Elsewhere in this Newsletter, Ben Knights emphasizes the valuable role that thinking about and analysing teaching can – and perhaps should – play in the lives of English lecturers (above, p. 2). Currently, much writing about English HE teaching either chooses not to be analytical at all (offering up pragmatic sets of teaching ‘tips’), or else deploys frameworks taken not from English but from the social science discipline of educational research. The question this event posed was a simple one: is there a ‘third way’? Can we, as English lecturers, evolve, on our own terms, within the discipline of English Studies, an intellectually rigorous tradition (or traditions) of writing about teaching? Isn’t this an area that is too important to be neglected by us and left to researchers from other disciplines?
The event was jointly convened by Ben Knights, Director of the English Subject Centre, and Shân Wareing, Director of the Educational Development Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London. As background reading, participants had been sent copies of three essays, each highlighting different possible ways forward for pedagogical research: a section from Ben Knights’s book From Reader to Reader (Harvester,1992) exploring similarities in the ways that both literary texts and the seminar groups that discuss them construct meaning, an essay by Shân Wareing putting the case for ‘generic’ pedagogic research, and ‘Investigating the Production of University English’ by Ken Jones, Monica McLean, David Amigoni and Margaret Kinsman (Arts and Humanities in Higher Education (October 2005)), the description of a pilot project videoing and analysing university English seminars. After a scene-setting discussion based around a series of short presentations, the group selected three topics for further discussion in the afternoon: ‘transition’ from school to university, the ‘identity’ of English lecturers and students, and the implicit theory behind English lecturers’ pedagogical practice. Each of these topics was allocated to a different sub-group, and, in each case, a rich crop of questions resulted. The ‘transition’ group concluded that topics for research might include both the peer cultures of students and the nature of any clash between the values of students, lecturers and managers. The ‘identity’ group discussed both possible ways of finding out about ‘disciplinary identity’ – blogs, ‘Big Brother’ diary rooms, learning journals, surveys of joint honours students – as well as the relationship between pedagogic practice and curriculum topic – the extent to which literary theory can be applied to and inform teaching, the ‘reading’ of teaching encounters in terms of genre theory, and so on. The group looking at pedagogical assumptions flagged up the importance of gender and ethnicity and also proposed a number of different methodological approaches: inter alia, a survey listing possible pedagogical assumptions to which lecturers would be invited to respond, teaching observations and the analysis of taped conversations with lecturers with the lecturers themselves.
The day concluded with a wide-ranging plenary session on future directions and outcomes. Many important topics were raised, including the false dichotomy between ‘teaching’ and ‘research’ (together with its baleful child, the unequal status of pedagogy and publication) and the key question of audience (to whom should an English –specific scholarship of teaching be addressed?). The group compiled a long list of desiderata, viz.
• more networking via the Subject Centre
• more departmental publications and projects
• the submission of more articles on HE English pedagogy both to traditional ‘research’ journals as well as to specialist journals such as Arts & Humanities in Higher Education , Changing English , Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment .
• more colloquia and conferences
• the incorporation of discipline-specific research in new lecturers’ programmes
• the forging of links with CETLs
• more sessions on pedagogy in ‘research’ conferences (something the Subject Centre would be keen to help fund )
• events on this topic bringing together university and secondary school teachers
This exploratory day clearly succeeded in its primary aim: to support and spur on lecturers ready to think in creative ways about their own teaching. More events will follow. In the meantime, interested parties should bear in mind that the Subject Centre is providing English–specific pedagogical research with a number of publication outlets, including online case studies , Teaching the New English (a major new monograph series from Palgrave) , and, last but not least, this newsletter, which welcomes articles on any area of HE English teaching.
