Teaching and Learning English Literature

Ellie Chambers, Marshall Gregory

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781446237496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

?It is scarcely possible to imagine a truly educated person who cannot read well. Yet it is not clear how or even if courses in literature actually work. How can teachers of English help students in their developmental journey toward becoming skillful readers and educated persons? This is the complex question that Chambers and Gregory address in Teaching and Learning English Literature.

The authors consider practical matters such as course design and student assessment but do not shirk larger historical and theoretical issues. In a lucid and non-polemical fashion - and occasionally with welcome humor - Chambers and Gregory describe the what, why, and how of "doing" literature, often demonstrating the techniques they advocate. Veteran teachers will find the book rejuvenating, a stimulus to examining purposes and methods; beginning teachers may well find it indispensable? - Professor William Monroe, University of Houston

?The transatlantic cooperation of Ellie Chambers and Marshall Gregory has produced an outstanding book that ought to be on the shelves of anyone involved in the teaching of English Literature, as well as anyone engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning in general or in any discipline. As they say, "the teaching of English Literature plays a central role in human beings? search for meaning" although others in other disciplines may make this claim for theirs too. If so, they will still learn a great deal from this book; anyone looking for no more than a means of satisfying the demands of governments that look for simplistic quality measures and economic relevance, let them look elsewhere. This is a book for now and for all times? - Professor Lewis Elton, Visiting Professor, University of Manchester, Honorary Professor, University College London

This is the third in the series Teaching and Learning the Humanities in Higher Education. The book is for beginning and experienced teachers of literature in higher education. The authors present a comprehensive overview of teaching English literature, from setting teaching goals and syllabus-planning through to a range of student assessment strategies and methods of course or teacher evaluation and improvement. Particular attention is paid to different teaching methods, from the traditional classroom to newer collaborative work, distance education and uses of electronic technologies. All this is set in the context of present-day circumstances and agendas to help academics and those in training become more informed and better teachers of their subject.

The book includes:

- how literature as a discipline is currently understood and constituted

- what it means to study and learn the subject

-what ?good teaching? is, with fewer resources for teaching, larger student numbers, an emphasis on ?user-pay? principles and vocationalism.

This is an essential text for teachers of English Literature in universities and colleges worldwide.

The Teaching & Learning in the Humanities series, edited by Ellie Chambers and Jan Parker, is for beginning and experienced lecturers. It deals with all aspects of teaching individual arts and humanities subjects in higher education. Experienced teachers offer authoritative suggestions on how to become critically reflective about discipline-specific practices.

1

The discipline today

IN CRISIS?

Culture wars

No Literature academic, long established or just beginning, can be unaffected by the ‘culture wars’ that in the last two decades or so have ravaged our scholarly community, and indeed the Humanities generally. Western governments’ neglect of the Humanities, even to the point of repudiation, and their concurrent outpourings of resource for research and teaching in the so-called productive areas of the higher education curriculum – business, technology, the applied sciences – undoubtedly galvanised many humanists, but in ways that commentators (especially in North America)¹ have identified as an aspect of ‘the crisis’ itself. That is, in such a situation of dwindling resource for the discipline and perceived loss of its status within the academy, colleagues tended to turn on each other

in culture wars and canon wars that feature campus radicals versus conservative publicists, proponents of multiculturalism versus defenders of tradition, scholars who insist on the political construction of all knowledge versus those who would preserve the purity and beauty of a necessarily nonpolitical, because objective, truth.

(Scott, 1995: 293)

And these activists, in both traditionalist and radical camps, joined in (always justified?) scorn of their more utilitarian, entrepreneurial colleagues who, then and now, would ‘sell’ their services within the favoured, well-resourced domains – offering courses in medical ethics, for example, or communications for business managers, or in logical thinking, problem-solving and other so-called generic and transferable skills – for either their compliance or their debasement of a once-precious coinage.

‘Marketing’ higher education

Meanwhile, many of us look on in perplexity, fearing the worst as humanities departments continue to be merged or axed, faculty numbers and class-contact hours cut and our once coherent curricula reduced to short modules which students pick and mix like outfits from the shopping mall. At the same time, we are exhorted to introduce ‘flexible’ learning methods to cope with periodic bouts of expansion in student numbers (video-taped lectures, virtual seminars via computer conferencing), and to focus increasingly on our students’ employability and acquisition of related skills. Insult adds to injury when such ‘developments’ are held up as progressive: as the elements of an architecture of client-centred Lifelong Learning, or some similarly opaque assertion our education has taught us to question and fully equipped us to demolish. For many academics in the Humanities, and perhaps especially in literary studies, vehemently reject such a retail model of higher education – a model in which every institution’s first concern is to keep the paying customers coming through the door, and teachers are the floor clerks who keep those customers happy.

