This project, centred on the writing, validation and teaching of a semester length module to run concurrently in two collaborating HE Institutions with shared teaching materials, was carried out over the course of the academic year 2002-2003. The module was called ‘The Origins of the Reading Public 1830-1870’ at Edge Hill and ‘The Origins of the Popular Press’ at Salford and introduced students (drawn from various programmes but based in English departments) to the social history, technological development and cultural contests over mass literacy as exemplified in the development of periodicals and magazines in the mid nineteenth century.
This project was designed primarily to explore three questions:
1. To what extent would it be possible to develop curriculum at level three by asking students to work in what would be, essentially, a research mode?
2. How could an advanced course in Victorian popular literature be taught in the absence of accessible or affordable print resources?
3. How could issues of regional collaboration between HEIs be addressed between institutions with different missions, credit frameworks, academic structures and time tables?
The project was also aimed at exploring these issues through a subject-focused rather than a generic teaching and learning approach.
The project began with the construction of a database which contained hundreds of images scanned from a range of Victorian popular texts. These included full text versions of various magazines and chapbooks as well as sample pages containing engravings. These were then organised into thematic sections and accessed via WebCT. Students could thus follow a programme of reading using, if they so chose, virtual versions of primary materials.
Further, the tutors concerned made available primary texts drawn from their own collections of material and such library resources as were available. One major issue raised by work of this kind is how far electronic resources, however sophisticated, can suggest the materiality of texts. One of the great pleasures of the module is undoubtedly the interest taken by students in the material presence of primary material – a better example of what Benjamin calls ‘aura’ would be hard to imagine. Despite the many virtues of the website and database, much more development would be needed to offer students something comparable to what can be assembled from collections and libraries. It would be extremely interesting to try to write up further what we saw as the strengths and weaknesses of using electronic as against ‘actual’ texts. Such issues of course also link across to the research interests of the staff involved. Brian Maidment’s work, for instance, is now making extensive use of collections of graphic images on such websites as the Guildhall Library, the John Johnson Collection and the Lewis Walpole Library. These kinds of online image sources will have a profound effect on what may be taught on ‘popular culture’ or ‘cultural studies’ modules, and our experience on this project gave us a glimpse of what might be achieved. John Simons is continuing to develop critical editions of chapbooks and other popular texts. Margaret Forsyth is extending her work in popular culture and is currently preparing a critical anthology of nineteenth-century working-class women’s poetry for publication.
A lecture and seminar programme was agreed between the two participating institutions (Edge Hill College of HE and Salford University) but no attempt (beyond informal discussion) was made to collaborate on teaching beyond the agreement to deliver classes on similar materials in the same week. Nonetheless, all three tutors concerned with the delivery of the programme remained in weekly touch with each other, and a lot of informal sharing of ideas and teaching material took place.
The students were provided with two interactive facilities: one synchronous and one asynchronous. This was designed to enable collaborative learning and to facilitate inter-site discussion between students working on similar issues at much the same time. Thus the course was centred on collaborative learning rather than collaborative teaching. Both institutions recruited a single seminar group (16 at Edge Hill, 23 at Salford), using the normal processes of option choice. About half of the Salford students were Journalism and English students, and the module had been particularly written to embrace their needs. Few of these students, however, had formal skills or experience in reading texts of this kind.
Set texts were something of an issue. It was felt that some kind of primary reading available in conventional print form was necessary. We used the Penguin selection of Dickens’s journalism1 (which was fine, even though it concentrates on post-1850 texts – so none of the early sketches were included) and Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman’s recently published anthology of writing from Victorian women’s magazines2. In practice students preferred to work with the available primary material and the website than these supplementary texts, but some students wrote assignments on Dickens and others made use of the anthology in their essays. The Beetham and Boardman anthology was specifically designed to serve as a textbook, and is pioneering in this respect. It would be interesting to know if other modules are making use of it in this way.
