pedagogies
WikiOmeros: technology and textual research in the first year
Harnessing wiki technology, tutors at Warwick help their first-year students to create online annotations and commentaries for Derek Walcott’s epic poem, Omeros. Amanda Hopkins Amanda Hopkins is a part-time tutor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, where she contributes to many modules, including ‘The Epic Tradition‘, and ‘Medieval to Renaissance Literature‘. She is the co-editor (with Cory Rushton) of The Erotic in Medieval Literature of Britain (D.S. Brewer: 2007).
Students on the first-year module,‘The Epic Tradition‘ at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, study a number of traditional epic texts (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, in translation, and Milton’s Paradise Lost). They conclude the module with Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) as a case study in the selfconscious use of the epic tradition by a modern author. While Omeros has generated a good deal of scholarly criticism, notably in the field of Afro-Caribbean studies, and at least one monograph, no one has yet attempted a commentary on this dense, allusionfilled poem. Since texts on the module are studied chronologically, and specifically in the context of epic literature rather than Caribbean literary or cultural studies, the absence of a commentary posed a particular challenge for our students. In answer to that challenge, the department’s WikiOmeros project, the brainchild of Dr Elizabeth Clarke, was launched. As the director of the project, Dr Clarke intended to encourage students to carry out original research which would be published in an online commentary to the text. The system was not intended to be a ‘pure’ wiki, since we felt it crucial that all comments be reviewed by me, the project co-ordinator, before publication. In a true wiki, as its inventor Ward Cunningham observes, material is intended to be uploaded and modified, at will, by users; control is delegated to the users (Venners, 2003). Today, WikiOmeros is a project which has gone through two phases, amassing a significant, but not yet complete online, commentary to Walcott’s poem.
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In its first phase, the project was run as a prototype in 2006–7 with contributions from students on ‘The Epic Tradition‘ module. Funding from the English Subject Centre allowed the commentary to be augmented and refined in 2007–8 in order to give a wider audience the opportunity of using and contributing to it, including a new cohort of Epic Tradition students (this was Phase Two). In this article, I summarise some of the key aspects of the project and some of the challenges we encountered along the way. A detailed case study with descriptions of the setting up, maintenance and format of the project from its inception can be found in the Case Studies pages of the Subject Centre website.
The prototype When the project began, we hoped that contributing to the commentary would develop undergraduates’ academic and professional skills by allowing them to engage in mentored original research and to practise formal academic writing. An electronic resource seemed most appropriate, since it could be created easily and quickly and be widely accessible, both within Warwick and in the wider community. The project’s objectives thus met an important element of the HEFCE strategy for e-learning, that e-learning should ‘enabl[e] students and other users to develop more independence in learning and to share resources’ (HEFCE Strategy for e-learning, March 2005). As project co-ordinator, I was responsible for preparing the online text, editing and uploading commentary submissions from our students, carrying out technical duties and liaising with the e-learning advisor in the Faculty of Arts.
Creative Pedagogies Early on, after meeting with staff teaching on the module, we decided that we could not make contributions to the Omeros commentary a formal module requirement, because the text came so late in the term and the activity was so different from the other module requirements. There simply wasn’t enough time to scaffold the activity properly for any students who might have needed extra time to do it well. Students would be encouraged, but not required, to contribute; and guidance on research methods and the preparation of commentary entries could be provided in seminars on Omeros. Each seminar group would be responsible for a section of the text, and some time would be allocated during class should students wish to discuss and present work-inprogress. In introducing the project to the students, I emphasised the skills they could gain by contributing and reminded them that the resource would be available to them when studying the text and revising for the end-of-year examination.
I enjoyed doing the research for WikiOmeros as it really contributed a different dimension to my ‘Epic Tradition’ studies. As a first-year student, it was quite daunting to be helping with a literary research project only a few months into university. However, looking up all the different words was really interesting and it gave a great background to the learning that we were doing. Also, it helped with learning how to research and what different tools are available, something which has been important to my university career since then. It was a really great project and bonded the first year together, making everyone feel they were doing something worthwhile for the wider literary community. Antonia Barr, student We originally envisaged the commentary as integrated with the text, and began negotiations with the publisher, Faber & Faber, to gain permission to reproduce the poem online. Unfortunately, in granting permission for the poem to be used, the publishers stipulated that the online text had to be accessible only to students on the ‘Epic Tradition‘ module. This meant that we had to reconsider our original idea. If other people were to benefit from the commentaries being created by the students, we would have to format the comments as a stand-alone facility for the wider world, but keep them connected to Walcott’s text for our own students. Following the recommendation of the Warwick technical adviser, we decided to use technology already in use at the university: ‘Sitebuilder’ web-design software and Warwick Blogs. The text and supporting material could be hosted within the English department’s module pages and the administrative settings for each page could permit or block access as required. The commentary could be hosted on a dedicated blog that could be accessed separately.
WikiOmeros was a really useful project to be involved with developing … A further benefit was the opportunity to practice scholarly citation and academic research in a context other than essay writing … it might have been helpful, or at least interesting, to spend more lecture and seminar time on the project, in order to allow time to explore the ideas in and possibilities of the index. Jenny Mills, student
As the project got underway, we composed a reliable system of ‘tags’ for each entry composed by students to make the searching process easier for users. Four main tags were agreed (Epic Tradition, Characters, Glossary and Context) and I then compiled an extensive list of sub-tags (including primary themes, motifs and historical events, titles of related texts, locations referred to in the poem and names of characters). I also prepared the poem for electronic publication, scanning each page and using optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert the material to text, which was then formatted in HTML (figure 1). At the same time, I prepared supporting web material, including a page listing sources cited in the commentary, and a WikiOmeros home page (figure 2).
Figure 1. The beginning of the online text. Users navigate chronologically by using the Previous and Next Page links, or by returning to the Chapter Index.
Figure 2. A screenshot of part of the main WikiOmeros portal page. Note that access to the text is locked (shown by the padlock in the navigation bar to the left).
The electronic version of the poem was uploaded on 2 May 2007, in time for students to use the resource as part of their exam revision. Permission rights on these pages were set to allow access only to students on the module and to staff teaching the module. The first commentary submission was received on 3 May 2007 and by the end of July, at the conclusion of the first stage of the project, some 220 separate blog entries had been received and uploaded. The number of contributions and the positive student feedback suggested that the prototype was worth developing further, and the commentary worth offering to a wider audience, who could use and contribute to it.
