There are many ways of assessing the health of a subject, even more so where that subject is a loose federation of related disciplines. The TQI and Student Satisfaction Survey wear fairly prominent health warnings for anyone uneasy about the steady marketisation of Higher Education. Yet, while acknowledging that ‘student satisfaction’ needs to be triangulated with other kinds of evidence, the English community can afford some satisfaction over the results. With an average score of 4.18, English–based subjects come high on the discipline tables – joint fifth with Biological Sciences. Eleven English courses – more than any other subject – feature in the Guardian’s composite list of 50 top scoring courses (1). While clearly there is a near–universal need to tackle the issues of assessment and feedback, this is a result that goes some way to support the contention that ‘English’ is a subject where the vigour of scholarship and the practice of teaching are mutually reinforcing. It is unreservedly good news for the subject community.
‘Building a distinctive knowledge about teaching does not require teachers of English to abandon our own idioms’The English Subject Centre is delighted, and (given the quirks of surveys) relieved. The survey results achieve public recognition for the fertility of the human and cultural materials we have to work with. In this context we can afford the return to the question aired in earlier Newsletters: what kind of knowledge do Subject Centres represent and seek to foster? Several considerations feed into a provisional answer. These include the current Funding Council / Universities UK / Higher Education Academy consultation on Accreditation and Professional Standards; a lively debate among the Subject Centres over the nature of pedagogic research and its (in)visibility in the RAE; and observations drawn from the diverse materials crossing the Subject Centre’s radar. Perverse as it may seem to remark just now, we are still struck by the difficulty of writing or talking about teaching. With some notable exceptions, English people, challenged to write about teaching, talk about curriculum choices (which authors or texts) or about resources (which editions, anthologies, readers). Does this – as an older linguistic fundamentalism might suggest – imply a difficulty in thinking about teaching? Evidently there is much good, even inventive teaching around, but in what forms, through what discourses and genres do we make our tacit teaching knowledge available to others or even to ourselves for scrutiny? This is a question which The Cambridge Quarterly addresses in its 40th anniversary issue (2). There are many potent forces which push us back towards default assumptions (the primacy of the essay, the self–evident process of the seminar, the value of lectures, the uselessness of generic staff training) – default assumptions held in place by forces as various as the RAE and the construction of students as consumers.
To return then to the question. The knowledge that the English Subject Centre seeks to promote is working knowledge about our group of subjects as read through a pedagogic lens. There are many reasons for doing this, not least of them the growing gap between students’ experience of English in school and at A–level and their experience of university. (Another reason might be sought in the probable results of failing to reconcile and build on the differing strengths of language, literature and creative writing.) Even in sharing the community’s unease over the idea of dissemination (‘you can’t bottle it’ as one colleague remarked), we can seek to bring about a conversation about teaching and learning. A community that is so good at analysing and using language and cultural forms, a community that prides itself on linguistic and conceptual inventiveness, need not be inhibited about developing a vocabulary and a syntax in which to address teaching. Or in which to evaluate our own subject knowledge in relation to pedagogy or to the learning styles and prior cultural knowledge of our students. If, as we like to think, we are good at reading, why not also read the fine grain of the seminar encounter? And, having read it, share our interpretations? Let us seek to articulate together how in Felicity Rosslyn’s words, we have ‘made English real as a discipline’ in the fragile space of the seminar (3). Developing a pedagogic language in which to talk to each other would mean at the same time developing our ability to take part in and mediate those cross-cultural encounters with students in the hybrid environment of the classroom. Building a distinctive knowledge about teaching does not require teachers of English to undergo Mowbray’s sentence of banishment, to abandon our own idioms for a foreign tongue. Humanities disciplines, their material all the time overlapping with the stuff of everyday life and language, are evidently subject to what Gerald Graff has referred to as ‘the problem problem’ (4): the apparently counter–intuitive nature of what we do. In finding a sharable language for ‘the problem problem’, we might even discover fresh pedagogic valencies to familiar organising concepts: concepts such as gender, the other, desire, dystopia, the gothic, the postcolonial. Or from other registers, imagination, embarrassment, shame, hospitality.
Twenty–five years ago this September, John Broadbent and a group of colleagues held at the University of East Anglia the first of many Development of University English Teaching workshops (see Susan Bassnett’s article in this issue, p. 31). Their object was to unlock collaborative creativity in teaching. Preparing for one of the next workshops John Broadbent remarked on ‘the difficulty of talking about serious matters in professional terms. Even though we work in interpretative communities, we may find ourselves being “swamped by the machine” … the professional group turning into a deadly threat, excess of structure producing apathy or anarchy’. Many histories have flooded and ebbed since then. But the task DUET set itself now seems if anything more rather than less necessary.
Notes
1. Guardian Survey at http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/tables/0,9863,1575133,00.html.
2. Cambridge Quarterly, Fortieth Anniversary Special Issue: English Now, 34.3 (2005).
3. Felicity Rosslyn, ‘Literature for the Masses: The English Literature Degree in 2004’, Cambridge Quarterly 33 (2004), 1 - 10.
4. ‘The Problem Problem and Other Oddties of Academic Discourse’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 1.1 (2002), 27 – 42.
