We have reached an exciting moment in the history of the Subject Centre. The decision has been taken to fund the Subject Centre network to July 2009. New contracts are currently being negotiated between the Higher Education Academy and host institutions. For the first time in our short but intensive existence we are able to weave a huge array of threads and initiatives into coherent longer term planning. In doing so, we shall as always be working in dialogue with our subject community and its students. In turn that commitment requires us to negotiate the potentially fruitful tension between the role of supporting teaching (inherited from the Learning and Teaching Support Network) and the Academy’s orientation towards the student experience (sometimes qualified as the ‘student learning experience’). At the English Subject Centre we are well aware of the suspicions our community entertains towards this latter imperative: its semi-overt project of positioning UK higher education in a global marketplace, the potential for reinforcing short-term consumerist attitudes, the downplaying of the seriousness and danger of knowledge in favour of skilling up an intellectual proletariat for the ‘knowledge economy’.We are aware, because in many ways we share the reservations ourselves. Nevertheless, we believe that there are intellectual and social advantages in offering support for teaching in the context of attention to the student experience (however defined). The range of contents of this newsletter – like the range of Subject Centre events – itself bears witness to the productivity of shuttling between domains. If it does nothing else, the ‘student experience’ mantra puts squarely before us the necessity of paying attention to the fluid identities of those who enter our subject as learners; and takes us back to the broader meanings of an education in ‘English’ (in all the sub-disciplines that cluster beneath that elastic label) for those most of whom will not go on to become the future professionals of the subject.
Small outfit that it is, the English Subject Centre is not in a position to make all the connections and carry out all the projects with which our colleagues nationally or we ourselves might wish us to be involved. But we are in a position to work with our communities and with other agencies, offering tentative advice and acting as catalysts for development. Above all we can create or seize opportunities to enrich the pedagogic matrix: to help build on the existing communicative and pedagogic habits of the discipline. We can thus facilitate a self-aware activity that reaches from day-to-day reflection on teaching all the way to a systematic scholarship of teaching and pedagogic research.(1)
This orientation means that we seek in all we do to pay attention to the forms and rituals through which our subject matters are mediated, all those ways in which students and potential students are invited into (or excluded from) dialogue. Let us take the example of the ‘English 21’ initiative with which the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has been charged. This is an important opportunity to contribute to the shaping of ‘English’ in schools and colleges. The Subject Centre, while actively involved, cannot fully represent the higher education community all by itself, and strongly urges national colleagues to join in the dialogue.(2) It is at least possible that we are seeing a thaw in the cold war which has for the past fifteen years – since the shameful dismissal of the Cox and Carter reports – tended to barricade University and School English into blocs of mutual misunderstanding.(3) Some implications for students of effecting the boundary crossing are explored in Andrew Green’s recent report for the Subject Centre.(4) It would be irresponsible to miss the opportunity presented by ‘English 21’, especially since we now know that ministers and the DFES see no need for an Adrian Smith-style enquiry into English. But an adequate involvement rests on the higher education English community being able to articulate the values and benefits of our subject to the larger community, even while recognising with due humility that this extended family of subjects is not and never has been a straightforward derivative of scholarly research. For this is a dispersed subject with its roots in multiple practices and traditions. In a classic sense it is a ‘soft subject’ whose boundaries with its surroundings are weak and permeable. That, paradoxically, is its strength. It has as much to do with the habits of speech and reading communities as with the habits of educational systems.
Shuttle diplomacy between communities (teachers, students, writers and readers) may be precisely what the Subject Centre is positioned to do. We cannot (and should not) act as sole representatives of the higher education English community – that community can speak for itself – but we can bring tidings, offer translation facilities, take part in and report on parleys. Above all, we can assist colleagues in articulating and sharing the ways in which their scholarly knowledge and practice fuels transactions between generations and communities.We can thus play a part in renewing the connectedness between this group of university subjects and the critical literacies of the future.
References
1. See the article on p. 13 of this newsletter.
2. See http://www.qca.org.uk/11781.html
3. Cf. Ben Knights, ‘Building Bridges:Traversing the Secondary/Tertiary Divide’, English Subject Centre Newsletter 6 (February
2004), pp. 28-9
4. Andrew Green, Four Perspectives on Transition: English Literature from Sixth Form to University (English Subject Centre Report
10, 2005)
