The following is an extract from the original proposal (2001):
Active Reading is a structured process of imitation, variation and experiment: students learn and understand cultural discourses by practising them. This project is addressed to an urgent situation in English Studies. The discipline faces a number of challenges: the increasingly plural and diverse cultures of the student body, the rise of A-level English Language, and the soon to be apparent effects of Curriculum 2000. The subject confronts the loss of a taken-for-granted ‘common core’ of reading, and the narrowing of the band of ‘high’ readers during a simultaneous explosion of powerful cultural industries: ‘English’ now takes place in a highly mediated society. In HE, English is in danger of splitting between ‘high status’ critical knowledge and theory and ‘low status’ practice. Alongside the current expansion of creative writing programmes, there is a real need to foster dialogue between writing as expression (or as pragmatic communication) and writing as medium for analysing and historicising texts. This project seeks to circumvent such divisions by working across the implied boundaries.
In these overlapping contexts, Active Reading equips students to take on productive roles within their culture. The project responds to the need to enhance dialogue between English in School and in Universities. In my own university context, widened access brings in students who need considerable academic support in ‘finding a voice’ (literally as well as metaphorically). In such situations, the teacher remains an essential guide and mentor on the road to autonomous learning.…
By building on my existing work with structured rewriting, I will research with students ways in which they might through the transformation of texts attain deep knowledge of cultural diversity and the resources of the cultural past. The project seeks to overcome the stark dichotomy between ‘critical’ and ‘creative’ activity, or between ‘self expression’ and impersonal knowledge. It does not concern creative writing as such: rather its originality lies in enhancing linguistic inventiveness. It supplements – rather than supplants – conventional forms (analytical prose: essay, dissertation) with the portfolio of re-writings and creative ‘translations’. It examines the sharing and constructive criticism of students’ drafts as a basis for developmental dialogue in what Robert Scholes calls the ‘craft of reading’. It addresses a further question concerning the methods and criteria for assessing this kind of work. Its wider intention is to facilitate both the passage from School/Access to HE, and then later the passage from HE into ‘lifelong learning’. The packaging of learning that comes with the territory in HE today often breeds a paradoxical dependency and lowered self-expectation. So to achieve its aims the project needs to explore with students (and in precise detail) the stance towards their own learning necessary to reach out towards the autonomy advocated by contemporary L&T strategies.
The project is based on over twenty years of my own research on teaching, rooted in long-held convictions about the inter-relations of pedagogic and subject knowledge…. The ideas underlying the proposal have been successfully trialled in my own experimental modules Writing for Reading, Making Sense and other modules (e.g. Introduction to Writing) within the Teesside programme and in workshops elsewhere. Further, I would like to test the hypothesis that transformative rewriting provides an enabling matrix for cross-disciplinary developments (English – Media Studies/Cultural Studies/History). The project will build on the pioneering work of DUET (in which I was active for many years), and will productively complement the different emphases of ‘Speak Write’, and Rob Pope’s current NTF project on ‘Textual Intervention’.
Aims
Through the Active Reading project I hope to –
• enable understanding of texts and theory through production (re-writing, translation)
• develop bridges between A-level/Access and HE as Curriculum 2000 unrolls
• promote an understanding of culture as dialogue including dialogue between generations
• support students during exposure to unfamiliar or threatening cultural materials
• challenge a widespread perception of HE as purely instrumental
• evolve the reflective portfolio as simultaneously a method of students identifying their own learning needs and as a mode of
• involve students in implementation and evaluation
• build pedagogic bridges between English/Literary study and other cognate disciplines
• explore the European dimension of intellectual mobility between cultures.
All this was clearly ambitious enough, and the project has only got as far as it has through the devoted efforts of Chris Thurgar-Dawson as project assistant, (and since 2002 as the principal module leader). One major achievement has been the continued life and evaluation of the modules concerned, modules which now include a third level independent study (limited by pre-requisite to students who have studied the module at level two). Another has been the continued development of a bank of course materials, techniques, activities. We have individually and on occasion together engaged in dissemination (not in the context an adequate word) through workshops, conferences, and ILT forums. We have not yet solved the problem of what to do with or how best to share the materials generated, though we are well on the way to having a website. As English-based academics, we still hanker to ‘write the book’.
In one sense, the objects associated with the aims have become sharper. For example, to:
• foster a productive relationship to language
• endow students with a sense of cultural agency
• deepen their awareness of linguistic and literary process
• license creative and experimental working, thus leading to increased confidence
• develop craft understanding and sensitivity to effects of stylistic choices
• promote values of curiosity and cultural alertness
• introduce variety into working practices
• provide alternative models of the quadrilateral relations between individual student, other students, text, and teacher.
A sample of the kind of activities we use could include:
• Turning simple into more complex poetic forms (and on occasion vice-versa)
• Pastiche as sharpening of local awareness
• Transformation of styles
• Transformations of genres
• Transformations of point of view, focalisation, perspective
• Heteroglossia: unearthing and activating hidden or marginalized voices
• Exploring the spectrum between minimalist and garrulous narration – degrees of narrative management of material or of reader
• Activities to elicit reciprocity between text and reader, making explicit the reader’s role in the process of making meaning.
Assessment is by portfolio, a selection of work which must include evidence of drafting and a reflective, selfcritical element which some students choose to integrate with their text.
The nature of the project is enabling us to collect evidence for outcomes which were previously a matter of hunch or anecdote. We have a more firmlygrounded sense that at programme level students return empowered to literary critical modules – more confident and with a wider repertoire of response. Since we are also clear that we owe it to students to theorise what we are doing and do not want to encourage naïve expressivism, we are also interested in the ways that productive work in writing – making sense made visible – can be theorised and feed back into student work on theory. At an individual level, some students have started on (or returned to) their own writing. At the level of the teacher or professional, we are exploring a CPD-type writing activity for staff development workshops, thus building a bridge to a form of practice increasingly in favour among health and social care professionals.
Perhaps most excitingly, the whole project has a bearing on access and widening participation: confidence-building, encouraging experiment with language, reinforcement for analytical and critical writing in other assessment genres. Some of the most interesting material to arise from the evaluation interviews with students concerns their comparative perception of the ‘Writing for Reading’ strand in the Articles 24 context of the rest of their programme. In relation to access and widening participation one potential barrier to access derives from the traditional expectations entertained about the English Studies student – wide linguistic and cultural repertoire, pleasure in irony and multivalence, free movement between levels of discourse. We believe (and are now collecting supporting evidence) that units like these provide a space within which the less culturally secure can learn to play in language.
