A symposium held at Sheffield Hallam University on 14 October, 2004 provided a forum for university English teachers to discuss the current status of independent study as a key aspect of learning on undergraduate English degrees, and to think about how we might support English students in becoming increasingly independent learners during the course of their degrees. The symposium arose from the English Subject Centre funded small grant project ‘Developing the Independent English Student’ at Sheffield Hallam, led by myself and my colleague Dr Matthew Steggle. The symposium gave us a chance to report on our research into student perceptions of independent learning and to present the resources we have developed to encourage independent learning. It also allowed us to compare our experiences and understanding of independent learning with those of colleagues at other institutions and to hear presentations by two colleagues (both National Teaching Fellows) with real expertise on the topic: Dr Bill Hutchings from the University of Manchester, and Dr Pam Knights from Durham University.The programme for the day was made up of a presentation on our work at Sheffield Hallam, a hands-on workshop looking at the independent learning resources we produced, and presentations by Pam Knights on her use of virtual (and highly physical) learning environments to teach a course on Children’s Literature, and by Bill Hutchings on how he has used problem-based learning to teach eighteenth-century literature.The day ended with open discussion of current challenges to independent learning in English degrees and of what solutions there might be.
Our project suggested that there are grounds for considerable hope in terms of the openness of English students to the central importance of independent study in the subject, but also grounds for the need consciously to develop student ability and confidence in learning independently. Thus our conclusions about student perceptions of independent learning at Sheffield Hallam are, in some respects, very cheering, in that a decisive majority of students responding to questionnaires felt that they had become or were becoming increasingly independent learners during the course of their degrees, and that almost all felt they had gained much from independent study. Most respondents in the third year of study felt that the quality of their independent learning had developed over each year of the degree. However, there was also significant mention in questionnaire responses of perceptions of substantial difficulties with independent study. Obstacles to independent study raised by students fell into three main groups:
1. Not being confident about how, or what, to study independently. 2. Other pressures on study time, especially having to take paid employment in order to sustain studies (or, anyway, lifestyle), and family responsibilities. 3. Lack of library resources / knowledge about how to find appropriate resources in the library or on the web.
A number of student responses articulated a paradox which became central to the Sheffield Hallam project – that they needed more support to become independent learners. Thus several responses to the question: ‘what would help you do more independent learning?’ were ‘more help from tutors’. Though this kind of response might seem initially comic, and bound to upset anyone tempted by the Frank Furedi line on the ‘infantilisation’ of students, we concluded that this could be interpreted as a reasonable request for help with learning to learn. This student perception also accorded with the feelings of academic colleagues at Sheffield Hallam and elsewhere that students did not necessarily arrive in higher education with a very highly developed ability for, or understanding of, independent study as defined in the higher education context.
When we first designed the project, we noted that on the BA English Studies degree at Sheffield Hallam, there were already specific modules aimed at developing independence at level four (first year undergraduate) and level six (third year undergraduate). At level four, the module ‘Introduction to English Studies’ seeks to support transition from A-level and access modes of study to the more independent kinds of approaches to study to which higher education aspires. At level six, the dissertation module, following tradition, allows students to select and research their own project, which may be a literature, language or creative writing task, and to carry it through with a relatively small amount of supervision. There was an evident progression in the level of independence required by these two modules, which is also echoed by other aspects of course design at levels four and six. However, though there were no doubt expectations that students would develop further independence at level five, there was little explicit indication to students of what form this might take. We therefore decided to concentrate on building some resources into level five which would enable students to build independence of a kind which bridged the gap between transition-to-HE and final-year dissertation. We located these resources in two core modules, ‘Drama 1880-1960’ and ‘British Poetry 1780- 1850’, while also trying to suggest links to other level five modules and to level four and six modules as well.
