English has the largest subject cohort of A Level candidates, and there were 38,000 undergraduates reading for English degrees in the UK in 2005/2006. So where did it all go right? The answer must surely be ‘in the classroom’, for it would be odd to assume that our students are initially attracted to the discipline by our research. Higher education teachers are now required to take courses on the basics of teaching (quite rightly), but the generic aspects of these training courses seem pretty well universally loathed. If the training is to be more in accord with what the trainees themselves see as their needs (as it surely must), then there have to be subject-specific books like this one, for the training is given not before but while starting to teach at degree level, and that reduces the average trainee’s toleration of generalised otiosity virtually to zero. This book certainly begins to meet the need for materials which offer tightly focused, practical, subject-specific support. There isn’t a great deal of competition, but Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature (Blackwell, 2003) is an outstanding predecessor – lively, witty, quirky and wise. There is also the more genre-based collection Teaching Literature: A Companion, edited by Tanya Agathocleous and Ann C Dean (Blackwell, 2002). The present book is more ‘cross-cultural’ than these, in the sense that it is not based mainly on teaching in the US, and I would classify it as more an ‘informational’ than an ‘inspirational’ book.
It opens with an overview chapter, ‘The discipline today’. We are not, surely, ‘in crisis’ any more, but workloads are killing, the ‘quality’ machine goes on producing its paper cities, and the ‘grant capture’ beast devours what energy is left. The second chapter asks, ‘What is good teaching?’ and uses a class on Joyce’s ‘Araby’ in answering the question. The third considers the teaching of literary theory and of academic writing, and chapters follow on planning and course design, on specific teaching methods, on assessment and on the evaluation of teaching. A number of very helpful appendices are available, not between the covers, but on the book’s website (these days more and more books have websites, for increasingly – whether tutors or students – we read only primary texts on the page, and do most of our critical reading on the screen). However, I couldn’t get to the website by the route given on page vi, but by www.sagepub.co.uk/upm-data/9680_011352.pdf
An important chapter in a book such as this is the one called ‘Methods of teaching’, and here I found the material sometimes a little thin, with scope for expansion in a second edition. There is little specific, for instance, on Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), though the topic is briefly touched upon on page 189. Specific commentary would have been welcome on the use of products like the Blackboard ‘family’ of ‘learning management’ systems (from the fiercely-corporate, Washington DC-based organisation) or the more recent Moodle (which is ‘free and open-sourced software’, so we have bad cop and good cop options). Like most of my colleagues, I use VLEs all the time, and see them wherever I go as examiner. The days of badly assembled photocopied handouts seem to be over (thank goodness). Further, putting JSTOR links on a VLE is the only way I have ever found of getting undergraduates to read articles in academic journals. The section on lecturing also seemed rudimentary – it’s little more than a paragraph, in fact. Yet this is surely the aspect of teaching likely to provoke the greatest sense of anxiety and insecurity, and much more is needed in a book like this on how to shape a lecture and give it impact, pace and interest. Increasingly, PowerPoint is the norm – a great and powerful aid, in my view, and infinitely forgiving as a system – but the term is not mentioned in the book. PowerPoint becomes unhelpful when over-packed slides are presented in tricksy ways – phrases arriving on the screen accompanied by drum rolls and bullet noises, and the like. Why do people do this? Because they can, is the only answer. Some basic advice and principles for this kind of presentation would therefore have been welcome.
On the other hand, much else in the book is well judged – it says sensible things, for instance, about plagiarism, and points us in the direction of the most recent detection aids, and is helpful on the topic of assessment by portfolios, with examples of such tasks in the website appendices. Overall, this is a thorough and practical book in which new and not-so-new lecturers will find a good deal of valuable and thought-provoking material.
Peter Barry
Aberystwyth University
