The significance of the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme is that it has made a clear, public statement of the importance of a professional attitude to learning and teaching in Higher Education. Naturally, all of the twenty successful nominees – and our colleagues nominated by other institutions in 2000 who were equally deserving of the award – feel highly honoured. The principal honour, however, is not personal, but being part of the movement to raise the status of teaching within our sector.
Like all good learning and teaching, the scheme is founded on co-operation – between colleagues, between institutions, between teachers and the Institute for Learning and Teaching (ILT), the Subject Centres and all other supporting agencies. The stimulus to develop one’s teaching comes from all such means of help and guidance; but above all it derives from students themselves. The most touching result of my own nomination has been the number of past and present students who have taken the trouble to contact me with their congratulations. The congratulations are really due to them, for it is their efforts and achievements that represent the value of our profession.
When I came to consider my own project for the award, I therefore wanted to make it something that went to the heart of learning and teaching as a co-operative enterprise. I wanted it also to be something that located the teaching of Literary Studies within the wider educational experience, as well as recognising the inherent and essential nature of Literary Studies as a discipline.
Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is already well established in Manchester University’s Medical and Dental Schools and in Biomolecular Sciences at UMIST. PBL is a student-centred approach to learning and teaching which uses student groups as the key vehicle to achieve co-operative or collaborative learning. Actively identifying and managing their workload through carefully designed, subject-specific problems, tasks or case-studies, students are motivated to identify, retrieve, organise and disseminate their findings in written or oral format to an audience which may consist of their immediate team-mates, their peers, tutors or examiners. It is through research and debate triggered by challenging features within the problem design (sensitively guided and monitored by tutor/facilitator) that the students’ existing subject knowledge base is integrated and expanded, leading to deeper subject understanding and developing their ability to apply that knowledge in potential ‘real-life’ situations.
Arts programmes already place emphasis on such core skills as research and communication. An increasing number of our programmes do include a strong oral component as well as the more traditional written element of communication skills. Self-directed learning through dissertation and project work is common practice. This, however, tends to be individual, with the key dynamic being that between an individual supervisor and an individual student. The supervisor acts as a source of advice, as a sounding board for ideas, as a supplier of references and as a checker of draft material. The PBL model, which encourages co-operative learning, offers a broader application of core skills and the development of inter-active learning.
As a self-directed approach to learning that prioritises co-operative learning and group management of tasks as a key vehicle of delivery, PBL seems ideally suited to a discipline such as Literary Studies that works so much through discussion and debate, with a relative lack of clear target responses to questions. It might even be argued that the current dominance of tutor-directed models within Literary Studies actually runs counter to the real nature of the subject. A literary text seldom, if ever, has a single issue or problem as its concern, even when a critic or even the author claims that it does. There will always be a diversity of potential response generated among diverse readers. It is arguably in the apprehension of this diversity that the true creativity of the subject lies. A PBL method, in which it is the group itself that defines the learning objectives, tasks and methods of inquiry, seems particularly appropriate.
Arts disciplines generally, and Literary Stud-ies in particular, would seem therefore to offer fruitful ground for the investigation of the applicability of PBL models. My National Teaching Fellowship Award has facilitated a two-year project (commenced October 2000) which aims to implement a pilot PBL programme in the Department of English and American Studies at Manchester.
The main aims and objectives of the project are as follows:
- To produce PBL learning packages for a variety of Literary Studies modules;
- To pilot PBL systems in selected course modules from September 2001;
- To move towards implementation of a PBL programme in further selected modules;
- To assess and to evaluate the outcomes of PBL systems in comparison with conventional teaching patterns;
- To develop materials for the delivery of PBL systems in a variety of literary studies modules;
- To examine the student experience of PBL;
- To disseminate project outcomes.
One of the most important outcomes of the project to date has been the realisation that our initial PBL model will without doubt follow what has been dubbed the ‘hybrid’ approach. By hybrid, we mean that the PBL sessions will be supported by a ‘spine’ of tutor-led seminars. The aim of these seminars will, of course, not be to provide or hint at ‘answers’ to the problems. To do so would be to run counter to the entire concept of student-centred learning, to confuse PBL with straightforward ‘problem-solving’, and to falsify the nature of the discipline. However, we think that – at this stage in the project at least – to subject students to ‘pure’ PBL as a trial study would be too close to playing dangerously with their degrees. The intention of tutor-led sessions (which will nonetheless be interactive in method) is to provide reassurance and to be part of the process by incorporating seminar-engendered ideas in the research and critical methods. It may be, indeed, that such seminars can be a legitimate part of a functioning PBL model, taking their place as one – but only one – area of student enquiry and investigation. Purist PBL practitioners will throw up their hands up in horror; but let us see.
So our (allegedly!) innovative project is now well under way and has already aroused interest within the Faculty of Arts at Manchester and in institutions outside Manchester. We hope to be able to report to you further in 2002 with a summary of project outcomes and evaluative data. However, if you feel you would like interim bulletins on progress or expansion of our approach to any of the categories outlined above, then please let us know. We welcome further enquiries, exchanges of experience, expressions of interest, offers of lunch, support or sympathy!
Please contact Dr Bill Hutchings or Karen O’Rourke, Department of English and American Studies, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL.
