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 seminar-type 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.
