October. Hopefully you have taken a few weeks holiday and, if you’re lucky, have had time to devote to your research. Your course handbooks and module outlines are complete and ready. Your campuses are gearing up or are already humming with activity. Inevitably a new building is under construction somewhere within earshot of your office space and, at charitable moments, you see this is as an appropriate metaphor for the start of fall term: growth, expansion, change. We hope Issue 15 will contribute to that sense of promise and new beginnings.
In keeping with the theme of fresh starts, we’ve made a few changes to the Newsletter, which we think will make it easier and more enjoyable to read. Brett Lucas’s popular column on internet and digital technologies, IT Works!, now anchors the Starters section in the front of the issue, just after the Events Calendar. Sharing the middle sections are Features and Creative Pedagogies. In this issue our Features section is packed: in the Interview we’ve been talking to Scottish literature specialist Carla Sassi, about her teaching career and the surprising differences between higher education in Italy and the UK. Our other articles include Joan Anim-Addo and Les Back’s impassioned discussion of why Black British literature isn’t regularly taught in UK departments of English. Our director, Ben Knights, confronts how English might, if not must join with the other Humanities subjects to think and plan strategically about how skills, economics and employability can sympathetically map onto our group of subjects. Brett Lucas reports on the successful way for lecturers to learn from and with one another regarding e-learning using strategies developed by colleagues across the UK over the last two years. In Creative Pedagogies we have published Nicola Harlow’s winning essay from our annual student competition; she reveals What Makes a Good Lecturer. Graeme Harper writes about his research into how Creative Writing students learn while Jennifer M Young transports us into Second Life, where she and her students have created a virtual literary magazine.
In this issue we are also pleased to include reports from Candice Satchwell on higher education in further education and from Keith Hughes on specific higher education initiatives in Scotland. Finally, the Endnotes section gathers together Book Reviews, Desert Island Texts and The Last Word.
Also scattered throughout this issue are summaries of our current mini-projects and highlights of some of the events we’ve run or helped you to run since April. If you would like more details about this year’s projects (or those of previous cycles) please go to the Projects page on our website. And, if you would like comprehensive reports of any of our events just navigate to the Event archive also on our website. We hope to offer more mini-project funding in 2009 – watch this space and our home page for a funding announcement. Please get in touch if you have a suggestion for an event or are interested in involving the English Subject Centre in an event you have already planned. We are also happy to sponsor teaching-related strands or panels at research conferences.
If you are looking for the through line to this issue it won’t take you long to notice the emphasis has fallen in three places: early career teaching, Creative Writing and Humanism. Our interview with Carla Sassi and Suzanne Hobson’s The Last Word, each address the complex transition from postgraduate studies into full-time employment as a lecturer. While Sassi remembers clearly when she ceased to be a ‘new’ lecturer, Hobson is more ambivalent about the distinction between ‘new’ and ‘experienced’ especially as greater numbers of postgraduate students are doing more and more teaching. Please consider sharing these articles with your own postgraduate students and any colleague you have who is just starting out. The latter group may also be interested in our New Lecturers’ Workshop in November. The continued rise of Creative Writing is certainly reflected in this issue: you can read about projects, events and pedagogical innovations being pursued with great success by Creative Writing practitioners. Our student essay is written from the perspective of Creative Writing and both book reviews in this issue consider Creative Writing texts. But whether in a workshop or a lecture theatre, whatever your area of teaching is, many of the contributors to this issue, including Anim-Addo, Back, Knights, Lucas and Sassi, are quite animated about the role humanism has played and will continue to play in the development of our group of subjects. Though these writers each have very different points to make, from distinct perspectives, they agree that we must not lose sight of the intrinsic plurality and diversity of humanistic pursuits taken up under the banner of literature, language and Creative Writing. Read on, enjoy and please, send us your comments.
Nicole King
Editor
