Louise Marshall and Will Slocombe
teach at Aberystwyth University.
They were English Subject
Centre E-Learning Advocates
in 2007–2008, and are now
working on the HumBox project
and a CILASS project on
inquiry-based learning module
design. They are also involved
in the 2008–2010 AHRC-funded
Collaborative Digital Research
in the Humanities doctoral training
project. They are the authors
of ‘From Passive to Active Voices:
Technology, Community, and
Literary Studies’, Teaching
Literature in Open and Virtual
Universities, ed. Takis Kayalis
and Anastasia Natsina
(forthcoming, Continuum 2010).
In Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton tells the story of George Gordon, Merton Professor at Oxford, who, in 1922, ironically stated: ’England is sick, and […] English literature must save it.‘ Gordon went on to satirise the zealotry that characterised the discipline during the post-war period: ’English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State‘ (Eagleton, 1996: 23; see also Baldick, 1983: 104–6). His sardonic words echo over 80 years later, and, in our jaded times, we might not believe that literature can save our souls or heal the state either, but such statements may, nevertheless, retain some valency.
With much discussion of the ’value‘ of literary studies recently, be it from the government, the public or from within the academy, we find ourselves in the precarious position of having to justify the ’value‘ of our subject yet again. But what is the value of English? If it is merely to produce students well versed in literary ‘classics’, then what is the ’value‘ of such an education to a graduate of today? Likewise, if our primary goal is to foster that most amorphous of phrases, ’critical thinking‘, then what is the “value” of such a skill outside of the academic sphere? There is one, of course, but articulating this to each other is difficult enough, let alone to students or those outside the subject. Eagleton notes the resonance between Gordon’s words and Matthew Arnold’s ideological agenda in promoting mass education (something else that echoes today), and while we should be cautious in adopting either Gordon’s cynicism or Arnold’s politics, there is still a kernel of truth in the values that Gordon’s statement ascribes to the subject.
Where Arnold believes that literature can prevent anarchy, Gordon is more suspicious of the appropriation of literature as social panacea. Despite their very different agendas, there exists a common ground between the rhetoric of Arnold and Gordon; both commentators identify literature as a powerful form of communication, one that has lost (for Gordon) and retains (for Arnold) the potential to entertain, inform, salve and revitalise. Today, technology finds itself in much the same predicament. It is perceived as social glue on the one hand, but is held responsible for cultural fragmentation on the other. What an English degree achieves, arguably, is not only an understanding of literature but, more importantly, an understanding of the role that it plays in society. However, in order to achieve this in relation to contemporary society, some understanding of the intersections between English studies and technology is required. We may not be able to heal the state – and many of us would not want to – but we can nevertheless show the role we adopt as ‘the subject of communication’.
The subject of communication?
One of the first skills that our students are told is vital to their success as English undergraduates is effective communication. We rehearse again and again the value of an English degree as evidence of an ability ’to communicate effectively‘ in both academic writing and verbal communication. But what exactly is effective communication in a networked society? Neither of us would dispute the value of essay writing or oral discussions, but as the only ways of judging a student’s ability to communicate, such tasks occlude the fact that communication itself has come to have a much broader significance.
In the oft-maligned 2007 QAA Benchmark Statement for English, ’effective communication‘ is referred to in both subject-specific and generic skills, and includes the acquisition of ’rhetorical skills of effective communication and argument, both oral and written‘ and ’advanced literacy and communication skills and the ability to apply these in appropriate contexts‘. The overlap between these specialist and generic competencies reveals the difficulty in determining what ‘effective communication’ means within these different contexts. By enshrining communication as both subject-specific content and generic skill, as both subject and object of an English degree, we are clearly labelling ourselves, and being labelled, as the subject of communication.
Photo courtesy of xkcd.com
Elsewhere in the Benchmark we are told that students should ‘develop a range of subject-specific and transferable skills, including high-order … communication skills’. Seemingly, the notion that English literature is a powerful mode of communication remains integral to authorised accounts of the subject. It certainly seems to us that public perceptions of our subject identify English graduates as good communicators. However, the Benchmark and our own experiences of teaching and learning hold that English has a much broader scope than merely ‘effective communication’. The Benchmark identifies a host of skills and knowledge, including critical reflection, textual production and reception, enthusiasm for the subject and an awareness of the ‘continuing social and cultural importance’ of English literature. Such statements echo Gordon’s rhetoric, showing how this debate continues, but there are other elements identified in the Benchmark – most notably electronic resources – that, while ‘new’, remain central to a subject predicated upon communication.