However, it’s not all gloom and doom. It is clear that the apprenticeship model of higher education – in which disciplines are ‘tribes’, with their different, clearly marked out, well defended ‘territories’ (Becher and Trowler, 2001) and their academics busy training the next generation of scholars – is giving way under the pressures of national and international competition and of students’ buying power to looser curriculum formations and an economy that is demand- as well as supply-led. These are shifts of emphasis that many in the academy welcome. And they may simply be inevitable in the situation of widening access to higher education in the age of the Internet (see Edwards and Usher, 2001). The main danger is of course a dumbing down of higher education generally, as newspaper headlines about Mickey Mouse courses attest (especially in some of the newer fields, such as Media Studies) and as many academics themselves fear. In this connection, we would just point to the widely acknowledged high academic standards of the UK Open University, which since 1969 has successfully offered a modular programme predicated on the widest possible choice to adult students who need have no previous educational qualifications at all. Dumbing down is a danger, then, but it is not inevitable.

Understanding global forces

And, at least, humanities disciplines are not alone in all this. Indeed, it is now widely accepted that there is ‘a global crisis of rising demand for higher education which races ahead of the public funding to meet it’ (Channon, 2000: 255, citing Goddard). We may conclude that, after all, the ‘crisis’ of the Humanities reflects an infrastructural crisis in all higher education, even if humanities disciplines perhaps come off worst. Furthermore, if (with Bourdieu, 1988) we first distinguish between the cognitive and the social structures of the disciplines – their academic (knowledge/actively intellectual) and their social (power/socially reproductive) dimensions – and, second, identify some disciplines as clearly located at the cognitive end of the spectrum (e.g. natural science) with others (such as business studies) at the social/temporal end, we may then locate the Humanities towards the cognitive end, in a state of some tension between the poles. This analytical framework (which, note, does not entail judgements of disciplinary value) can help make sense of the bewildering array of forces currently acting upon higher education and its effects. For the world-wide trend towards mass higher education systems is a phenomenon that emphasises the social/temporal dimension of all disciplines (Kelly, 2001) – an emphasis that is likely to have especially distorting effects on those disciplines located towards the cognitive end of the spectrum.

That is, as ever-larger numbers of students enter higher education systems, these systems – yoked as they are to the economic demands of an ever more global marketplace – are increasingly geared to the students’ future employment and capacity to contribute to national wealth. A major aim of a higher education, then, is that students should acquire marketable skills. In the UK, for example, these skills are to be demonstrated by the students’ competent performance of the ‘learning outcomes’ that their teachers must stipulate for them in advance – with teachers’ own performance measured accordingly and controlled for ‘quality’. Thus we all become constrained to think about our teaching goals and methods in similar terms, whether our field is Biology or Business or Literature. It is as if, when it comes to teaching, the structure, purposes and pedagogy of all disciplines were one and the same. And it is as if students themselves may have no educational goals or preferences of their own.

Truce and federation

While the particular tensions such constraints give rise to will of course differ within and among humanities as well as other disciplines, we should try to understand our own situation in a way that inspires something more productive than either panic or paralysis. With respect to Modern Languages, Kelly’s solution to avoiding disciplinary fracture and marginalisation – to achieving both the social unity needed to address issues of power and the cognitive diversity required to create new knowledge – is ‘federation’: large departments or units that may ‘speak with one voice’, acting on behalf of all their members and, at the same time, fostering and sustaining a wide range of intellectual interests (Kelly, 2001: 55). If the situation of Modern Languages is in its essentials representative of other humanities then might not such a notion of federation profitably be extended to the Humanities as a whole, including Literature? Clearly, this would entail a truce in the culture wars and a genuine coming together to forge new understandings.

Indeed, it seems that the worst of the conflict is behind us now (Gregory, 2002). A recent contribution to the debate from another American academic, who was a student at the height of the culture wars (Insko, 2003), suggests teaching for democratic citizenship as a way forward, while Gregory himself (2001: 87) recommends the ‘humanization of the social order’; Bérubé (2003) promotes ways of valuing the ‘utility’ of cultural work; Gerald Graff (2003), by ‘teaching the conflicts’, suggests yet another possibility. And evidence that there is a will to forge new understandings emerging widely in the Humanities came our way in response to a proposal in 2001 to establish an academic journal of Arts and Humanities higher education (Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, Sage Journals (www.sagepub.co.uk)). Variously, the (anonymous) international respondents pointed to the need:

• . . . for a potential rallying-point for the politics of those dedicated to a remarkably resilient yet systematically slighted area of education. We don’t get the big grants . . . but we do get the students, and the interest . . . we’re big education providers/cultivators for post-industrial societies. After all, by and large, we insist on education (not training alone), and flexibility and adaptability (not narrow vocationalism).
• . . . for ways to cut the humanities coat according to the shrinking cloth on the one hand, developing arguments that may at least have some potential to reverse this trend on the other.
• . . . genuinely to bring together top-level thought on research-led pedagogy across humanities disciplines, which strengthens links between those disciplines without denying their separate identities.