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Creative Pedagogies Unfortunately, at this point, there was an unexpected delay in setting up the Javascript code to link the text and blog, which meant that there was no straightforward means for users consulting the commentary to read the entries alongside the text. As a short-term solution, I prepared a downloadable version of the commentary, with entries presented in chronological relation to the text. This file, in Adobe portable document format (PDF), was updated every few days while submissions continued to be received, and continues to be maintained.
The Omeros project allowed the students to conduct original research collaboratively, to amass supportive data on a text which currently lacks any form of critical edition and to make this data accessible to the rest of the student cohort. The project honed their research skills and provided insight into the process of assembling the textual apparatus for a critical edition. Dr Christiania Whitehead, tutor
The second phase of the project The second phase of the project, supported by both funding and advice from the English Subject Centre, was intended to widen participation among the students and to offer extended supporting materials, such as dedicated critical bibliographies. We also wanted to add an enhanced search engine and complete the pop-up links between the text and commentary entries. The Subject Centre funding made it possible to include in the project Dr Lynne Macedo, of the Centre for Translation and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Dr Macedo, a specialist in Anglophone Caribbean literature and cultural studies, held five weekly sessions to offer advice to students researching the text during this phase and conducted a thorough check of the contributions to date, concluding that ‘The entries seem to be of a very good standard and the students have clearly been able to comment on many of Walcott’s allusions to other epics. There has also been some attempt to understand the specifically Caribbean aspects of the poem and, presumably, this will be added to and expanded in the future’. Macedo also identified lacunae and offered useful suggestions for future research directions: ‘Undoubtedly there are still a number of key Caribbean issues that have not yet been picked up and students could perhaps be guided towards these in the future.’ During March 2008, all commentary entries, to date, were reviewed, with a view to final preparation for wider access. Bibliographical codes, throughout, were linked to the online Bibliography to the Commentary, and cross references within the commentary linked to the corresponding entries. We were simultaneously thinking about how to publicise the commentary to a wider audience and fund the next phase of the project. Finally, in May 2008, the Javascript pop-up boxes were made available, but it quickly became evident that they were not working properly. While I was able to resolve some of the technical issues, our university technical adviser had insufficient resources to deal with all the problems. As a result, WikiOmeros was forced to operate in a much reduced capacity with little of the functionality we had originally planned and worked so
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diligently towards. Sadly, further technical issues have arisen and remain unresolved, forcing the project to be put on hold.
Looking ahead For anyone considering a similar project, there are a few things I would suggest: • Ensure that someone at the core of the project has basic knowledge of website design using HTML. This is particularly helpful in terms of visualising the end product. • Keep your blog-based system simple and straightforward. The basic search function was useful for WikiOmeros, but we ran into difficulty when we tried to link comments to the text using a pop-up function. • Ascertain, ahead of time, whether your technical adviser (if your institution assigns one) has the resources (of time and experience) to devote to your project. It sounds obvious, but it is very important that everyone involved have a shared vision for the final product, and its success. • Assess student contributions to the commentary. If contributions to WikiOmeros could have formed part of the assessment of the module, this probably would have brought even more lecturers onside. As mentioned above, however, this would only be feasible if Omeros was taught much earlier in the year, rather than at the end.
The WikiOmeros project has proved an immensely effective and valuable tool in the teaching of this set text on the first-year core module, ‘The Epic Tradition‘. It familiarised students with research techniques early on in their undergraduate career, which will stand them in good stead in their subsequent Honours years. The project was particularly useful in providing them with the motivation to undertake such research insofar as they were given ownership of a particular section of the poem on which to comment, allowing them to feel like ‘stakeholders’ in the cumulative process of building up a detailed commentary on the poem. Dr Catherine Bates, Convenor, ‘The Epic Tradition‘
Despite the inevitable hiccoughs and frustrations of project management, building WikiOmeros was an incredible experience, especially for the students. As a method of teaching first-year students the basics of close reading and textual research, creating a wiki is an engaging, collaborative and fun way to do it.
References HEFCE, JISC HEA (2005) ‘HEFCE strategy for e-learning‘, available from tinyurl.com/c5uz6b Venners, B. (2003), ‘Exploring with Wikis: A Conversation with Ward Cunningham’, available from www.artima. com/intv/wiki.html [accessed 17 September 2008]
Keen to know what your colleagues are up to in their classrooms? One of the best ways to find out is to look through the Subject Centre’s online Case Studies, written by English lecturers for English lecturers.
Peek inside your colleagues’ classrooms
This popular set of pages showcases an exciting range of work, including innovative ideas for seminar activities and outreach programmes, cutting-edge uses of ICT and novel forms of assessment. Each case study is written clearly and straightforwardly, and all follow the same three-part structure: an introduction giving contextual information, a description of the activity in question and a conclusion assessing the value of the activity and considering ways in which it could profitably be extended or adapted in the future. As well as reading other people’s case studies, why not contribute one or more of your own? We will pay you £150 for 1,500 words on any aspect of your teaching, outreach or pastoral work which you think other lecturers might be interested to read about. Simply send a one-paragraph summary to Jonathan Gibson at the Subject Centre (jonathan.gibson@rhul.ac.uk).
http://tinyurl.com/cmrgab
Turning the Classroom into a Debate Hall: arguing about racism in Heart of Darkness Stella Bolaki (University of Edinburgh) Second-year English literature students were invited to debate the question of racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the light of Chinua Achebe’s well-known denunciation of Conrad in his ‘An Image of Africa‘ (1975). The debate took the form of a trial with each side gathering evidence, arguing its case and responding to the other side’s objections. It was attended by outsiders, not necessarily familiar with Conrad criticism, who functioned as a jury, voting for one or other side at the end. The case study describes the various stages in and outcomes of the debate and suggests ways in which debates can be used in teaching Modernism courses and in other areas of English studies. Read more at tinyurl.com/b2y63b
Plot-casting: using student-generated audiobooks for learning and teaching Matthew Rubery (University of Leeds) This case study reports on a pedagogical project which involved getting students to create their own audiobook recording of a Victorian novel. During semester one of the academic year 2007–2008, members of the third-year undergraduate module ‘Sensation Novels of the 1860s’ were invited to create a recording of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. Each week, four students recorded designated chapters, which were preserved as MP3 files using the free digital recording software Audacity. These podcast recordings were then made available to other members of the seminar through a module blog created in the Leeds Elgg weblog community. The blog’s RSS feeds automatically notified students each time new podcasts were posted for peer assessment. At the end of term, individual recordings were combined to form a complete recording stored on the Library’s MIDESS Digital Repository, where it will be available for free distribution to members of the university in the form of a digital audiobook. Read more at tinyurl.com/ctlnhs
WordPlay • Issue 1 • April 2009 29
Creative Pedagogies
Voices in Further Education The Subject Centre’s HE in FE Project Officer, Candice Satchwell, writes a composite piece based on her visits to several Further Education colleges and reveals what common issues arise.
