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.
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