Web CT resource base
The Web CT was set up to include a resource base and an interactive facility to enable students across the two institutions to make use of e-mail and a discussion page and chatroom. As course tutors we selected a range of nineteenth-century periodicals, magazines, illustrations and journals, as the basis for the primary resource base as it was agreed that students needed access to a fairly wide range of materials representative of the period.
Some complete copies of periodicals such as The Penny Magazine were made available while sample pages and illustrations were selected from others. The material was organized by genre: Chapbooks, Religious Tracts, Songbooks/Songsheets, Journals, Literature of The March of Intellect and Novels. There were further subdivisions in each category containing representative texts from each decade between 1830-1860.
One of the key issues for the web designer was achieving a balance between download times and clarity of text. While every effort was made to strike a realistic balance, generally speaking download times were given priority although visually, the texts were considered clear enough to fulfill students’ needs on the course. It was felt that while access to the Web CT through the intranet at Edge Hill was relatively quick, students accessing the same information externally would experience longer download times.
Students received training in the access of Web CT at both institutions and were encouraged to make use of the interactive tools. However, for a variety of reasons, this element of the course was not as successful. One of the tools was designed as a chatroom, which depended on students entering it at particular times. Similarly, the discussion tool required students to plan ahead and access the site at specific times. This was problematic as the demands of student timetables and access to computers across the two institutions couldn’t really be synchronized successfully.
Student feedback
Students did, however, make full use of the primary resources and bibliography, finding the Web CT invaluable for their research, particularly the illustrations.
Student feedback on the Web CT raised the following issues:
1. Students would prefer longer download times and clearer images, particularly for text. Illustrations were felt to be reasonably clear but that further improvements could be made.
2. Students valued the range of resources available on Web CT but felt that this should be expanded even further with more ‘runs’ of periodicals, journals and newspapers made available. It was felt that the categories could be expanded to include more texts aimed at women readers and family reading.
3. Some students felt that the resources available on Web CT should be opened up and made available to other modules relating to nineteenth century literature/history.
4. Students would have been more likely to make use of the synchronic/asynchronic facilities if there had been an initial ‘face to face’ meeting between the two groups.
Teaching
While students responded well to the demands of the course overall, the level of tutor support was higher than anticipated. Initially, students needed greater tutor input specifically in defining the cultural, historical and social framework of the period. This need was met by increased use of lectures and tutor-led workshops. By week 6, students were noticeably more independent and had a clearer sense of their areas of research. After this time, students engaged with their individual projects with specific hours allocated for student-tutor advisory/progress meetings.
Student feedback
1. Students felt that a high level of input was needed initially but that once the framework had been established, working in a research mode was both stimulating and challenging. Students appreciated the intellectual and academic freedom of designing their own research project.
2. There were some concerns relating to the Web CT (outlined under Web CT Resource Base) and the visual quality of resources but generally students appreciated the range of primary materials made available and felt that they should be expanded and opened up to other courses.
3. Students needed more practice in reading and interpreting illustrations as this was a new approach to texts (and one of which they had little previous experience). The Salford student feedback forms show in general a high level of satisfaction.
Conclusions and outcomes
1. The project was an extremely valuable one in terms of curriculum development in both institutions. The module has stayed on the books of both institutions and was taken by good numbers of students in semester 1 of 2003.
2. The project was extremely valuable in providing students for the first and only time in their undergraduate programme with some sense of the issues involved in approaching non-canonical texts through the sociology of literary production and the materiality of the texts. Students did develop valuable new skills in analysing the nature and ideological structure of mass circulation literature.
3. The project was extremely valuable as a form of staff development and as a means of increasing awareness of teaching and learning issues, especially those posed by the use of electronic resources. Apart from the very obvious and immediate skills developed by Dr Forsyth in preparing, organising and deploying teaching material on an electronic database, all the staff concerned learnt a great deal about the strengths and limitations of electronic databases and about using primary material within undergraduate teaching.
References
1. Selected journalism/Charles Dickens edited by David Pascoe. London: Penguin, 1997.
2. Victorian women’s magazines: an anthology edited by Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman. Manchester: University Press, 2001.
Newsletter Issue 6 - February 2004
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