Candice Satchwell teaches English on the BA (Hons) English Language, Literature and Writing at Blackpool and The Fylde College where she specialises in stylistics, literacy studies and children’s literature. She is also an honorary research fellow in the Literacy Research Centre at Lancaster University. Her most recent publication, co-authored with R. Ivanic, is: ‘The textuality of learning contexts in UK colleges’, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, Vol. 15, No. 3. (2007)
The following is an ‘imaginary’ account of visiting an higher education English team in a Further Education college. My visits to numerous such institutions have had remarkably similar characteristics, and I hope it might be of interest to those for whom this is not the norm, while for others it will be all too familiar. Issues touched on here include the apparent inequality in access to resources for students at universities and those at colleges, and I am pursuing the complex reasons for this. I am also continuing to gather information on the experience of mature students, with a view to providing guidance for tutors in the areas they are most likely to require support. I would be very happy to receive your thoughts on these or any other issues relating to English degrees in FE colleges. I arrive at the college reception where I am to be met by a colleague. In the reception area are a number of students of varying ages; one asks me whether she is in the right place for a childcare course, while another is asking for information about a work placement in the college related to her HND. On the wall are a range of notices and advertisements for courses and qualifications, dominated by stands displaying plans for a ‘new build’, which incorporates sections for HE as well as FE. The plans are to be carried out over the next five years. There is already evidence of the first steps in that a car park is being cleared ready to house a new building – creating parking problems all round. My colleague escorts me to the English section’s staffroom, which is shared with tutors teaching several
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other subjects, in both HE and FE. Although there are many desks in the staffroom, there is only one person in there: all the others are teaching. I am taken to a classroom where a Year 2 group are studying ‘Discourse Analysis‘ for a module on the BA (Hons) in English and History. The course is validated by a university 25 miles away, but has been devised by a small cohort of the English and History teams at the college. The 12 students present are sitting in a horseshoe shape with the teacher at the front. There is no lecturing and no PowerPoint, the teaching and learning taking the form of paired and small group work, examining photocopied examples of transcripts of spoken discourse. The students are aged between 25 and 65. When I ask them, later, about their reasons for choosing this course, it turns out they are almost all local, with jobs and/or families. One or two have come from further afield, attracted by the design of the course, or by the less stringent UCAS points requirements. They are overwhelmingly positive about the course, their lecturers and their experience. However, they are less enthusiastic about the resources, the library and access to journals. ‘It doesn’t seem fair that we have to know exactly what we want before we can get hold of a book – and then we have to order it. Students at the university can browse the shelves, pick books up – but we only have online resources.’ They are also dispirited by the noise from the building work and the lack of parking space.
Creative Pedagogies At the end of the two-hour session, the lecturer has to dash off to teach A Levels at the other college campus, two miles away. The students fetch themselves coffee, which they bring back to the room and await their history lecturer who will teach them for the next hour and a half. The course is organised to fit into two days a week, so that the students can still work part-time, and don’t need childcare every day. Later, I talk to a new member of staff who has come from an established university where he was studying for a doctorate, and where he taught some undergraduate seminars. He tells me, ‘I think all university teachers should work in FE first – it is so beneficial – it lays the foundations. I’d be a much better teacher if I went back to teaching at university now.’ He teaches all levels – A Levels, GCSE, Key Skills and the degree, with 25–30 contact teaching hours per week. He is also taking a PGCE, with a class every Friday, and is still completing his PhD. Despite this he ‘really likes the job‘. A more experienced teacher also loves her job, but she is demoralised by the lack of time for research and for developing new resources, being expected to run A Level courses as well as BA modules. She would love to be able to provide research seminars, poetry readings and meetings at lunchtime for the students – but the additional work required makes this a dream, rather than a reality, at present. As we leave the classroom to visit the learning resource centre, a student is waiting outside. She
asks my companion: ‘Have you got a minute …?’ As the student begins to cry, I reassure the lecturer that I will find my own way. When you know students intimately over a number of years, it is impossible to abandon them in a time of crisis. Colleges nationwide are in the throes of new developments, most being required to supply more HE courses, particularly Foundation Degrees, and fulfil agendas for expanding vocational and skills provision for 14–19 year olds. For some English degrees, however, having been established several years ago, the staff are disappointed in the falling levels of recruitment. It is difficult to generalise about the reasons for this, but exhausting the local supply of literary talent is likely to be one, with tuition fees another. While the recession might seem to represent a boon to FE colleges in requiring the retraining of newlyredundant people to take on new jobs, it is also reducing the likelihood of people being able to afford the ‘luxury’ of pursuing a degree in English. After all, many mature students on English courses declare that it is ‘something for me for a change’; although, in fact, they often go on to become teachers or to work in jobs they had never previously dreamt of. For these students, their ‘academic’ degree – relatively rare in FE colleges – turns out to be anything but ‘non-vocational’. As one graduate of the English and History course tells me, ‘It’s enriched my whole life. And now I’ve got a job here because of it! I’d never have believed it if you told me five years ago.’
Looking for funding for an e-learning related idea? Learning and Teaching Innovation Grants are a new type of funding mechanism offered by JISC. Grants of £25,000 to £75,000 are offered for innovative project ideas for uses of technology to enhance teaching and learning. Unlike other JISC funding calls, this one is a rolling call for ‘one-year’ projects that takes place approximately three times a year. The next call will be around April 2009. The application process for these grants has been simplified to encourage the submission of speculative and innovative ideas. Funded projects should contribute to one of the key outputs and outcomes across the JISC e-learning programme which includes things like knowledge and skills around the use of ICT to support lifelong, workplace and flexible learning and support for personalisation, and pedagogic and institutional diversity, at departmental, institutional, regional or national levels (other key outputs and outcomes are listed in the call). Consortia bids are encouraged so the project does not necessarily have to be an individual or departmental one. There are a few caveats, so read the call carefully, and remember only one proposal is allowed from any one institution for each round and projects must not duplicate existing work, involve purchase of equipment or involve the further development of an existing tool (unless there is a significant demand from an identified community). Good luck!
