Across the Subject Network, Subject Centres perform a balancing act. In the nature of the new ‘arms length’ state apparatus, they are required to achieve demonstrable results. Like every other agency, we have targets to meet and funders to impress. Inevitably this means that a large part of our visible output is in the form of practical advice and consumable resources: in the broadest sense, technologies for learning. But there is a larger and at the same time less visible aspect to our work. Subject Centres are staffed by people committed to their subjects, to the knowledges that have been lovingly built, the people who build and maintain them, the students who study them. Beneath the toils of instrumental rationality, we are concerned with the human environment composed by the communities who practice our subjects. It is this orientation towards the hinterlands of classroom practice that has led us to run regular events for departmental and school administrators, humanities librarians, and careers staff as well as front-line teachers.
In the English Subject Centre, we find some of this thinking sharply concentrated as we prepare for next year’s ‘Renewals’ Conference http://www.english. heacademy.ac.uk/renewals/ We find ourselves, in fact, unpacking and enquiring into the connotations of ‘renewals’. If we as a Centre bear some responsibility for promoting the health of the subject, we must ask where professional renewal comes from. The subject of the Conference is of course primarily the renewal of subject matter and teaching. But that renewal in turn has to be based upon those nurturing conditions that make professional creativity possible. The conventional understanding is that – at the individual level – renewal comes from scholarly immersion in your subject. Typically, that is taken to mean reading, researching, doing your ‘own’ writing, talking to colleagues or taking part in conferences or comparable professional activities. The acme of that sort of ‘renewal’ would be an AHRC study leave, or a scholarship to work in one of the great research libraries. But what about teaching? How do people derive a sense of renewal in working with students? Again, the traditional answer used to be from having the time and mental space to work with energetic and questioning students. Yet it seems that all too often colleagues are experiencing the opposite of renewal in their day to day teaching tasks. We hear on all sides about what depletes our colleagues: we hear about the effects of increasing SSRs, about the passive aggression of an influential minority of dependent students, the bombardment of e-mails, about obsessive audit procedures, about the unsatisfactory performance of a job you care about but no longer have the time to do with conviction. We hear less about the sources of new energy, and must wonder whether institutions are actually making the best use of the commitment and expertise at their disposal. This failure (if failure it is) impacts at two levels: upon the existing staff of departments and subject groups, and thus, in turn, upon the bringing on of recruits to the profession. Anxious and stressed colleagues, hanging on in the hopes of their next sabbatical, are not a good advertisement for the joys of teaching English. At the Subject Centre we are very conscious – from departmental visits, from the Head of Department Conferences – how much the work of so many senior colleagues involves caring for the disciplinary environment. We see our larger task as concerning the ways in which departmental communities nurture and support each other; mentor and encourage new faculty, support those who are struggling with fraying of the spirit, or reward those in later career. These cannot be hived off as a separate set of issues. All bear very directly on a group of disciplines that has – in its various forms – treasured linguistic innovation, creativity, the theatre of argument. Which is to say that the question of nurture in our subjects is indeed academic, but not in the pejorative sense. The subject’s very public quarrel with enchantment may have made it all the harder to talk about the teaching self or give nurturing attention to deeper meanings of the academic career. A healthy departmental culture matters if for no other reason than that it enables the recruitment of the next generation of the profession. So one meaning of ‘renewal’ points towards the regeneration of the social body of scholar teachers. Yet we might further suppose that in order to be able to give to our students we have also to be able to give to ourselves. For some colleagues that gift will be the opportunity to re-read and talk with sympathetic others about texts whose meanings are deeply threaded into their own lives. For others it will be the excitement of collaboration on a joint project. At still other times it will be the opportunity to cultivate stillness and the inner space in intense focus on a writing task. Equally, the gift might be one of encouragement to take on greater responsibilities. All require the respect and active support of subject colleagues.
This understanding of departments as working environments informs the Subject Centre’s orientation towards events. As departments seek to help individuals answer for themselves the question ‘what am I in it for?’ we will support them in every way we can. We are simultaneously heartened and depressed when we hear from colleagues at events statements like ‘it reminds me what I’m in it for’, or ‘it succeeded in restoring my faith in both the job and the discipline’. To be oriented towards developing the social-intellectual matrix is not purely an investment in professional narcissism or the nostalgic comfort zone of a residual clerisy. Academic communities in which colleagues look out for each other are a prerequisite if that ubiquitous phrase ‘the student experience’ is to have any real meaning.
