Christie Carson is
a senior lecturer
in English at
Royal Holloway,
University of London.
Her main teaching area
is Shakespeare in
performance. She
has been working
towards involving the
work of contemporary
performers and theatre
practitioners in teaching.
Dr Carson is the co-editor
of the Cambridge King
Lear CD-ROM: Text and
Performance Archive
and author of 'King Lear
in North America',
an article on this CD
and the principle
investigator of Designing
Shakespeare: an audio
visual archive, 1960-2000.
The Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) came into being two and a half years ago and June 2007 marked the halfway point in their funding. As a result the English Subject Centre’s ‘Renewals’ conference in July was significant for those involved in CETLs and provided a forum both for dissemination and for discussion of the CETL initiative. The core theme of ‘Renewals’—refiguring university English in the 21st century—also happens to be at the heart of a group of CETLs which I have come to know well. The engagement of these CETLs in the conference presents an opportunity to review both the event and history so far of those connected to the English subject community.
Between January 2006 and July 2007 I worked as the CETL Liaison Officer in the English Subject Centre. During that period it was my task to develop relationships with, and to understand the activities of, ten of these CETLs in order to draw conclusions about how this work might influence the discipline more widely. The objective of the post was to develop a symbiotic relationship with the ten CETLs most closely associated with English in order that we might benefit more widely from this exciting and unprecedented development. The high level of involvement of the CETL community in the ‘Renewals’ Conference demonstrates the potential of the strategy of integrating the CETL conversation with a wider discussion about the changes taking place in the discipline.
As Professor Judy Simons pointed out in her ‘Renewals’ welcoming address, the students we are teaching today have changed in a number of ways. In particular she noted how their approaches to learning have changed as have their approaches to technology. Our students now often work as well as study and so may well interact with the library and their course work at odd or unsocial hours. She remarked that their attitudes toward assessment and also toward reading have changed.(1) The aims and objectives of ‘Rene
wals’ were designed to highlight the issues that are arising from such changes and these are exactly the issues that the CETLs are also trying to address over the long term.
As Professor Elaine Showalter declared in her introductory remarks at ‘Renewals’, the conference was a truly international affair, which opened up the debate taking place in the UK to cross-fertilisation with ideas coming out of the United States where student attitudes and practices have been moving in new directions for some time. She lauded the fact that we had invited to the conference two key innovators from the US, Professors Alan Liu and Richard Miller, and she also highlighted the areas where UK higher education differed from the US in terms of the environment in which we work. Drawing on her experience in the 1990s as President of the Modern Language Association, she said American HE practices, were paralyzed by competition and complacency while the UK has the equally alliterative advantages of communication, commitment and centralisation.(2) In this comment she was referring specifically to the kinds of dialogue which have been undertaken by the English Subject Centre but which are also taking place increasingly through the Centres for Excellence.
Ben Knights, Judy Simons & Rick Rylance
at the Renewals conference, July 2007.
In governmental terms the CETL initiative was developed as a change management strategy. The government saw a need for change and put money into giving colleagues the job of managing that change as they saw fit. What might be considered a coercive approach from on high was understood by Showalter as one of the greatest strengths of the British environment. The experiences of the Centres for Excellence, I would suggest, also support the claim that it is possible to gain great benefits from a centrally sponsored initiative. The CETLs I have been working with have developed new skills in talking about their teaching. Participants have also been given the gift of time and money to develop new learning practices and to create new learning spaces. Most importantly, however, the existence of the CETLs has opened up a dialogue between colleagues about how students and the environment in which we are teaching are changing in the 21st century. This discussion has resulted in a serious attempt to rethink the profession and the position of the university in our society. Of course, these are questions that are not being raised by the CETLs exclusively, however, within the CETLs we can see positive and concrete examples of what new models of teaching and learning might look like.
Background
The CETLs came about, in part, to act as a counter balance to the Research Assessment Exercise. This HEFCE initiative, which was instigated by the 2003 White Paper The Future of Higher Education aimed to develop a means of rewarding specific departments and institutions that were developing innovative pedagogic practice. Thus when 74 CETLs were approved in England and Northern Ireland in January 2005 the national network of Subject Centres turned their attention to thinking about ways of working with this new network of pedagogic laboratories. In order to understand how to achieve this end it was essential to consider the CETL initiative’s two main aims: to reward excellent teaching practice, and to further invest in that practice so that CETL funding delivers substantial dividends to students, teachers and institutions. Although many CETLs are dedicated to generic themes such as employability and assessment, the English Subject Centre identified ten whose work would be of greatest interest to our community. Four of these are concerned with developing creative practice in teaching in the humanities. The remaining six address forms of learning and assessment that are of particular relevance to the English community.