If you would like to discuss an idea with an expert, contact the English Subject Centre’s learning technologist, Brett Lucas brett.lucas@rhul.ac.uk
http://tinyurl.com/3kapqc
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Creative Pedagogies
Two Legs of a Relay Rajorshi Chakraborti describes the fruitful experiences of being a teacher of Literature and Creative Writing at the same time.
Rajorshi Chakraborti teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. His first novel, Or the Day Seizes You, was short-listed for the Hutch Crossword Book Award, 2006, the best-known prize for English-language writing in India. His second novel, Derangements was published in August 2008.
I have often thought of teaching literature and Creative Writing as being comparable to distinct parts of a relay. In a literature class we take for granted the book as a finished article; we begin with it in our hands, and attempt to draw out its themes, take apart its structure. On a Creative Writing course, however, that finished book (or story) is our distant end-point, the destination we hope to arrive at one day with a lot of effort and some luck. It is the getting-there from the sketchiest beginnings – and the bumps, lures and false starts which are perhaps inevitable parts of the journey – that forms the focus of our discussions. As a teacher of both subjects, I feel fortunate to be able to participate in both legs of that relay. There are (numerous) times on a literature course when I try to draw the attention of my students to the workings of the words in a particular paragraph, and how they weave and combine to achieve the specific effect we are discussing. Likewise, the big thematic ambitions of our writing students can only be successfully realised through narrative that is vivid, precise and engaging word-by-word and as a whole. In my own case, this dual-sided interest in works of fiction dates back to before I even began writing. As an undergraduate, and then a student undertaking a PhD in English Literature, I read novels very much with a consciously-held hope of being a writer (although I hadn’t yet found any worthwhile stories to tell). So, while I remained alert to the treatment of the themes and issues I was reading for as a critic, I was also attempting to stay attuned to the prose on another level, that of an apprentice writer. It was during this period that I grew to believe in what still forms the
This constant awareness of the potential openness and plasticity offered by the form has been the underlying connection between the courses I teach as a writer and those as a literary critic. bridge for me in my twin roles as a teacher: that the novel isn’t just another genre within literature, but that it can be an uniquely rich and inclusive form of written discourse, and that the apparently simple
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act of telling a story about a few specific selves in a specific part of the world can examine life within that world in particularly fluid, intricate and complex ways. Through my readings of several novels, I ended up trying to demonstrate in my PhD thesis that fiction can illuminate connections between various levels and aspects of inhabiting a world, between the inner, the inter-personal and the social, and can thereby add up to an especially comprehensive, detailed and dynamic exploration of lives within that world. And, I argued, by always foregrounding its partiality and its made-up status, fiction can achieve such evocations of fullness without ever pretending to or claiming finality. Since any narrative perspective is inevitably particular and limited, these very limits are what allow (and demand) the emergence of new stories, alternative trajectories and points-of-view. If we can all tell only partial stories, we can each disagree with and revise other stories. I suppose it is this constant awareness of the potential openness and plasticity offered by the form that has been the underlying connection between the courses I teach as a writer and those as a literary critic. In my writing classes, I try to urge my students to maximise their use of this potential so that their stories can be even more fluid, penetrating and inclusive. Which alternative directions could a story develop in, without losing momentum or focus, that would add not just range to the cast and the themes, but also bring unpredictability and surprise to the act of turning the pages; which moments and scenes, contrasting voices and world-views, could be brought out further to add depth, mystery and richness to the conflicts? And it is the degree of successful attainment of such complexity and ‘polyphony’ (to borrow a Bakhtinian term) that determines the quality of our reading experiences as critics, on the other hand. The more multilayered and intertwined the dimensions and strands of a story are, the more points of entry and interrogation, as well as scope for alternative interpretations, the text will offer, and, therefore, the more rewarding our debates about its themes, portrayals and aesthetic methods will be. At Edinburgh, I’m fortunate in that the way the Creative Writing Masters programme has been conceived and is practised ideally suits my own teaching philosophy. Our writing students are expected to take two literature courses as an integral part of their taught curriculum, and one of my roles
Creative Pedagogies
has been to run a couple of the options that are specifically designed to suit (and extend) the interests and preoccupations of prose writers. Through these courses, we attempt to introduce our students to a wide range of texts, styles and critical/theoretical ideas, while keeping in sight one of our stated objectives, which is ‘to push ourselves as writers reading writers, as writers encountering and discussing a broad range of formal possibilities and styles available within the genre to explore their chosen themes‘. Incidentally, I’m pleased to see that the spirit in which these particular courses are offered appears to reflect quite a few of the specific aims outlined in the recent Creative Writing Benchmark Statement framed by the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE). Although mostly positive, our students react in a range of ways to these courses. For instance, in one of the literature-based classes I offer, entitled ‘Explorations in Postmodernism‘, a few of them, each year, do resist engaging with some of the theoretical texts that I circulate. Part of the reason for this may be that they do not immediately see the relevance of these academic-seeming discussions to their own interest in developing their writing skills. Another commonly stated factor is the density and apparent obliqueness of much of this critical prose. In such cases, I often feel the burden of proving relevance rests on me: how are these ideas actually performed in the novels we are discussing, and how might a general
awareness of such questions visibly influence the themes and styles of their own work? Yet, in a way, I enjoy being in such a situation, attempting to articulate how a consideration of such apparently abstract issues might somehow feed beneficially into their own development
me, that is semi-conscious at best, and even passive or dreaming much of the time, is always looking and listening out for those details – images, occurrences, snatches of conversation, encounters and places – which I will gratefully seize on because they are too perfect for me to make up,
In a way, I enjoy being in such a situation, attempting to articulate how a consideration of such apparently abstract issues might somehow feed beneficially into their own development as writers. as writers. Sometimes, I’m happy to report, later on during the year, this tussle with the new ideas and approaches they encounter, does make its presence felt in interesting ways in the work of some students. Others, however, consolidate even more firmly their previously-held beliefs about what storytelling is and how they wish to practise it, but at least (I like to think) the process of substantiating their disagreements (sometimes vehemently) in class has proved to them to be a rewarding one. Yet, trying to think along creative and critical lines simultaneously has been of great benefit to me, not just as a teacher, but also as a writer. The critical training I was fortunate to receive as a student still helps me consciously reflect over how best my interests and thematic preoccupations can be explored in a work of fiction. However, at the same time, another part of
and they make my stories more vivid and surprising than I could ever have achieved with conscious effort. They can come from any direction, at any time, from spending a day outside or from a dream, yet the moment they arrive, as free gifts and fully formed, my conscious half gets to work thinking of how I might weave them into my stories to bring out my themes in the most evocative and interesting ways possible. I feel this co-operation between my conscious and not-quite conscious parts, between the active and the passiveattentive, has been sharpened within me by my years as a student and a critical reader of literature, and it is this extremely real, although irregular (and often-dormant-or-invisible), aspect of the planning process I talk about quite a bit with our creative writers, and something I urge upon them to notice, cultivate and trust.