Interestingly, the ability to evaluate such electronic resources is only identified as a generic, not subject-specific skill, as is ICT itself. ‘IT skills’ (where is ‘Communication’ here?) are to be promoted through ‘the ability to access, work with and evaluate electronic resources (such as hypertext, conferencing, e-publishing, blogs and wikis).’ Surely, if English is to retain its place as the subject of communication, ICT skills are precisely the type of skills English graduates are expected to possess in a networked society. Moreover, should they be learning about soon-to-be-obsolete forms of communication or instead be encouraged to see the broader picture of technology-enhanced communication? As a central component of English studies (and thus subject-specific rather than generic), students must learn about the applications of technologies rather than the technological applications themselves.
The subject of community?
It is through the concept of technology-enhanced learning environments (TELEs) that we believe such issues can be addressed. As practitioners of, and researchers in, our subject, we all know that English has a broader potential than merely the production of graduates who can read, write and speak with authority. We want students to know how to act as independent researchers rather than literary parrots squawking: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged …’. Such independence is gained through active learning and it is opportunities for individualised, self-directed learning experiences that we need to provide.
TELEs are not limited to virtual classrooms or teaching materials disseminated via a VLE, but arise from students customising their own learning environments and bringing their own technologies (textual or visual, digital or paper) into the classroom. With the growth of mobile technologies, students themselves can negotiate the degree of blended learning they experience. The potential of the student-directed teaching environment can therefore be fully exploited in terms of enabling students to become independent researchers in their subject, irrespective of the teaching environments offered by the institution or designed by the teacher.
TELEs do not just mean that individual students bring their own technologies to bear upon their learning, however, but that they also communicate their learning to their peers. It is in this way that English demonstrates its value to the broader community: students learn the benefits of community through research and vice versa. In so doing they translate and transpose existing tools for collaboration into the classroom context, bringing their ‘everyday’ experiences to their scholarship. Moreover, through the inclusion of these experiences in the academic setting, students come to understand the malleability of tools, strategies and approaches. The act of incorporating social technologies into learning and teaching means that ‘critical thinking’ becomes the filter through which students can appreciate and appropriate these technologies in both spheres, developing subject-specific and transferable skills through understanding the acts and contexts of communication.
The communities that we engage in as subject practitioners and researchers can also be regarded as TELEs. As such, TELEs go beyond the immediate confines of our day-to-day teaching, for as a subject community we readily engage in such environments in order to inform our own textual interpretations. What binds these communities together are our shared experiences, practices and approaches, be they in relation to language/literature, historical period, literary theory or pedagogy. But what enables them to function is an increasing reliance upon technology. Our goal, as a subject, is to address the age-old question of how to get students involved in English, to see its value and to join our subject communities, as external advocates if not as practitioners. Technology can help us to achieve this and enable our students to make the transition from passive learners and receivers to active participants and readers.
For us, the simplest way to conceptualise the centrality of community to the subject is through linking Stanley Fish’s famous concept of ’interpretative communities’ to Randy Garrison and Terry Anderson’s ‘communities of inquiry’. Fish’s ‘interpretative communities’ proposes that textual interpretations are constructed through a community and that students need to be introduced to that community in order to understand such interpretations. In so doing, of course, students learn how to do the subject alongside learning what the subject is. Garrison and Anderson’s “communities of inquiry” is a pedagogic model uniting environment, teaching and community to foster student-led inquiry; for them, such communities are predicated upon technology, given the ways in which it can be used to facilitate different types of communicative practices and place the teacher within, rather than outside, the community.
By bridging between these two hypothetical communities, our aim here is to recognise that students learn the subject by doing the subject. The integration of technology into this is not an afterthought or an e-learning tickbox exercise, but a recognition that, used appropriately, technology can foster a sense of community. As a result, we can begin to build a community of practitioners – comprised of both us and our students – who understand not only the content and curricula of the subject (its ‘what’), but also its values and methods (its ‘why’ and ‘how’), as well as developing the necessarily technological proficiencies to benefit the wider community, whether in educational, cultural, economic or societal terms.