However, as we have seen, certain indicators are plain discouraging. Internally, some humanities disciplines are deeply fractured, perhaps especially Literature. It appears that within the Humanities generally there exists little agreement about desirable purposes, curricula and teaching practices – partly as a consequence of differences in response to the external pressures just noted, and also owing to different underlying conceptions of the disciplines themselves (see Chambers (2001) for discussion of traditional, radical and utilitarian views of Literature as a discipline). In starting this book with such sobering reflections we recognise no more than is true and no more than beginning academics will indeed encounter. It is because of this backdrop that what we say in it has urgency. And of course through the book we aim to point up the distinctiveness of our discipline, and to help achieve the kind of unity of purpose and understanding that will sustain its vitality.

Disciplinary vigour

In any case, we must not lose our nerve. Literature courses have traditionally attracted large numbers of students and they continue to do so. In spite of the difficulties involved when resources for teaching are far from commensurate, what this means is that many people actually want to study Literature. If they didn’t, the discipline’s ‘crisis’ would more likely be the discipline’s demise. And these people we now see in our classrooms (or, in a mode such as distance education, perhaps don’t see at all) could hardly be more heterogeneous: of all ages, and social and ethnic backgrounds; with a range of previous experience of education and of qualifications from virtually nil to standard higher education entry requirements and beyond. In the UK, a series of assessment visits made in 1994–5 to 72 per cent of university English departments revealed that in over a third of the departments ‘the quality of education was judged to be excellent’ (and of the remainder, to be satisfactory in all but three cases). The assessors continue:

Excellence was identified across a variety of programmes, institutions, approaches to subject delivery and assessments of the curriculum. Positive features included: vigour in the curriculum; success in attracting capable, enthusiastic students; widening of access – particularly to mature, returning students – without any diminution in quality; high retention rates; student achievement that in general reflects considerable intellectual challenge . . .; positive views held by past and present students about the quality of their learning experience; and excellent staff–student relations.

(QAA, Subject Overview Report – English, 1995; Summary: at www.qaa.ac.uk – accessed March 2004)

So there is much that is encouraging.

It remains to be seen why students might want to study Literature and just what kind of education it is that they want or expect. But first we step back a bit, to consider where we’re ‘coming from’. Given the focus of the book, our starting point is of course pedagogy.

FROM ANCIENT PEDAGOGY . . .

Traditional pedagogy in literature classes has its roots in the ancient pedagogy of classical language instruction. This was a pedagogy aimed mostly at students ‘getting it right’. The beginning stages of Latin and Greek do not provide occasions for student ‘interpretation’; students can’t have independent opinions about semantics, syntax, tenses, inflections and the like. Thus, the very pedagogy that is so much maligned today – students mimicking and parroting their teachers’ knowledge and injunctions – was the pedagogy that for centuries was successful in beginning Latin and Greek classes. Once beyond the beginning stages, the content of classics classrooms was of course not language as such, but Greek and Latin philosophy and literature (Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Aristotle), and in translating these complex and nuanced texts questions of interpretation and judgement would increasingly come to the fore. Nonetheless, these roots in the pedagogy of Greek and Latin instruction partly explain why, historically, literature pedagogy of a ‘top-down’ kind has had so much momentum and why it has taken so long to alter or modify it.

Literature pedagogy

When Classics and Literature finally went their separate disciplinary ways, and literature teaching was mounted on the platform of students’ own language rather than difficult and dead ‘foreign’ languages, the pedagogy of Literature could be loosened considerably. The issue in reading literature was no longer tied to students ‘getting it right’ as a matter of necessity. They could be encouraged to develop their own interpretive opinions. However, the magisterial rightness as represented by the teacher was a strongly entrenched tradition in the academy and did not immediately melt away. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, students in literature classes were still taught as if their job was to ‘get it right’, if not tenses and inflection then interpretations and meanings. The right interpretations and meanings came not from student thought, inquiry or questioning, and certainly not from student ‘opinion’, which most teachers until recently (and some still, if truth be told) viewed in quotation marks, but from the instructor. ‘Right opinion’ was what the teacher thought. Today, given the challenges the discipline faces, there is even more reason willingly and imaginatively to jump outside the authoritarian frame that teachers and students may sometimes still inhabit.

Perhaps, therefore, the most helpful thing we might say about pedagogy at this early stage of the book is to recommend not this or that ‘local’ strategy, such as ‘do seminars, not lectures’ or ‘do workshops, not seminars’, but to discuss a ‘global’ approach designed to help teachers help students think more deeply than they might about the possible uses and value of literary study. Later, in Chapter 5, we discuss such local teaching strategies as lectures, seminar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Teaching and Learning the Humanities in Higher Education
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 The discipline today
• 2 What is good teaching?
• 3 Teaching literary theory and teaching writing
• 4 Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design
• 5 Methods of teaching
• 6 Student assessment
• 7 Evaluating teaching; future trends
• Bibliography
• Index