WordPlay • Issue 1 • April 2009 33
The Student Experience
Poetry and Film for Students: greater than the sum of our parts Caroline Hawkridge, Writing School student, Manchester Metropolitan University. ‘I am not a great fan of poetry, but these films have really been an eye-opener.’ ‘... stunning variety of ways poetry can be mediated and illuminated by the moving image, and how TV images and poetry can mutually enliven each other – it made one yearn for more!’
Caroline Hawkridge recently received her MA in Creative Writing, with distinction. In this report, she recounts how, last year, a small grant from the English Subject Centre helped to start a MMU Writing School festival, and much more.
Film poetry can invite a sceptical response from literature or film students alike. An English Subject Centre Student Literary Societies grant enabled me to set up Words on Film, a festival showcasing cutting-edge film poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). My aims were to invite an exchange between disciplines and to alert students to the innovative work that can be produced when poetry leaves the page. Words on Film featured pioneering BBC producer Peter Symes, poet Simon Armitage and three film screenings. Planning and running the festival was an exciting way of bringing together a variety of students and led to several unexpected outcomes. Now, further plans are afoot, including a second season of screenings.
Poetry and film Poets and film-makers have been attracted to the synthesis of poetic text and moving images since the 1920s (eg Manhatta, 1921; Etiole de Mer, 1928), although the most famous early example is the documentary Night Mail (1936) featuring W. H. Auden’s verse. More recently, poetry has been used to provide a subjective voice in TV documentaries, eg The Blasphemers’ Banquet (Symes/Harrison, 1989) or Songbirds (Hill/Armitage, 2005). Short films based on poems have also been produced, eg Colin Still’s work for Channel 4 Learning (www. opticnerve.co.uk) or Bloodaxe’s webcasts, Poetry Quartets, (tinyurl. com/6p7sv9). Today, students have the means to make and distribute their own film poems – or poetry film – and yet even award-winning examples of the genre remain difficult to access because they are TV documentaries. Most TV programmes
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have never been released on DVD or video and are, therefore, not available, for instance, via the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) or British Film Institute (BFI) archives. Also, older films were made before off-air recordings of broadcasts were licensed as teaching resources by the Educational Recording Agency (ERA) under the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act.
Words on Film festival My proposal was to invite a pioneering film-maker to share their creative practice and experience of working with poets as scriptwriters, and to showcase several classic films to a diverse audience of students from disciplines such as literary criticism, Creative Writing and film studies. Benefits would include: critical, creative and social interdepartmental exchange; improved access to poetry film and the collation of a shared list of poetry film resources. As hoped, the Subject Centre grant enabled us to invite the pioneering BBC producer Peter Symes to visit MMU while MMU senior lecturer Simon Armitage volunteered a session on The Not Dead (2007), his latest documentary about war veterans made with director Brian Hill (Century Films). The pair of live events offered a great opportunity to hear a respected film-maker and renowned poet describe their roles. To complement this, three full-length screenings were also arranged: • 9/11 Out of the Blue (Ned Williams/Simon Armitage, Silver River Production for Channel 5, 2006) • Black Daisies for the Bride (Peter Symes/Tony Harrison, BBC, 1993) • The Blasphemers’ Banquet (Peter Symes/Tony Harrison, BBC, 1989) Words on Film took place over three weeks in November 2008. All events were held in the evening in the English department and were free and open to students.
Adding up One of the aims of the festival was to encourage critical, creative and social interdepartmental exchange. This occurred during the planning, but the range of students attending the events proved equally exciting. There was a noticeable split in the attendance however: Peter Symes and the film screenings attracted a mostly postgraduate audience whereas Simon Armitage attracted a mostly undergraduate audience.
The Student Experience The sum Another aim of the festival was to encourage students to explore film poetry ideas for research or creative projects. A chance to pursue this came about during early discussions about the festival when I worked with the Writing School to improve access by MA students to the free digital video training offered by MMU’s Media Services. Between January–March 2008, eight students attended this two-day training. We hope to repeat this in 2009. Later, judging by what students said they’d learned, the Words on Film festival also provided encouragement for continued student work in this area: ‘... stunning variety of ways poetry can be mediated and illuminated by the moving image, and how TV images and poetry can mutually enliven each other – it made one yearn for more! Thanks Peter Symes. Also poetry on film can be dynamite for change!’
‘Yes, I was sceptical initially as I am not a great fan of poetry, but these films have really been an eye-opener and have inspired me to explore the genre further.’
Residence, has already donated her filmpoem Desires. Other outcomes include requests from both literature and film students for a second poetry film season. We hope to do this, although accessing TV poetry film remains a significant problem.
‘Yes, it introduced me to a whole new way to deal with poetry – both with writing my own and reading others. It has also given Conclusion me many personal ideas on doing my own The process of planning and running the poetry for film. Also, I was introduced to Tony festival succeeded in bringing together Harrison and am currently reading his poetry.’ a variety of students (and staff!) and ‘Coming from a background where I had launched an interest in poetry film among very little exposure to poetry, I think the the diverse audience. The Subject Centre season has really opened my eyes to what grant provided a focus for this activity and an interesting medium it can be.’ led to small financial supplements from the Writing School, English Research Institute The festival engaged students from (ERI) and several contributions in kind. different disciplines and provoked However, the festival would have been critical and creative responses as well as impossible without a considerable number enthusiasm. We have begun collating of people, particularly Simon Armitage, a list of film poetry resources following Dr Vicki Bertram and myself, volunteering discussion with Peter Symes, Simon valuable time and resources. A second Armitage, the NW Film Archive and season of screenings is in the pipeline, Poetry Library (London). Kate Jessop but our more ambitious plans will require (www.katejessop.co.uk), MMU’s Artist in further funding.