From the outset we adopted certain principles in the design of the learning resources. Firstly, we did not in any way want directly to motivate their use through assessment, since this seemed entirely opposed to any true independence in learning (though we did alter assignment titles to make sure that there were opportunities to pursue directions which might be suggested by the independent learning materials). So, we did not, except for the purposes of evaluation, track whether individual students had used the resources, or make them in any way compulsory. Secondly, we chose topics which might have been touched on in lectures and seminars, but that were unlikely to have been developed in much depth. In this sense the independent learning resources were intended to constitute a kind of parallel curriculum to the one delivered: they linked to topics covered, but were deliberate sideways steps. For example, the learning resources associated with Ibsen’s The Doll’s House look at different translations of a scene, while the resource for O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock explores the geography of Dublin locations referred to in the play. Thirdly, we chose to construct our resources mainly through using existing web resources, and delivered it all through a VLE (Blackboard), though we still wrote a good deal of new material both to orientate students towards sometimes unfamiliar-seeming explorations and to suggest ways in which material might be linked together. This last principle was to make visible the constructed nature of literary interpretation so that students could see – or experience rather – that texts do not have ready-made meanings which can be scooped up: it is the job of critics to construct meanings from a variety of source materials, which may at times be conflicting: textual, linguistic, historical, geographical, performance history, previous Developing the Independent English Student interpretations and so on. Students using the learning resources were given support and guidance in making their way through material, particularly in how to construct appropriate enquiries to pursue, but there were generally no model answers. For the Drama module we provided an independent learning resource for every play and author covered by the module, as well as a resource on the topic of ‘Realism and Naturalism’. For the poetry module,we did not achieve quite such thorough coverage (or have not yet . . .). In both cases, we designed resources which could each be used in their own right, but also designed the activities as a sequence, so that there was more support with resources associated with material studied early in the semester and an increasing level of independence and ambition with later material.We also tried to take a different kind of sideways step in each resource, making this explicit in our commentaries.
By the end of the project we had ‘made’ sixteen resources for two modules, the flavour of which is given by the examples below:
- • Chekhov: Text and History: The Case of the Cherry Orchard
- • Synge: The Playboy of the Western World, Language and Irish Theatre
- • O'Casey: Juno and the Paycock and the History of Modern Ireland
- • Brecht: Brechtian Theatre (and its Stanislavskian Contrary)
- • Miller: Key Words in Death of a Salesman
- • Williams: from Page to Stage to Celluloid
- • Beckett: Bringing in Other Texts: Beckett and A Piece of Monologue
Of course, the most important question is: did all this absorbing activity have any impact on students? Evaluation suggests there were a number of different ways in which students made use of the resources. Starting at the low impact end, some respondents said ‘what resources?’, while others gave the more sophisticated variation:‘These look as if they might have been really useful – I wish I’d known about them’ (the simple moral here is that explaining independent learning resources in the first three weeks of a module, is, somehow, never enough). Many students – a majority – did make use of the resources, but in quite varied ways. Some were regular users, logging on pretty much every week, though of these a smaller proportion actually attempted the interactive learning activities, rather than reading, as they sometimes put it ‘for the information given’. Quite a large number of respondents looked at the resources only when they began writing assessed essays and /or when they began revising for the exam. In this kind of use, the overall developmental sequence of the resources was, perhaps, lost, since the resources were used selectively. Still, overall, the resources did seem to support some study beyond routine preparation for contact hours, and we were able to see in some particular cases that original work had been done using resources or tools or levels of independent enquiry which stemmed from the independent learning resources.
Bill Hutchings and Pam Knights in their presentations suggested that there are many and varied ways of encouraging English students to be more independent. While we had designed additional learning resources of a particular kind, Bill Hutchings’ problem-based learning in his third-year poetry options takes the almost opposite approach of providing nothing but a series of literary problems or enquiries.(1) The students themselves have to work from the research question and formulate ways of approaching it, have to find out as a group what they need to find out and where they might find it, select what primary and secondary courses to use and so on - acting in short more like professional researchers than undergraduates. Pam Knights’ presentation began by thinking about how during the course of her teaching career forces of conformity and utilitarian values had transformed many of the discourses and expectations of what higher education is for and what the experience of being at university is. Her approach certainly does make use of different kinds of assessment – particularly involving students on her children’s fiction course in working at schools and with children – but equally as striking is her practice of motivating independence through pleasure, through trying to break out of mechanically systematic, compulsory modes of learning. Thus her website for children’s fiction makes much use of links to current news stories and controversies, of writing and reading projects with local schools and so on (see http://www.dur.ac.uk/pam.knights/childfic/ to get the real atmosphere of this approach).
Discussion among participants in the symposium suggested that there was a shared feeling that enabling students to become more independent in their approaches to, and conceptions of, studying English was central to university English, and that this is to an extent under threat. There was a shared sense that the current A-level experience and the general conditions of being a student in contemporary higher education do not always automatically promote the development of independence in students and that there is at times a mismatch between our expectations and those of at least some of our students. Most importantly, there was a shared sense that course design and shifting of expectations could be achieved through intervention by course teams or individual tutors. We hope further to develop insights gained from the day in our work in English at Sheffield Hallam and more broadly in our contribution to the university’s CETL (Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) for ‘Promoting Learner Autonomy’.(2) Many thanks to the colleagues from the English subject community who participated in the symposium.
References
1. For a more detailed account, see Bill Hutchings and Karen O’Rourke, ‘Re-Writing Problem-based Learning for Literary Studies’, English Subject Centre Newsletter 2 (August 2001), pp. 12-13
