I am currently very interested in what English departments do with their first year students, especially in their first semester or term. This seems a vital question for the subject (and our students), since presumably those early days and courses are central to the job of advancing – or even transforming – A Level and Access students into degree level English students, and in setting out the fundamental understandings to enable them to progress on our degrees. Though individual departments must have thought through their own approaches to the students who each year begin their courses, there has been no general study of what the range of different approaches is, or of how successful these are. Here I can briefly set out some of the approaches of which I have experience or knowledge by way of illustration of the type and some of the issues.
In as much as I do recall my own first year (at York in 1980), I remember that we all took a specifically introductory course in the first term. My essays from the course show that I hadn’t yet acquired the sophistication to write the name of what we would now call the module on them. But I think it must have been a predecessor of York’s current ‘Approaches to Literature’ course, which ‘uses a wide range of texts from different periods and genres to provide an introduction to the critical, analytic and descriptive skills needed to study literature at university’. Going on to Warwick as a part-time postgraduate tutor in 1985 I taught on their equivalent module, ‘Introduction to Modern Literary Studies’ (perhaps the predecessor of the current ‘Modes of Reading’?). This also taught a range of texts from different periods and genres, and additionally introduced students to the major literary theories. Finally, acquiring a full-time post at Sheffield Hallam University (then Sheffield City Polytechnic, 1990), I taught on, and then became unit leader for, ‘Skills for English Studies’. This was based on the reading of a variety of literary texts, but it also had the more generic task (required by Sheffield Hallam, as by many other new universities) of introducing students to a productive engagement with the main modes of degree level study: seminars, lectures, presentations, independent research, essays, referencing conventions, and exams. I am still unit leader of the much evolved descendant, ‘Introduction to English Studies’.
Clearly there were differences between these introductory courses. No theory at York (in those days), except for theories of tragedy and comedy, but lots of practice in reading texts, whereas Warwick (five years later) covered structuralism to feminism in, I think, the last five weeks of its course. At Sheffield City Polytechnic, the unit had the additional tasks of focusing on methods of learning and of being an introduction to degree level study, as well as to an English degree. I wasn’t (in prelapsarian days) party to discussions about the introductory course at York, but I recall considerable debate about the two other introductory courses at Warwick and Sheffield. Some argued that it would be better to do without specifically introductory courses, since they didn’t have the content and weight of the central courses (usually period or genre papers), that the best way to learn university English was to be plunged into the full experience. Others agreed with the idea of an introductory course, but thought current arrangements missed the central issues of the discipline: not enough close reading, too much variety of texts, not enough variety of texts, not enough theory, the wrong kind of theory, the wrong way to teach it etc, etc, etc. One thing that these courses did have in common was that they all concentrated the introductory experience into one unit. This is, I think, the commonest model, but it is not inevitable. Some departments do not seem to have a module which carries out this task particularly. Others feel that there is so much to introduce that a number of courses are needed to support the transition to degree level English; thus Leeds has three first year courses which look as if they fulfill this function: ‘Strategies of Reading, ‘Language, Text, Context’ and ‘Literature, History, Difference’.
What I hope to get back from this article is information, comment and reflection from colleagues on what they do with their first years and on the challenges, issues, successes and problems raised in this kind of important teaching. I would be grateful for basic information in the way of course descriptions, and pleased if anyone would care to discuss their practice or any of the issues raised by this article.
Newsletter Issue 2 - August 2001
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