Encouraging Student-Centred Interaction Online 23 January 2009 On a cold wet day in late January, a group of enthusiastic lecturers and academic support staff gathered in the warmth of the English department at Birmingham City University to discuss how to encourage student-centred interaction in online teaching. We were all interested in finding out some of the ways in which new online tools, such as blogs and wikis, social networking tools like Facebook and virtual worlds like Second Life are being used with students, and we weren’t disappointed! The day began with our host Ruth Page (Birmingham City), who talked about how her department used Facebook (www.facebook.com) as a way to ease the transition into higher education for students (research shows that at least 65% of A Level students use the tool). A Facebook group was established and four existing students acted as mentors. Students used Facebook to discuss reading lists and the first-year timetable, among other things. Charlotte Carey (Birmingham City) talked about using the micro-blogging tool Twitter (http://twitter.com/). Twitter is a social networking service that allows you to blog a 140-character message through a mobile device/web page to a user’s profile page (which may be on a mobile or on screen). We learned how this could be used to question an author, discuss a text or even create exercises like composing a 140-character story or poem. Chris Ringrose (Northampton) and Sonya Andermahr introduced us to their use of student reading diaries using the blog function within their VLE for a children’s literature course and a post-war and contemporary British literature course. To get students started, they work from a set of prompts (eg ‘reflect on last week’s seminar’). Tutor feedback is given via a short written response or a short recorded audio file. The blogs form part of the assessment for the course and encourage the students to engage with the material. Matt Gee (Birmingham City) showed us a prototype wiki annotation tool (Wiki Without a Name) developed in the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (http://rdues.bcu.ac.uk/index.html). A typical wiki interface is augmented by a ‘pop-up window feature’ that allows colour-coded annotations to be added (eg poetic structure etc). Any web resource can be linked to any annotation and, most interestingly, comments can also be added to annotations like a discussion thread. Derek Littlewood (Birmingham City) then demonstrated how he is using wikis in his Irish literature course and will soon pilot this new wiki tool with students. Finally, Ruby Rennie (Edinburgh) talked about how she has been using the Virtual University of Edinburgh’s (VUE) Second Life island (http://vue.ed.ac.uk/) to encourage student-centred interaction in the MSc in E-learning she teaches on. When three students from the English department at Birmingham City joined us for a breakout session, we had a chance to think about some of the barriers and solutions to using the tools we had heard about and gained valuable perspectives from them regarding the effectiveness of the new teaching approaches. Later, we split into a beginner and advanced group for a workshop on developing and using blogs and wikis. In the final session, we reflected on a worthwhile day, which generated many new ideas for classroom practice. Brett Lucas, English Subject Centre English Subject Centre
You can view many of the presentations in our online media player on our website in the Events Archive.
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Book Review Beginning Old English Carole Hough and John Corbett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
When people encounter Old English texts for the first time, they tend to experience mixed feelings: on the one hand, they are very curious about a literature they did not know much about (the fact that English literature did not start with Chaucer seems to take many people by surprise), but, on the other hand, they become increasingly concerned about the demands of learning Old English grammar. Unfortunately, sometimes those demands become too difficult to handle, and this leads to loss of motivation and a feeling of alienation from texts which could, otherwise, have been greatly enjoyed. Carole Hough and John Corbett place the pleasure of reading Old English texts at the centre of their book, making the reader engage with slightly simplified texts right from the beginning. Readers are reminded, time and again, that Old English is the ancestor of Modern English and, therefore, they already know a significant amount of vocabulary even before they formally start learning the language. This encouragement and feeling of familiarity is certainly something beginners will welcome. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, the reader is introduced to the historical background, spelling, basic grammar and vocabulary of Old English, or rather its West Saxon dialect, which became a sort of koiné during the late Old English period. Making readers aware of the existence of dialectal variation during the Old English period is indeed fundamental, because texts written in other dialectal varieties do not tend to be studied (especially by beginners), and this can give people a false sense of linguistic homogeneity. In the second part, the authors ask the reader to consider the content and style of the so-called Cynewulf and Cyneheard episode in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a fragment from Beowulf, and the whole extant text of The Dream of the Rood and The Battle of Maldon. The texts come together with grammatical information and lists of both difficult terms and terms which the reader may be expected to recognise, on the basis of either their similarity with Modern English vocabulary or the fact that they have been explained in the first part. It would have been useful if the authors had included translations of the texts in an
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appendix, so that readers could check, more easily, their understanding of the texts. Finally, the book also includes a glossary of linguistic and literary terms, and an appendix with some basic paradigms. Unfortunately, the book has some statements which can be somewhat misleading: for instance, the authors say that Old English and Old Norse terms differ mainly in their grammatical inflexions, and give as an example OE wyrm ‘worm, serpent’ vs ON orminn (11). We should remember, though, that ON -inn is here not a declensional ending, but a form of the suffixed definite article, which does not always appear after a noun. Readers are told that ‘verbs end in -an‘, but it would have been more accurate to talk about the infinitives of verbs because, as the paradigms included in the appendix show, -an is by no means the only verbal ending (22). In another passage, the neuter pronoun hit is used to replace his hund in the sentence Þæt child āsende his hund ‘the child sent his dog’, but OE hund is actually a masculine noun and, therefore, from a grammatical perspective, the direct object should have been replaced with hine (36). While it is certainly the case that sometimes Old English texts present pronominal substitutions on the basis of natural rather than grammatical gender, a beginner who is aware of the actual gender of the noun could be slightly puzzled; therefore, an explanation of this example should have been included, or, even better, given the readership of the book, a different example should have been chosen. Later in the text, OE hēold ‘held’ is presented as part of a list of past verbal forms which can be identified as such by the presence of <d>; however, in this case, the final <d> is not a marker of tense, but rather part of the root, the past tense being marked, instead, by ablaut variation in the root (the infinitive is healdan) (78). Despite this, Hough and Corbett have offered both undergraduate students and members of the general public who are interested in learning Old English an engaging, encouraging and enjoyable stepping stone into what will hopefully be a long-lasting interest in the Old English language and literature. Sara Pons-Sanz University of Nottingham
Website
of the Week Having trouble keeping up with all the interesting websites related to literature, Creative Writing and English language? Then why not peruse the Subject Centre’s Website of the Week – you can always find it on the righthand side of our home page. You might also wish to browse the WOTW Archive. Send links to websites you think are great for teaching and learning to esc@rhul.ac.uk.