The project: Phase 1
The aim of my year and a half long project as Liaison Officer was to develop links with the selected CETLs in order to create a mutual understanding of the work going on in these two distinct organisations. A key goal was to make the CETLs aware of the resources available to them through the English Subject Centre in terms of expertise and existing dissemination opportunities. It was hoped that through discussion and involvement joint activities might arise.
The project was, in fact, split into two parts. During the first seven months I was charged with creating concrete relationships with the four CETLs that address the ways in which students can engage with creative practice (ArtsWork Learning Labs at Bath Spa; The Capital Centre at Warwick; C4C Collaborating for Creativity at York St John and the Centre for Employability through the Humanities at Central Lancashire). What these four CETLs share is a focus on the complex question of how students can learn creative and practical skills alongside their academic study. In each case these CETLs have developed intellectual and physical spaces that provide an opportunity for students to work towards a professional level of creative work. The six Learning Labs at ArtsWork at Bath Spa aim to create new courses that rely on student work and on interaction with the creative industries. The CAPITAL Centre at Warwick University aims to bring the practices of the rehearsal room into the classroom through the enhancement of current and future modules. Taking Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) activities into universities in England but also taking the expertise of the University back to the RSC is a central aim of this CETL. The C4C: Collaborating for Creativity CETL has developed a programme of 25 projects working to expand the work of existing modules. These projects and the creative space built for the CETL have been developed with an aim of involving the local artistic community in York. In a similar way the Centre for Employability in the Humanities at Central Lancashire is developing its work through Realistic Work Environments (publishing, media, museum and gallery, theatre and events) in a way that is designed to further the work of the students in conjunction with developing links with the local community.
I felt it was essential to draw together key members of staff from these four CETLs in order for them to be able to share experiences and expertise. Thus, after I made separate visits to each of them, our first collaborative meeting was held in May 2006. While all CETL staff were deeply involved in the specific local challenges of overseeing capital projects and hiring and training new staff, a number of key points of overlap were identified. These included: employability through Real Work Environments (RWE), creativity in English through performance and creative writing, issues around practice-based research and the documentation of creativity, the challenges of rewarding creativity, interdisciplinarity and the real changes to teaching brought about by new learning spaces. All four of these CETLs, despite working with quite different institutional and departmental cultures, found parity in terms of the challenges they faced when shifting to a teaching practice that was more practical in its approach. Through the discussions instigated by this meeting it became clear that the English Subject Centre had two quite different but related potential roles; first, it could provide information about pedagogic research, as well as models of good practice, and second it could provide a dissemination platform for the results of this research.
Joint events were seen as a productive model of collab oration in the first instance. The aim of these events was to, on the one hand, showcase the work of the CETL and, on the other, set it in a wider context of teaching and research in the discipline. Following these principles two successful events were planned. The first, ‘Teaching Shakespeare’ (September 2006), brought together the launch of a report on this topic conducted by the English Subject Centre with an opportunity to highlight the work of the CAPITAL Centre at Warwick University.(3) The second event, ‘Working it out: situated and work-related learning in the Humanities’ (March 2007), brought together two of the CETLs (CETH and ArtsWork) to share their experiences with a wide ranging audience of career advisors and academics.(4) At each event care was taken to place the work of the CETLs alongside similar work happening in institutions that did not contain CETLs. Indeed, it is important to acknowledge that while there are institutions that have benefited substantially from the new source of funding which CETLs provide, others have felt excluded from the apparent windfall. One of the aims of the work of my project was to extract lessons from the CETL work, which was often, by necessity, locally focused, to see how it might prove useful for the wider English community.
The Project: Phase 2
The aim in the second phase of the project was to initiate discussions with an additional six CETLs which were more generic in their approach to pedagogy and therefore were tackling disciplines beyond the humanities. These six CETLs had a much wider remit but they each had at least one specific project or staff member that was dedicated to working within an English Department. Two of these CETLs focus on Enquiry-based and student directed learning: CEEBL: Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-Based Learning at the University of Manchester and CILASS: Centre for Inquiry based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield. Working along a similar theme is the Centre for Promoting Learner Autonomy at Sheffield Hallam University. More specifically focused CETLs include the Centre for Excellence in Assessment for Learning at Northumbria University with an emphasis on new forms of assessment and the Centre for Career Management Skills (CCMS) at Reading University which looks at employability. Finally, the only CETL in the group to come from Northern Ireland, St. Mary’s Writing Centre at St Mary’s University College Belfast, looks more broadly at the issue of writing skills across the curriculum in all subjects.
