In 2002 I was fortunate enough to be awarded a HEFCE-funded £50,000 National Teaching Fellowship to carry out an innovative three year project on student peer-learning in the Arts. Since 2000, the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (1) has awarded a total of 60 Fellowships across all subject disciplines; 17% (or 10 out of the 60) current Fellows work within the broad subject discipline of English. Half, like myself, are in new universities and colleges, and half in old. A critical mass of English-based National Teaching Fellows now exists, particularly in the north of England. In my view, this offers very exciting potential for subject-based collaboration, influence, and impact on future educational developments. One element of the National Teaching Fellowship brief is to be 'a task force for national change in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education'. While this resonant formulation may invoke Henry V's small and valiant army at Agincourt, I am certainly eager to encourage others working in English to move towards a position where they are selected as institutional nominees. The recent White Paper (The Future of Higher Education)(2) proposal to increase the annual number of National Teaching Fellowship awards from 20 to 50 makes such initiatives particularly timely.
The dynamic multi-layered interrelationship or symbiosis between my academic research and my teaching was central to my successful Fellowship application. My inter-disciplinary project will focus on student peer-learning and team skills development across the Arts, whilst the content centres on my academic specialism: early modern women dramatists.
I will investigate, develop and monitor undergraduate peer-learning across academic years and disciplines by producing a digital video of a seventeenth century play with no previous recorded performance history, with students. Thus my project combines new technology and old texts; one outcome is that students will be helping to create original digital study resources on seventeenth century drama for other students, worldwide. The resultant video will be available for teaching and learning about seventeenth century drama (3). I also hope it will serve to encourage national and international colleagues to explore this model of interactive interdisciplinary teaching and research. I will thus combine digital video as end product, with the process of interpretation and creative film production with students. My proposal also encompasses pedagogical research, as I will record and evaluate student peer-learning, team skills development and creative problem-solving throughout the process.
The balance or separation or relationship between research and teaching in HE is currently hotly debated. This article offers a personal perspective on how my route towards a National Teaching Fellowship partly originated in a slightly frantic attempt to realise a personally and professionally satisfying and dynamic balance between research and teaching in demanding times. A consequence of the current rapid pace of change in HE is profound staff anxiety about finding and maintaining the space and opportunity for academic research when the pressures of undergraduate teaching are increasing so rapidly. The dramatic increase in teaching loads in my institution led me into a simultaneously panic-stricken and energised strategy of squeezing elements of my academic research on early modern women dramatists into my introductory Level 1 teaching. My response stemmed from the acute fear that otherwise I would simply no longer have the time to retain sufficient intellectual engagement with my research area.
As I outline below, this necessity-driven experiment was a remarkable success.
In a sense, both my National Teaching Fellowship and subsequent academic
promotion might be traced back to that crisis decision to firmly embed
my research into my teaching. I have never looked back and now firmly
believe that it is possible to integrate elements of research and undergraduate
teaching, even at introductory level, in a way that is valuable and exciting
for both staff and students. Lateral thinking, problem solving strategies
and creativity are intrinsic to the discipline of English. My personal
experience suggests that ingenuity and creative thinking in a relatively
oppositional situation can even energise research and teaching in unexpected
and interdependent ways. It is important to make this point at a time
when current HE policy and funding debates seem to be attempting to drive
research and teaching apart.
It is tempting to see change as a new, and debilitating, pressure in HE.
However, I find David Watson’s recent premise that ‘universities
have constantly invented and reinvented themselves’ reassuring (4).
Watson argues that change, at varying rates, is a constant feature of
HE. For example, changes in patterns of student participation are far
from new. Widening participation and the integration of marginalised
and non traditional student groups into HE are currently high on twenty-first
century educational and political agendas. However, more than 300 years
ago, the prolific dramatist who is the subject of my academic research,
Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle (1623-73) expressed acute concern
about unequal access to university education in England in her witty
and polemical comedy The Female Academy (1662) (5).
Cavendish's futuristic Academy offers university education to the largest
excluded student group of her day – women. Successive scenes in
the play show female students following an intensive programme in Discourse
(a discipline with elements in common with contemporary English, Theatre
Studies and Philosophy) towards the skills-based learning outcome of
being able to speak wittily and rationally. Oral presentation is the
exclusive mode of assessment in this particular institution; the topic
of the first student assignment is: ‘… are women capable
to have as much Wit or Wisdome as men?(6) These
access students are required to justify their right to higher education
from day one.