A quick survey of the English Subject Centre staff revealed the following favourites, previously featured on WOTW.
Open Source Shakespeare
Scribbling Women
Plagiarism Advisory Service
BFI Screenonline
(funded by JISC)
British Library Treasures: Shakespeare’s Quartos
Open Learn
Voice of the Shuttle
Internet Text Archive
The Kelly Writers House
The JISC Infonet guide to Time Management
The Poetry Archive
BRAIN.HE
(Open University)
(featured in this issue)
WordPlay • Issue 1 • April 2009 37
Ruth Page, who is registered in our Directory of Experience and Interests, shares her favourite books with WordPlay. Sign up today, at tinyurl.com/dayyrm, and your desert island texts could be featured too.
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre I first read this when I was nine years old, nearly all in one sitting. I dragged my parents to Haworth to visit the Brontë parsonage in the summer holidays afterwards. I wrote my first-year undergraduate extended essay on it, and still use extracts in my teaching now.
Nigella Lawson: Feast: Food to Celebrate Life Ruth Page is a Reader in the School of English at Birmingham City University. Her research interests include language and gender studies, new media, narrative theory and e-learning.
I find the relationship between food and ritual fascinating. And I love cooking. Nigella Lawson’s Feast is one of my favourite recipe books. I read it not just for culinary inspiration (especially when we are celebrating a particular festival), but for the beautiful illustrations – both a source of readerly pleasure, with or without the calories.
Rose Tremain: The Colour Rose Tremain’s writing is a joy. I especially love the characterisation in The Colour, its feisty heroine and the descriptions of the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island remind me of happy times travelling there.
Lionel Shriver: The Post Birthday World This must be one of the ultimate ‘parallel world’ fictions of recent years. The plot is simple, but the interleaving of the alternate chapters is cleverly done, with careful linguistic choices and plot twists at every turn.
Deborah Cameron: The Myth of Mars and Venus I have immense respect for Deborah Cameron’s work. This book is so accessible, but rigorously explodes many stereotypical myths that circulate in language and gender studies.
Vladimir Nabakov: Pale Fire Part discourse colony, part narrative, this book introduced me to the complex, ludic qualities of postmodern narrative that later became regularly used in hyperfiction from the 1990s onwards.
Larry D Benson: The Riverside Chaucer I was lucky to have a wonderful tutor in the final year of my undergraduate degree (English Literature, Birmingham University) who helped me to discover the delights of medieval literature. This was the edition of Chaucer’s works that we used, and it stood me in good stead when I began teaching.
Jeremy Strong: My Gran’s Great Escape I first read this with my daughter and now am enjoying it several years later with my son. A humorous story, which has stood rereading, and has had parents and children, alike, in stitches.
Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy Quite possibly the longest novel I have ever read, but I was engrossed throughout.
Electronic Literature Organization’s Archive This is a bit of a cheat, both because it is an archive rather than a single text and because it is online material rather than print. However, if I were on a desert island (clearly one with a broadband connection and PCs freely available) with time on my hands, the ELO is a great source of experimental hyperfiction, catalogued usefully and with many examples of artistic merit.
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Beyond the Essay: assessment in English literature and Creative Writing 5–6 December 2008 English Subject Centre
Organised by the Northumbria CETL and the English Subject Centre, this national conference on assessment in English Literature and Creative Writing brought academics from across the UK to Newcastle to discuss the practice and philosophy of assessing students’ work. Styles of assessment debated included students constructing their own critical glossaries, the use of fact-based questionnaires and assessing modules which address employability or professional development issues. The discussion during and between sessions was lively and engaged; initial feedback from the conference has been extremely positive, with many participants indicating that it offered them a stimulating forum for debate within the field. Academics from both ‘new’ and ‘old’ universities were represented, and the event indicated a range of common concerns and issues across the sector. Plenary speakers included Professor Rob Pope (Oxford Brookes University) and the author Michelene Wandor (Royal Literary Fund Fellow), both addressing the boundaries between critical and creative work in an innovative and provocative manner. The session on plagiarism, introduced by Professor Richard Terry (Northumbria University), produced a particularly lively debate, as delegates addressed the complex issues around this problem. There was also a lively and informative session on changes to the A Level English syllabus regarding forms of assessment, which was introduced by two speakers: Janine Creaney, an Assistant Head Teacher who has taught A Level for many years, and Adrian Beard, who is Chief Examiner for English literature A Level (Board AQA B). Professor Peter Barry (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) closed the conference with a fascinating plenary on what he described as the ‘writing continuum’ and the ways in which we might rethink our own assessment practices in relation to this. Victoria Bazin, University of Northumbria More details and information about presentations can be viewed on our website in the Events Archive.
Part-Time Teaching and Creative Writing 22 January 2009 In January, Cardiff University hosted a very interesting seminar on Part-Time Teaching and Creative Writing, which asked the question, is the part-time post no longer just an apprenticeship, but a way of life? Organised by the English Subject Centre with the help of National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) and literaturetraining, this event attracted over 30 teachers from all over the UK. The keynote address was given by Maggie Butt, Chair of NAWE and Head of the Media department at Middlesex University. Maggie described the huge growth in numbers of Creative Writing courses, teachers and students over the past 10 years, and discussed the burdens on both those who teach and those who manage teachers: in such a growth area, lack of support for part-time teachers is a risk for all of us. She left us with the image of the three-legged stool: how can we find a balance between money/writing/life? English Subject Centre
This led into small group discussions: how can part-time teachers become better teachers? And how can their institutions support them? Suggestions included finding mentors, training, monitoring, colleagues and support from organisations like NAWE for guidelines on class sizes. A common complaint was lack of communication within departments, especially if teachers were juggling several institutions and were not invited to staff meetings. An example of good practice was to hold departmental readings so that other members of staff met the part-timers as writers. In the afternoon, there were four presentations exploring the world of the part-time teacher, all of which stressed the importance of increasing our self-esteem and making demands on our institutions. If we are not supported, how can we support and develop our students and departments? The final session summarised the problems: time, isolation, lack of status, lack of access to pedagogical support, uncertainty over contracts, all this leading to lack of creative space in our heads! The solution? A personal timetable to keep the threelegged stool upright, saying ‘no’, networking and sharing resources through the English Subject Centre and NAWE sites. It was an extremely useful day for all concerned, although we all returned to our respective three-legged lives, we know we are not alone, and there are some practical things we can all do. Hilary Jenkins, NAWE More details and information about presentations can be viewed on our website in the Events Archive.
