The Future of the English Department An in-depth interview with English Department Head Victoria Dryden on the next steps and goals for the department. WORDS and PHOTOS by MADELEINE NICKS Q: What are your responsibilities as the English department head? A: One is administrative tasks and meetings, going to meetings, leading meetings, and meeting with parents, with teachers, observing teachers, interviewing prospective hires, offering faculty support, and taking on curricular leadership. Those are the big areas. I think it is all about regrouping and recovery after the pandemic—how can we work together and collaborate in a way that was disrupted by COVID? Q: How much of a hand do you have in text selections? Or is it more collaborative?
Head of the English Department, Victoria Dryden in the Writing Center.
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A: The first thing I’m doing is asking every teacher per grade level to write a skill list detailing what skills are being focused on in that grade level. And then, once that’s done, I want us to look horizontal and then vertical. After we do the skill progression, I’m trying to create a shared document on “how to teach writing” or “what we’re looking for in writing” that’s through the entire department. So that everyone is using the same language, common structure for essays, and common expectations, and a progression. In order for each teacher to choose a writing focus that builds on the focus from the previous year and then prepares the student for the following year. There needs to be a collaborative, common idea with one form, similar rubrics, and similar objectives. And then, my big thing this year is a text audit. To understand the world, you have to hear everybody’s perspective; traditionally, we haven’t. At least 15 or 20 years ago, it was one voice if you developed a curriculum. This is all about the canon and who created it, and why, and what voices were left out and why. We need to understand our relationship to each other and our relationship to the community just as much as we understand who we are as individuals. Q: What first made you passionate about teaching English? A: I became an English teacher because I liked hearing stories and telling stories and getting lost in those stories.
But, later, I saw literature as a vessel for an understanding of what it means to be a human and using literature to understand other people and oneself and how one interacts with other people and then, politics and gender and religions and protests and revolutions, and dreams, and all the messy stuff of life. Q: What are you changing, or hope to change, structurally about the department? A: I feel like the nation is changing, at least from my perspective. And so departments, education, and academia need to be fluid with that change. We are now at an integral point in history. We have to scramble to reassess what is being taught and how it’s being taught. I don’t know that I’m structurally changing anything, except I think we all need to regroup and think about what we are doing, why, and how we are doing it. As the SAT and standardized testing fades away, we can’t just keep plodding along and not be regrouping to realize how we must change to accommodate the changing world and to prepare students for college, because college is changing. None of us can understand that yet. We do not know what the other side of the pandemic is going to look like yet. Students have lost years of learning from remote classrooms. Students have access to technology that changes perspectives and reality. The United States is becoming increasingly polarized. Travel and global connections have been limited to some degree. thefourthestate.net
