Around a year ago, when the Subject Centre received its first independent evaluation from Professor Kelvin Everest, we were asked some interesting questions about how we were addressing that part of our brief covering learning. Teaching we might know about, but how do we address the learning side of the equation, and find out more, or investigate more purposefully, students’ experience of the English degree? Our subsequent work has included considerably more of this dimension. We are currently engaged in a number of projects (the careers of English students and postgraduate research methods, for example) which investigate how students regard their work in the English degree. We ran a student essay competition, which asked entrants to reflect upon their experience of English in the round, and we have published Chris Thurman’s winning entry in full in this issue, accompanied by extracts from the runner-up entries. Finally, we have requested student reviews of textbooks, and include three here as a starting point. We would be pleased to hear from departments with students who are willing to act in this capacity. These elements of current work should begin to piece together a fuller picture of how the English degree is perceived and regarded.
For the most part, the responses we are receiving in this area of our work are very positive, and perhaps we should not be surprised, since they are coming from able and enthusiastic students. We know, however, that this is not the whole of the student constituency nationwide, and this issue also sees an article (‘Now Read This’) which asks questions about the extent of students’ reading, an article which chimes in readily with my own experience of meeting colleagues in departments around the country. There are concerns about how much students have read before they come to take their degrees, and indeed, how much they are reading in the duration of study. This is not to say, as the authors of this article point out, that only so much is enough, or that this is a derelict state of affairs. On the contrary, this is all about expectations, and the need to raise questions about the kinds of reading and literacies that students bring to their studies, and to acknowledge that we might need to think much more about this. Doubtless, there is a whole range of factors to take into account. Selective departments may well be admitting enthusiastic and tireless readers, but not necessarily so, and not all departments enjoy this luxury; modular regimes have undoubtedly militated against the synthesis of reading, and tend to mark out reading against prescribed assessments (so what is the rest of it for?); the emphasis on skills, outcomes, learning objectives and specifications can so easily parody intellectual enquiry for its own sake into a redundancy or an irrelevance; the culture of reading itself is diminishing in many young people’s lives even while it is expanding in other age groups. My own take on this is that we are also not very good at accrediting the reading experience itself, that the heavy hermeneutic of English might overstress what students can do over and above what they know, and that the coincidence of this approach with the skills agenda will continue to depress the importance of the prime activity of reading. However, such an analysis may have dangerously regressive tendencies, and requires a sophisticated understanding of subject knowledge to redeem it.
This topic is an urgent one for English, and we have therefore made provision on our new website, for a discussion to run under the title of this article. If you visit the new site (www.english.ltsn.ac.uk) and go to the Discussion Board, you will find details of how to join in. Our new website has a much larger capacity than the first site, and has been designed for easy and quick navigation. You will notice that this newsletter has also been given a new look to relate it visually to our website and to keep it fresh and appealing to the eye. The website will become our main means of distributing materials to the community over time, and this coming year we will be concentrating more on the production of information and resources that will be of value to English tutors in their day-to-day lives. We are anxious to receive further suggestions about useful materials, so please let us know of your ideas and the usefulness of the resources we have developed.
This issue also includes Martin Coyle’s memories of the TQA experience, a timely reminder of the bluntness of inspectorial instruments at a time when some English departments (those not visited last time, together with degree programmes or part programmes in FE Colleges) it now appears, are experiencing subject review again. As the Scottish system, as reported in the last issue, continues to refine its model of enhancement and partnership, we should recognise the strengths of such an approach and the serious regard it has for improvement and support. In a separate article, Martin Coyle also outlines some radical proposals for reforming, grading and classification, developed out of his reflections on the strong clustering of upper second classifications nationally, and the ways in which such bulking can disguise the range of abilities therein. We look forward to responses on these proposals too. Recently we held a consultation for external examiners in English, with a view to discovering what kinds of valuable information and recommendations could be gleaned from such a group at a time when the system seems set to change, and the External’s role enlarged. Our discussions ranged widely, and included some of the issues that Martin raises. We are currently writing up the event into the form of a report, and further details are given in this issue.
Two articles in this issue are justly congratulatory in tone. Professor Rick Rylance outlines the successes of English and the strength of its current position nationally. He rightly points out that we are not always our own best advocates, particularly in terms of putting the case for funding, and recognising the role our subject plays in educating people who subsequently make large contributions in cultural and civic life, as well as in the creative industries, the arts, and education. Dr Sean Matthews writes in praise of the work undertaken by the British Council in supporting colleagues teaching literature and cultural studies overseas, particularly in middle and eastern Europe. His informative piece is also a reminder to us of the importance of the Bologna Declaration (outlined by Graham Caie in our last issue), and the need to work more closely with colleagues in Europe in the future, and it also coincides with a recent call from Stephen Greenblatt, in the Modern Language Association newsletter, to found an ‘e-mail academy’, a virtual network of resources and discussion with a global reach. Rick Rylance and Sean Matthews call for us to look outward, positively, at the potential and the future, and the Subject Centre is well-positioned, I think, to respond and will do so. We have started to develop our links with the British Council, the European Society for the Study of English and the Modern Language Association, and we expect those to begin to move beyond exchange of information into more collaborative work; we also have the capacity to provide data, information, and argument for departments on the kinds of value that English and the cognate disciplines provide.
Much of the Subject Centre’s work this past year has been to gather and analyse opinions and information in the form of reports: on C&IT in English, admissions, creative writing, access and widening participation, part-time teaching, external examining, the employment of English graduates, and postgraduate research methods. The Admissions Report has been distributed; many are close to completion now and will be distributed to departments this autumn, and the remainder will follow in quick succession. We have also launched our large-scale survey of Departments’ work under the title ‘Survey of the English Curriculum and Teaching in UK Higher Education’. This will follow up on the only such survey previously conducted, Diversity and Standards (CCUE, 1997), and should produce a mass of interesting material for departments about how English is taught and constructed in curricula across the country.