WordPlay • Issue 1 • April 2009 39
The Last Word
Inclusive English? Jonathan Gibson is an Academic Co-ordinator at the English Subject Centre, and also writes and researches in the areas of Early Modern and Renaissance studies.
Presentations have been quite hard, for I get very stressed and anxious. The deadlines are ridiculous sometimes. I had to give in three 3,000 word essays in three consecutive days. Feedback is rare, as my tutors are very busy. I only really receive productive criticism of a paragraph, maybe, per essay. Revision is hard, because English is a very vague subject.
few things in place – more ‘scaffolding’ in lectures; staggered deadlines; the facility for students to submit essays online – that would benefit both the majority of disabled students surveyed and a sizeable number of their non-disabled peers. For this reason, when planning our report, Kevin and I decided to divide the sections offering practical advice to lecturers into two parts: a section on measures which English departments can take which we think would be universally helpful and a section on student-specific adjustments which lecturers might consider making to accommodate the needs of particular disabilities.
The points made in these rather sobering student quotations will be familiar to us all – predictable, even. What is For more on diversity and inclusion, This approach of ours can be linked see the Subject Centre’s website striking, though, is their context of to wider debates in disability studies. at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/ utterance. All the comments come from Since the 1970s, the UK disabled rights explore/resources/access/index. a recent survey of disabled students of movement has been underpinned php and my blog, ‘Inclusive English’ English run for the Subject Centre by by what has become known as the (www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/ Kevin Brunton of London Metropolitan ‘social model’ of disability. This way of inclusiveenglish). The Subject Centre University. Respondents had been asked thinking was constructed in opposition report on disability will be published to comment specifically on ways in which to a ‘medical model’, conceiving of this summer and launched later their disability had affected their studies. disability as a physical condition requiring in the year at an event at London In the results, certain key problems treatment and entailing personal Metropolitan University. Please kept popping up across the full range tragedy. Per contra, the social model contact me, at jonathan.gibson@rhul. of disabilities: in many cases, what was ac.uk, if you would like to be involved minimises the significance of individual a problem for students with specific with that event or with the Subject impairment, arguing that ‘disability’ is Centre’s other work on diversity and learning differences also proved to be a social phenomenon – the product of inclusion, if you have ideas about a problem for students with mobility environmental, economic and cultural initiatives in this area which you problems and for students with visual barriers erected by an oppressive society: would like the Subject Centre to impairment – and so on. Difficulty in ‘impairment’, that is, only becomes pursue, or if you have material on this concentrating is a case in point: students ‘disability’ by virtue of inadequate and topic you would like us to publish (for with different conditions found it difficult discriminatory social arrangements. example, a case study: see p. 29). to concentrate for a number of different The social model (which has a striking reasons. In all cases, though, certain resemblance to the feminist distinction practices by lecturers exacerbated the between sex and gender) has been difficulty – and also, it can be assumed, influential in the framing of recent exacerbated the problems of non-disabled students with poor disability legislation, specifically in the emphasis which runs concentration. Changing these practices would clearly help throughout the Disability Discrimination Act (1995 and 2005) on students across the board, as well as mitigating the effects of the need for institutions, such as universities, to be proactive specific impairments. both in (a) anticipating the possible needs of disabled people The survey also, of course, revealed disability-specific problems: and (b) accommodating these needs in advance by removing a student with mental health problems who found it impossible those ‘barriers’ that the social model would argue constitute to work on texts with death as a theme; students with mobility disability in the first place. Via this legal gloss on the social problems unable to enter lecture theatres. Its overriding model, pressure is put on society – in little, the higher education message, however, is that in a limited number of important institution – to mend its ways. areas it is within the gift of departments and lecturers to put a
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The social model has recently come under attack from the sociologist Tom Shakespeare. Shakespeare accepts the importance of social factors in disabled people’s experience (and of the dramatic improvements in disabled people’s lives that can be wrought by social change), but he also stresses the reality of physical impairment, stating, categorically, that, ‘The problems associated with disability cannot be entirely eliminated by any imaginable form of social arrangements’. He goes on to make the obvious, if not always sufficiently recognised, point that: ‘Impairment is a universal phenomenon, in the sense that every human being has limitations and vulnerabilities’ (2006: 56, 64). Our report’s two-pronged approach maps quite neatly onto Shakespeare’s model, isolating, as it does, both individual, impairment-specific, need and social practices (or ‘barriers’) that are problematic for a majority of disabled students – and also cause difficulties for the ‘non-disabled’. Implicit in all this, surely, is the desirability of teaching ‘inclusively’ – in a way that acknowledges the diversity – on many different levels – of our student population. One might
expect that English Studies, a discipline much preoccupied with alternative and marginalised voices, would be eager to sign up to this agenda. As the philosopher Alastair Macintyre stated, interest in how the needs of the disabled are adequately voiced and met is not a special interest, the interest of one particular group rather than of others, but rather the interest of the whole political society, an interest that is integral to their conception of their common good. (1999:130 cited in Shakespeare, 2006: 67).
References Macintyre, A., 1999. Dependent Rational Animals. London: Duckworth. Shakespeare, T., 2006. Disability Rights and Wrongs. London: Routledge.
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
Recent Reports In at the Deep End? The First Year in Undergraduate English Literature
The Taught MA in English
Teaching the Teachers: Higher Education and the Continuing Professional Development of English Teachers
As Simple as ABC? Issues of Transition for students of English Language
WordPlay • Issue 1 • April 2009 41
The English Subject Centre supports all aspects of the teaching and learning of English Literature, English Language and Creative Writing in higher education in the UK. It is a Subject Centre of the Higher Education Academy www.heacademy.ac.uk
The English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London Egham TW20 0EX T 01784 443221 â&#x20AC;˘ esc@rhul.ac.uk www.english.heacademy.ac.uk