The Higher Education Academy is currently considering proposals for Subject Centres to commission ‘subject enquiries’ – systematic, policy-oriented, enquiries designed to map trends and extrapolate them into predictions about the future health of the subject. Whether or not such an enquiry into the English subject groups would be appropriate, the English Subject Centre would argue that all our ongoing work constitutes in a sense such a longitudinal study of what is happening. This Newsletter and its ingredients constitute an example. So do the website, or the dozen or more departmental projects flourishing at any one moment. So, too, do the reports which we have recently commissioned into A-level under Curriculum 2000 and into the teaching of Shakespeare, and those we are about to commission into the taught MA and (joint with the subject centre for Languages and Linguistics) into student transition from A-level English Language into HE Language and Linguistics. And that is without mentioning the Palgrave/English Subject Centre ‘Teaching the New English’ series of which the first three volumes have just been published . The Subject Centre has been from the beginning in the business of identifying, collecting and communicating knowledge about the dynamics of the subject, and doing so in ways that we hope and believe are practically useful to our colleagues across the community.
To assert this is to do more than engage in corporate self-advertisement. It is to recur to the question raised in my last Foreword about what kinds of knowledge Subject Centres represent and foster. Let me take this back to the perennial problem of creating an idiom for dialogue about teaching and learning. Within months we shall be coming to the end of a period when strategies and tactics surrounding the RAE have tended to dominate attention in many universities. It is hardly a wild guess to suppose that those very universities (highly aware of TQI and the Student Satisfaction Survey, fees, or the dangers of even unmerited adverse publicity) are going to invest a good deal more attention in learning and teaching. At which point the Subject Centres and their colleagues nationwide are going to have to be able to reach out beyond the rather pallid mantra about ‘the student experience’, and enter into nuanced debates about the oblique and sometimes tangential connections between what students do and know and what we as scholar teachers would like them to do and know. What do we really know about the aptitudes and knowledges, or about the nature of the memories they leave us with?
Let me connect this question to a current preoccupation of both subject and Subject Centre. That is the rapid growth over the last few years of creative writing in and in connection with English fields of study. The situation is moving too fast for there to be adequate statistics (and HESA) creates a distorted picture because it identifies single honours only). But the question concerns more than numbers, useful though they would be. Subject Centre information (and an unsystematic reading of school and departmental websites) indicates that if departments/subject groups/programmes with no creative writing provision are not already in a minority then they soon will be. Creative writing modules, strands, and MAs have emerged or are in process of emerging in all types of institution. Meanwhile, the Qualifi cations and Curriculum Authority is investigating the feasibility of a creative writing unit within AS/A2 and soliciting university views. Creativity is one of the legs of Rick Rylance’s ‘three-legged stool’ (see article, below). The question therefore becomes one about the meaning of the active co-presence of creative writing. Might we speak almost of a silent revolution in English Studies?
How will writing programmes impact, how do they already impact upon more traditional areas of the subject? What epistemological authority do such programmes carry? What lessons for teaching and assessment may be learned by other areas of the discipline? What kind of disciplinary hybrids may grow up? What are the implications for scholarship or for how students work? What new models emerge for relations between teachers and taught? A number of English Subject Centre publications and projects have already partially addressed these issues. The reconfi guring of English Studies in relation to these and related developments will be the subject of Renewals, our 2007 conference. We must ask, says Paul Dawson in his thought-provoking new book Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Routledge, 2005) ‘what constitutes knowledge in Creative Writing, and how does work produced by teachers and students in Creative Writing (i.e. their ‘research’) contribute to knowledge in Literary Studies ...’
The fraught questions of creativity and originality have currency in whatever it is we mean by student research as well as in writing labelled ‘creative’. Enabling students as producers is the subject of all manner of employability initiatives as well as of the work of our colleagues in Centres for Excellence in creative arts. But the Subject Centre takes the view that something very much more is going on here than universities somehow pandering to student demand or caving in to DfES policy. We believe that the potential for mutations and hybridisation across the already permeable boundaries between the study of writing, literature and language are of gathering signifi - cance for the future of the subject. This we think is true at the level of the process of the workshop or seminar as it is for supplementation of the traditional analytical essay. The meaning and nature of this silent revolution go beyond tools and pragmatic local decisions. While we must acknowledge major differences between the reception of Creative Writing in British universities and its much earlier acclimatisation in the USA, we may be about to observe an intellectual impact on UK English Studies comparable – though with different outcomes – to the arrival of Cultural Studies and ‘Theory’ a generation ago. Where that intellectual upheaval had surprisingly little impact on teaching and assessment, it seems unlikely that writing, with its emphasis on students as makers and performers, will leave our pedagogies untouched.
