One way of thinking about the role of Subject Centres is in terms of mediation and translation. These functions are perhaps at the heart of all their roles. Across the Subject Network, the Centres seek to connect up communities and discourses, translating the languages and pre-occupations of one educational tribe to another. This form of creative trespass, this understanding that no party has exclusive access to ‘the truth’, sometimes leads to new and surprising results. A salient example of the need for this go-between function would be the current pre-occupation of the Higher Education Academy and its paymasters with the ‘student learning experience’. (This reflects converging and mutually reinforcing trends both in educational theory and in DfES policy.) There it is on the Higher Education Academy homepage:
Our mission is to help institutions, discipline groups, and all staff to provide the best possible learning experience for their students. (www.heacademy.ac.uk)
Cue discomfort all round, not least for a Subject Network which was in its early days a ‘learning and teaching support network’ able to offer discipline communities the re-assurance that it would make no serious waves.
Let’s acknowledge straightaway the vulnerability of the very concept of ‘the student experience’. Not only does it homogenise what are self-evidently hugely diverse experiences, but it colludes with consumerism in implying that the core raison d’être of universities is cherishing and satisfying its students. So for the English communities (insofar as they are even aware of it) this po-faced mantra is a sitting target. Hardly worth wasting an ironic aside. All the same, here at the English Subject Centre, we would argue that the community ignores the phrase (and the orientation it represents) at its peril.
Certainly we should not fall into sentimentalising our students. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux put it clearly some years before the idea of ‘student-centred education’ migrated from the populist left to the mainstream.
It is not enough for teachers merely to affirm uncritically their students’ histories, experiences, and stories. To take students’ voices at face value is to run the risk of idealizing and romanticizing them. The contradictory and complex stories that give meaning to the lives of students are never innocent, and it is important that they be recognized for their contradictions as well as their possibilities. (Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991: 130 – 1.)
But the romanticization of the student experience is not a necessary consequence of a salutary reorientation towards the learner. For one thing, the tendency to prioritise the student experience is not simply an intrusion foisted upon us by an alien community of educational developers. There are, as I have argued elsewhere (Active Reading 2006:34), marked historical affinities between the ‘death of the author’ phase in Theory and the rise of the new student-centred accounts of learning styles in educational psychology in the late 1970s. Profound analogies exist with Barthes’s emigration ‘from work to text’, from monologic authority to the dialogic buzz of meanings. As Derek Attridge has argued, the study of literature (and the same must surely apply more broadly to language and discourse as well) requires a gesture of hospitality towards the ‘other’, towards all the guests that may turn up, bidden or unbidden in the classroom (Singularity of Literature 2004). In exercising hospitality towards our student guests, we who teach offer them model and opportunity for their own acts of hospitality, for welcoming the strange and perplexing as generous hosts in their own turn.
At the other extreme, there is the command economy of knowledge, of the kind that still largely underpins our curricula. (This is what you need to know, and this is how we intend to convey it to you.) The English trades – even in their Theory incarnation, and while formally committed to dialogue – have down the years invested too much in their own self-image as a Clerisy, as the social arbitrator of cultural and aesthetic significance. There’s a paradox here, and one we need to tease out if our subject grouping is not to shrink into an elite subject for the expensively educated. On the one hand to do justice to the rigorous demands of knowledge, yet in the same breath to recognise that we need to be more sensitive to, to know more about, the learning styles, the varied intelligences and needs not only of those who happen at this moment to be our students, but of those who (were we to relax our border controls) might be our students in the future.
Commitment to ‘the student experience’ does not have to come at the cost of denying the difficulty of learning or betraying the altogether serious demands of knowledge about literature, language or culture. We would be short-changing our students if we sold out to evanescent consumer whim, or succumbed to the temptation to pretend that we are all really 20 year olds at heart. Yet such commitment does require that the English constellation think much harder than in general it has been accustomed to do about its own procedures, rhetorics, support systems – all the pragmatics of its relation to students and potential students.
Learning is by turns tough, exhilarating, boring, and liberating. We do our students no favours if we pretend otherwise, or strive to protect them against the experience of risk. We have, so to say, to do justice to learning as noun as well as participle, and find ways of sharing with students the difficult privilege of being active producers of knowledge. Yet maybe too much of the subject’s identity has been invested in the production of that small minority of students who will become the future scholars of the subject. While we should never in our dealings with students forego the rigours of scholarship, we have to acknowledge and work towards the needs of those whom we might not have seen as the ‘ideal readers’ of our efforts. For them, too, ‘English’, as subject matter and practice, offers the opportunity to nourish the roots of citizenship in vibrant language and luminous artifice. In the words of Martha Nussbaum’s title, our subjects concern ‘cultivating humanity’. Our responsibility towards our students need not trump but is always commensurate with our responsibility to knowledge.