The subject of the subject?
As a result, what has come to the fore in the projects we are involved in is the need to work together as a community and the ways in which technology can augment this. During the English Subject Centre E-learning Advocates project, the idea was simple: to develop a network of practitioners who could advocate how technology can best be employed to assist departments’ teaching and their students’ learning. It was, quite simply, a ‘community’ project. In our current two projects, ’HumBox’ and an inquiry-based learning project through CILASS (both of which are discussed elsewhere in this issue of WordPlay), the idea of community is again important (see p. 14 and p. 45 respectively). In a true scholastic community, we learn as much from our students as they do from us. In such a community, the learner/teacher paradigm shifts – knowledge is co-created by the community for the community.
The student experience of active learning is central to this. As such, the aim of this piece is not to advocate technology as the solution to all our problems. We take issue with many discussions of technology-enhanced learning, e-learning and blended learning (to name but three types in an ever-increasing array) because they foreground the technology rather than the student. There is an increasing sense, in both educational theory and more broadly in society, that technology is a panacea. Whether you believe this or not (and we do not), students still need to engage critically with new technologies and technological change in order to exploit the potential of their status as graduates of English. By learning through technology they are prepared for some of the challenges that they will face, while not detracting from either the knowledge we expect them to gain or the skills needed to make use of such knowledge. The technology is not the point here, the students are.
Of course, balance needs to be maintained between what the students bring to the environment and what the environment brings to the students. Students, as much as any literary text or linguistic practice, are the subject of our subject, because without them we have no future. Classrooms and virtual environments are spaces of negotiation, of contact and community, and we cannot adopt a ‘one size fits all’ approach. If we wish to promote the ideas of communication and community, then we have to do this within learning environments, making them active, community-focussed and ensuring, above all else, that they actually work, adapting to the needs of individuals as much as to the changing faces of literature and language.
As participants in this subject community, we must foster both research and teaching, promoting the subject through our teaching in order for our students to see the value of research. They are, after all, the next generation of scholars. For all our concerns over research impact, it is important to remember that a thought-provoking textbook or engaging seminar has the potential to impact upon the future shape of the subject as much as any piece of 4* research. If we can show students what the subject ‘is’ and what we ‘do’, then we have shown the value of our subject to them. In so doing, we show how our subject, given its continued focus on communications and community, is of value to contemporary society and so have already justified our value. Like Gordon, we may no longer believe that literature has a ‘civilising function’, but perhaps English has a broader purpose today: to expose to the community the various ties that continue to bind us together.
Community, Technology and student inquiry: five practical suggestions
1. Promote ‘research-led learning’: Encourage students’ to follow their own interests, do research into their favourite books (the vast majority will do this online) and discuss them with their peers. Encourage them to create community resources and produce essays for undergraduate journals on topics that interest them.
2. Make technology relevant in the classroom: Instigate collaborative research activities that facilitate online research (remember to give them a little longer to carry out the task – the results will be worth it). Discuss their findings, focussing on the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’. Deliver strategies for research through the subject content, not outside of it.
3. Make technology relevant outside the classroom: Ask questions via discussion boards or blogs that feed into seminars and group discussions. Base the choice of materials, the themes addressed and/or the activities undertaken on students’ ideas and choices. Make your own contributions, suggesting other sources or topics to extend the discussion and, more importantly, to value the ongoing discussion.
4. Use ‘paperchases’: Ask students to follow up their interests by playing a bibliographic paperchase. Get them to find an essay they find useful and then select one of its sources to read. From this source, they should find another bibliographic entry and read that. Repeat as often as they wish. Discuss what they have found alongside how they found the materials.
5. Break the rules sometimes: We are told that good learning activities need students to be aware of three things: what they should do, what they should produce and how long they have to produce it. Why not break the rules? Give them a goal but don’t tell them how to achieve it, or give them a method but don’t tell them where it should take them. Enjoy the journey with them!
Finally, whatever else you do, make sure that everyone involved (including you) understands and can identify the benefit to their own learning.
References
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
The English Benchmark Statement
www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/benchmark/statements/English07.pdf
