Programme Details: Friday 6 July 2007

Title: The Art of English: an interdisciplinary approach to creativity in everyday and literary language

Leader/s: Joan Swann, Sarah North and Kieran O’Halloran  (The Open University)

Theme: Language and Style

Time: 9.15 - 10.45

English in Higher Education has always had the potential for interdisciplinary engagement, which may enrich students’ understandings of English language and literature as well as reinvigorating English as a subject. In this paper we report on an Open University teaching project designed to encourage the interdisciplinary exploration of creativity, or verbal artistry, across a range of texts and practices – from conversational narratives and everyday performances, through picture books and new media texts to canonical literature.

As course developers, we were influenced by recent linguistic research on the poetic nature of everyday language, and associated arguments that there is some continuity between such everyday creativity and literary language (e.g. Carter, 2004; Cook, 2000). Such ideas pose a challenge to common conceptions of the nature and functions of language, and to the distinctiveness of literature. They therefore provide a valuable stimulus within the teaching of English. In our case, they have helped us to link students’ study of English language and literature in a new OU English degree. In our teaching we have added to and sometimes challenged the position adopted by Carter, Cook and others by drawing on insights from a range of disciplines, including literary stylistics and cognitive poetics, literary theory, sociolinguistics, literacy studies, performance studies, multimodal analysis and historical analysis (see Goodman and O’Halloran, 2006; Maybin and Swann, 2006). Through supported open learning, combining textual, audio-visual and web resources, students are encouraged to engage critically with ideas and argumentation and with different theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as to relate ideas in the course to their own (diverse) linguistic experiences. They are also supported in carrying out their own analyses of texts and practices.

In the presentation we discuss how this interdisciplinary approach suggests some new ways of developing the notion of English as a subject, while also producing intellectual tensions. We also discuss some pedagogical challenges in presenting the course to a diverse student body in a distance learning context, and explain our rationale for combining different modes of materials and resources.

Biography: Joan Swann, Sarah North and Kieran O’Halloran work in the Centre for Language and Communication at the Open University, where they are responsible for the production of multi-media teaching materials in English language studies. They are interested in developing curricula that acknowledge variability, hybridity and change in English; that foster links between English language and literature; and that are designed for an internationally diverse student body.

Select a date to view the programme