Contemporary feminist playwright Charlotte Keatley has argued that the best way to understand a play is to put it on its feet (7). At the point when my teaching load began to encroach dangerously on any potential research space, my interdisciplinary research already successfully encompassed theatre workshops and stage production of Margaret Cavendish's plays. My experimental solution to the acute impending crisis was to expand this strategy by involving undergraduates in action research within the curriculum. This problem-solving initiative involved jettisoning two weeks of conventional lectures and seminar discussion with a group of students who had only been at university for eight weeks, to film a series of classes on The Female Academy. Teaching sessions were reconfigured as the Female Academy in action; the lecture theatre became our set temporarily and the female students wore borrowed academic gowns as notional costumes throughout the exercise. The students studied the play by staged reading aloud, interpreting and improvising around the text. Everything that happened in these classes was recorded on digital video, with the help of volunteer third year Film students. It is worth noting that, at this point, I had no experience of digital video as a production medium and had therefore placed myself in a demanding, and public, action-learning situation, alongside my first year students.
Charlotte Keatley also said that The playscript on the page is a temporary stage between the writers imagination and the public performance (8). The political upheavals of Margaret Cavendish's times appear to have precluded the public performance of her published plays, which occupied a temporary stage for more than three centuries. My 1999 production of The Female Academy was thus a world premiere, a very exciting concept for participating students. Whilst some of the early video footage is uneven and a little shaky, the interpretative outcomes from that first public performance have undoubtedly stood the test of time. I have discussed The Female Academy in academic papers at international seventeenth century conferences in the US, Canada and Britain; fellow academics have engaged enthusiastically with the new knowledge and textual insights generated by my students experimental work. The shared exploration broke down barriers about expertise and learning, as well as spatial barriers within the lecture theatre. It provided me with important new academic insights and inspired beginning university students to understand that they could contribute to the creation of knowledge, thereby encouraging their intellectual and creative ambitions. Boyer's four categories of scholarship (9) suggest that the most advanced and currently valued form of scholarship, the scholarship of discovery, is least likely to benefit undergraduate learning, particularly at introductory level. My experiment indicates otherwise– first year students directed action–research generated a number of important new discoveries about a hitherto neglected text.
The positive outcomes of this experiment, including my National Teaching Fellowship, are almost too many to list. Since 1999, I have developed new skills in digital video production and have filmed extracts from six of Margaret Cavendish's more than 19 plays with students-each a world premiere. These productions underpin the Margaret Cavendish Performance Project which I established to develop this pioneering performance-based research strategy. Barbara Zamorski has investigated students varied awareness and perceptions of staff research activity (10). What are the perceptions of those first year students (now graduates), who participated in my early experiment in the holistic integration of research and teaching? Many have indicated that they found it a memorable and confidence-building experience. As initial members of the intellectual and performance community which developed into the Margaret Cavendish Performance Project, these students remained exceptionally engaged and well-informed both about academic staff research and about seventeenth century drama by women. A number used institutional structures creatively to rejoin the project at different points in their undergraduate careers, drawing in fellow students as well. For example, some devised work placements or dissertation topics which allowed them to build on their initial interest or experience of Cavendish's plays. Others suggested new directions for production or initiated new filming developments. One graduate has worked on Cavendish's plays as an actor or director every year for the past four years. Another, who returned to the project in her final semester to give a complex and insightful virtuoso cameo screen performance as a would-be female revenger, valued highly the symmetry of being able to begin and end her undergraduate career in the same area.
In conclusion, Cavendish's bold dramatisation of a proto-feminist university in The Female Academy offers a manifesto for persisting with new and radical initiatives regardless of external discouragement or opposition. In this plays battle of the sexes, the conservative and obstructive men outside the Female Academy are terrified of innovation and change in education and will go to almost any lengths to prevent the women from studying. Resistance makes them ridiculous; our final first year workshop turned York St John itself into a theatre as we staged the comic cacophony of the male characters in the play blowing trumpets in the central quadrangle outside the lecture theatre, in incoherent and futile attempts to silence the Female Academicians. Time has duly evaluated Cavendish's eccentric and challenging idea that women might be entitled to university education. I hope the ongoing development of creative and innovative inter-relationships between research and teaching might have a similar outcome.
References:
1. Details of the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme are available at http://www.ilt.ac.uk
2. Available at http://www.dfes.gov.uk/highereducation/hestrategy/
3. Gweno Williams Margaret Cavendish: Plays in Performance: Video 1 (forthcoming 2003), Video 2 (forthcoming 2005)
4. David Watson 'Reinventing the University - A personal Perspective' in The Effective Academic edited by Steve Ketteridge, Stephanie Marshall, Heather Fry (Kogan Page 2002) p.7
5. Margaret Cavendish The Female Academy (1962) , available through the Brown Women Writers Project at http://www.wwp.brown.edu
6. Margaret Cavendish The Female Academy (1962) Act 1 scene 2
7. Charlotte Keatley My Mother said I never should (Methuen 1994) p. viii
8. Charlotte Keatley My Mother said I never should (Methuen 1994) p. viii
9. See Graham Gibbs ‘Institutional strategies for linking research and teaching’ Exchange Issue 3 Autumn 2002 pp 8-11 http://www.exchange.ac.uk
10. Barbara Zamorski ‘What do students think about Research?’ Exchange Issue 3 Autumn 2002 pp. 21-22 http://www.exchange.ac.uk