What came out of this second phase discussion with CETLs was a sense that across the disciplines university lecturers are struggling with very similar challenges. These included many of the issues raised at the Renewals conference: increasing class sizes, inflexible and inadequate teaching spaces, increasing cultural diversity, the pressures imposed on students by the rising cost of education and the sense that students were increasingly finding the shift to the independent learning model of higher education a struggle. Staff in all of the CETLs expressed their enthusiasm for having opportunities to discuss these issues with a broader group of colleagues than they were accustomed to addressing. Extending the discussion into more formal outcomes that could be published was seen as a huge advantage of the CETL work. Therefore in this second group of CETLs the work of the English Subject Centre was focussed on drawing out the specific project work going on in English and bringing it to the attention of a discipline specific audience. The ‘Renewals’ conference figured prominently in these discussions, as did the submission of articles to the special UK issue of the journal Pedagogy.
The Relationship between the English Subject Centre and the selected CETLs
In taking a proactive approach to working with a group of selected CETLs the English Subject Centre has been able to participate in this relationship quite successfully. The CETLs are in a position to supply the Subject Centre with a great deal of concrete information about how teaching practice is changing. The Subject Centre therefore can rely on the CETLs for edivence to help to make its cases in policy discussions about the changing face of the discipline. The CETLs can in turn rely on the Subject Centre to place their work within a wider national context. It should be noted, however, that the CETLs have grown in strength and direction over the two and half years since they were established and increasingly they have been in a position to instigate their own dissemination activities. As one example amongst many, the CETH at UCLAN has launched a refereed journal to look at issues surrounding work-related learning.
Conclusions
Renewals delegate Moira Baker (Radford College)
presenting her paper 'Bringing the Global Home:
the use of digital technology in an international
women writers course'.
Initially the aim of the CETL Liaison project was to single out the work of a small group of CETLs in order to create a dialogue that would be of benefit to the English community as a whole. By meeting at an early stage with key staff in each of the designated CETLs it was possible to gauge the most useful ways of working collaboratively. Such work has included joint CETL events, conference participation and publications. In the future it is my hope that the work of the CETLs will be integrated into the work of the community in a seamless way. However, at this early stage in their development it seems essential to highlight how large a shift in practice is taking place, particularly towards a student-led model. To colleagues who feel they have been entirely unaffected by the CETL work I would suggest getting involved in the increasing number of events and conferences that these Centres are hosting, for the CETL initiative as a whole is destined to provoke a much wider debate about how we serve students and our own interests as teachers in the long run. If the face of the university is to change to meet the challenges of the 21st century then participation in thinking through those changes seems an essential activity for colleagues across the discipline.
The outcome of the CETL initiative has been to extend the pedagogic debate and to develop a language for speaking to the government about the changes that are taking place. Radical shifts of practice in Higher Education cannot be fully resisted, largely because they are the result of societal shifts; however, the CETL work has given a voice to academics working at the coal face of teaching. By sharing practices across institutions and across disciplines this work can help to reinvigorate the profession by using government funding and interacting with government policy in a proactive way. In the face of mounting pressures for change it is essential that the experience and engagement that Richard Miller (in his plenary lecture at Renewals) suggested we instil in our students, is also being developed in us. The CETL initiative is a chance for academics to learn through doing as well as giving students the opportunity to take this approach. The RAE has gone a long way to support the model of competition and complacency that Elaine Showalter says has caused paralysis in the US. The CETL initiative is designed to counteract that tendency by appealing to our desire to share practices and experiences in a way that can support and foster productive institutional and national change in our shifting education environment.
Notes
1. Judy Simons Pro Vice Chancellor at De Montfort University, Welcome to Renewals: Refiguring University English in the 21st Century, Thursday 5 July, Royal Holloway University of London
2. Elaine Showalter, Professor Emeritus of English at Princeton University. Opening Address at Renewals: Refiguring University English in the 21st Century, Thursday 5 July, Royal Holloway University of London
3. Event archive for ‘Teaching Shakespeare’ which contains videos of the presentations
4.Event archive for ‘Working it out: situated and work-related learning’
Read Christie Carson’s editorial commentary in this issue of the Newsletter
Further reading
Renewals: Refiguring University English in the 21st Century
Professor N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Literature as a
Computational Practice’
‘The Future of Higher Education’ 2003 White Paper
HEFCE CETL announcement
Selected CETL Websites
English Subject Centre CETL Homepage
The Capital Centre (Creativity and Performance in Teaching & Learning) University of Warwick
The Centre for Employability Through the Humanities (CETH)
University of Central Lancashire
ArtsWork Bath Spa University
‘C4C: Collaborating for Creativity’ York St John University
Centre for Promoting Learner Autonomy
Centre for Excellence in Assessment for Learning Northumbria University
Centre for Career Management Skills (CCMS) University of Reading
CEEBL - Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-Based Learning University of Manchester
CILASS - Centre for Inquiry-Based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences University of Sheffield
St. Mary’s Writing Centre St Mary’s University College Belfast
