This day event stemmed from the recognition that in the higher education English community the first year has become a matter of widespread concern. Colleagues are acutely conscious of how much there is to achieve within what has come to be widely seen as a foundation year. The Subject Centre is aware that many are worried about a group of related issues: a perceived lack of student preparedness for studying at university level – perhaps as a result of the training they have received for school assessment regimes and specifically under ‘Curriculum 2000’; signs of increasing dependence on being given notes; exaggerated expectations of teaching hours and support; an unwillingness to read beyond the syllabus (or even within the syllabus) going with a strategic approach to learning and a lack of intellectual curiosity or risk-taking which risks making nonsense of institutional ambitions to create ‘autonomous learners’. Too many of the 18 year-old cohort (it was reiterated during the day) are ‘assessment-led’, and simultaneously lack both wide reading and the patience for reading in depth. There is a feeling abroad that these are not simply widening participation issues – or, alternatively, a grumpy recycling of complaints lecturers have made over the years. In some institutions there are associated worries about student retention, and there is in any case extensive apprehension that all the problems sketched above will intensify as the era of ‘variable fees’ confirms the emergent identity of students (and their increasingly vocal parents) as consumers. At one and the same time, many departments, responding to the pressures of oncoming research assessment, have delegated major portions of their first year teaching to visiting lecturers or postgraduate part-time teachers.
The day was organised so as to explore some of the pressing questions which arise from this situation, questions, for example, to do with the substance of the curriculum, with the pacing and structure of assessment, with how to foster dialogue within seminar groups and establish norms of self-managed study, with the nature and resourcing of support and tutorial systems, and with how to support and mentor colleagues on fractional or hourly-paid contracts.
Twenty colleagues from a number of different universities attended the day, and packed a vigorous discussion into the time available. While the event was more in the nature of a colloquium, short presentations were given by Gary Snapper (Institute of Education and former Head of English at Impington Village College) on the impact of Curriculum 2000, and by Peter Childs (University of Gloucestershire and National Teaching Fellow) on models for the first year curriculum. Gary drew attention in particular to the effects of unitisation and Assessment Objectives on the experience of A-level, but also reminded us of long-standing features of A-level pedagogy. Peter gave examples of curricula which sought to represent a variety of periods and kinds of discourse. Areas raised in discussion included:
- • The need to treat the narrative from AS to level 2 holistically.
- • Hospitality to strangers: when and how you pace the giving of information.
- • Academic literacy: integrated or added?
- • Strategically planned curricula: is planning still dominated by habit rather than attention to student needs?
- • Collaboration between personal tutor systems and other university agencies (counsellors, librarians, careers, ICT).
- • Ways of modelling self-managed learning – taking responsibility for the contexts of teaching.
- • Who represents the interests of Level 1 within the staff team?
- • The complaint that the litany of ‘transferable skills’ is not actually helping students make connections even between modules and years at university.
As always, much of the denseness and richness of the discussion eludes capture in a short report. Naturally, there were disagreements: some were most struck by students’ lack of an abstract conceptual language, others by how poor so many were as close readers. Nevertheless, allowing for the variety of individual institutional circumstances, certain pointers for wider investigation and development emerged.These included:
- • The need for locally specific knowledge about student working hours.
- • The need to address the isolation of those who only come onto campus for specific hours.
- • The need to improve the level of dialogue between A-level and higher education teachers over essays, feedback and the curriculum more broadly.
- • Sensitivity to the culture shock experienced by students entering university.
- • Giving thought to enabling learning communities to form (we cannot just assume that a student group knows how to learn together).
- • Preparing for the effects of ‘variable’ fees on the teaching relationship.
- • The possibility of exercising an ‘equal and opposite force’ to the cultural and economic pressures experienced by students.
- • Conversely, the possibility of tapping their energies, enthusiasms and diverse learning styles; or building on their knowledge of cultural production and consumption.
- • The need for departments to think through what they themselves regard as central: period? genre? context? survey courses designed to compensate for A-level students’ atomised knowledge of texts?
- • Demonstrating the courage to make intellectual leaps or to set off into the dark.
- • Recognition of the social and intellectual merits of the lecture as a form.
- • Recognition of the difficulty of the seminar and the imperative to prepare content through the prism of learning.
- • Can current pastoral systems substitute for the passing of one-to-one contact in mitigating the shock of the first year?
In this context, readers’ attention is also drawn to the latest English Subject Centre Report, Andrew Green’s Four Perspectives on Transition (Report No. 10) and its appendix by Adrian Barlow .
