The Windmills Programme

‘When the wind blows, some people build walls and others build windmills …’

Produced by Dr Peter Hawkins, the Windmills Programme is a career management programme that can be used by those wishing to promote awareness of career potential and career development strategies in students. Peter Hawkins is co-founder and adviser to the University of Liverpool’s ‘Graduate into Employment’ unit.

The programme constitutes a set of resources (a video, book, trainer’s notes and exercises) that encourage students to reflect on the sort of career and lifestyle they want, and what they need to do in order to realise these goals. There is much practical advice on producing CVs, being interviewed, and a template for a progress file, but the main focus is on career planning and personal reflection. The programme can be followed in its entirety, or parts or exercises used to support other activities. The trainer’s notes are comprehensive and attractively presented. The programme is also applicable to academics wishing to give their own careers a boost!

The English Subject Centre has a copy of the Windmills Programme, courtesy of the LTSN Generic Centre, and is able to reproduce and circulate material to departments. (Many University Careers Services also have a copy). If you wish to find out more, please contact: Jane.Gawthrope@rhul.ac.uk

Behind the Acronym: RSS

As discussed elsewhere in this issue, the Subject Centre has recently launched its redesigned website. Besides a new look, the Centre’s website includes a number of new services aimed at promoting the use of web-based learning and teaching resources. One such service is our Humbul Humanities RSS feed: http://www.english.ltsn.ac.uk/resources/general/humbul/index.html

Humbul, part of the Resource Discovery Network, provides access to select Internet resources for the UK learning and research communities. It locates, evaluates, and catalogues online resources and publishes relevant details about the resources, including URLs and summaries, on its website (http://www.humbul.ac.uk). The Subject Centre is currently collaborating with Humbul to catalogue resources dedicated to literatures in English.

To keep members of the subject community informed of Humbul’s growing resources for English and related subjects, the Subject Centre’s website contains a live feed known as an RSS (or Rich Source Summary). According to one web pundit, Dave Winer of Userland (http://www.userland.com), “There is no consensus on what RSS stands for, so it’s not an acronym, it’s a name.” While there might be some debate about what RSS means, there is no question about what it does: it dynamically and instantaneously retrieves details of resources from the Humbul database and publishes them on our website. By means of this service, members of the subject community can quickly and easily check the latest or most recent entries catalogued by Humbul. To date we have established feeds for English Language and Literature, American Studies, and Humanities Computing.

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C&IT in English Roadshows: Autumn 2002

The English Subject Centre’s year-long project investigating and mapping the use of communication and information technologies (C&IT) in English Studies is concluding in the autumn with a final regional Roadshows.

New Media and English:
• Senate House, University of London, October 9

A variety of new media and technologies are currently used to enhance learning and teaching in English departments. To provide examples of a range of practices, this event is dedicated to demonstrating the ways in which lectures have made use of web-based and CD-ROM technologies for developing hypertext and multimedia resources. The event will be structured to afford participants the opportunity to gain practical, firsthand knowledge of these new media so that they can begin to use them in their own teaching.

It is free of charge.

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English: The Condition of the Subject

Professionalism and Practice in Higher Education. An international conference organised by The English Subject Centre, The Institute for English Studies, and The Council for College and University English. To be held at Senate House, The University of London July 17th-19th 2003.

The purpose of this conference is to ask questions that are commonly excluded by the schedules, structures, and bureaucracies in which we work, and questions which focus on the materialisation of English in taught programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Plenary Speakers will include:
Jonathan Bate
Catherine Belsey
Ronald Carter
Ato Quayson
Elaine Showalter

What is the condition of English now, and how are its subjects (the curriculum, the students, lecturers, and their research activity) constituted? How have the mechanisms governing our professional lives in the modern university affected the subject? Is the ‘English’ of our research the same ‘English’ that we teach? Do our students understand it in this way? Is English now (an open access subject nationally) the same as the selective English of a decade ago? What is the English ‘class’, and how are we changing it or reinforcing it? How are we teaching the new English curriculum, and what is happening to the old curriculum? Is English a subject with no centre and no margins? This conference will address such questions and also provoke enquiries of a broader, more general kind:

• What it means to be ‘in English’ now
• The future for interdisciplinarity
• The values of an ‘English’ education
• The relocation or abolition of ‘the literary’
• The future of English in the Modern University
• The future of English academic publishing
• Theory wars over
• The understanding of English outside the academy

If you are interested in such discussions, or in adding more pertinent ones to the list, or in being involved with the organisation of the conference programmes, then please contact the Subject Centre by emailing the Administrator.

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Newsletter Issue 4 - September 2002

© English Subject Centre

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