The English Subject Centre has run several series of events on topics of interest to the English subject community. To date, we have initiated discussions on seminars, assessment and creative writing, and reports from previous events are available through the Subject Centre website.
The reports to date are written on the chaired discussions at each event. Everyone who attends an event has the opportunity to present their own points of view, and to discuss the particular circumstances which are affecting their own, or their department’s, choice of action on a topic such as oral assessment. In some universities, for example, there is pressure to include varied forms of assessment which include oral assessment; in others, there is a push towards the use of the traditional examination. Delegates at the event on ‘Oral Assessment in a Discursive Discipline’ were able to discuss the relative merits of oral assessment in the context of teaching English, before moving on to discuss their own experiences of it or their plans for using, or not using, it in the future. At the end of each event, delegates agree on a set of guidelines and observations which were then used to structure the reports published on our website.
We hope that the reports will prove useful to departments who are reviewing their practice and want to establish their position in relation to broader debates within the subject. Each department will argue about assessment after its own fashion, but it will nevertheless be helpful, we hope, for departments to be able to refer to arguments being conducted in other institutions.
Although the discussions we have organised to date on the topics of oral assessment and seminars have a generic element to them, we have conducted the discussions in the context of our experience as practitioners in the English subject community. The second event on seminars, for example, focused on the power relations of seminars, and the balance of learning and teaching in seminars but did so through an explicit focus on the issues involved in classes which focused on literary theory. We intend to develop subject-, genre- and even text-specific events in the future, and we already have plans in place to run future events on Creative Writing and the role of English Language in Literature programmes.
Many lecturers in English departments identify their work as interdisciplinary, and while the framework of 24 Subject Centres has positioned English as a single discipline, we are in the process of planning collaborative events with other centres with cognate interests. The event on seminars and theory will run again in January 2002 in collaboration with the Language, Linguistics and Area Studies Subject Centre, and we hope to set up events in collaboration with the centres which have responsibility for history and for performing arts. If you have any suggestions on the form such events should take or the topics they might cover, please e-mail siobhan.holland@rhul.ac.uk.
Newsletter Issue 2 - August 2001
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