The English Association - over 100 years at the forefront of English

Issues in English

Number 9

Supporting English Studies? Reflections on the Changing Academic Library

Number 8

Talking About Travel Writing

Number 7

100 Years of English Teaching: the problems that can't be ignored

Number 6

Assessing Research Assessment in English

Number 5

Irish Studies and English Studies

Number 4

Second Reading: a report debating the present state of English at AS and A level and identifying priorities for revising the English subject criteria

Number 3

Write or Wrong? Creative Writing in the Academy

Number 2

Vital Signs: English in Medieval Studies in 21st Century Higher Education

Number 1

Doctor! Doctor! Doctoral Studies in English in 21st Century Britain

Issues 9 Supporting English Studies? Reflections on the Changing ... Talking About Travel Writing 100 Years of English Teaching: the Problems... 6 Assessing Research Assessment in English 5 Irish Studies and English Studies 4 Second Reading: the present state of English at AS and A level 3 Write or Wrong? Creative Writing in the Academy 2 Vital Signs: English in Medieval Studies in 21st Century HE 1 Dr! Dr! Doctoral Studies in Engish in 21st Century Britain

Issues Supporting English Studies? Reflections on the Changing... 8 Talking About Travel Writing 7 100 Years of English Teaching: the Problems ... 6 Assessing Research Assessment in English 5 Irish Studies and English Studies 4 Second Reading: the present state of English at AS and A level 3 Write or Wrong? Creative Writing in the Academy 2 Vital Signs: English in Medieval Studies in 21st Century HE 1 Dr! Dr! Doctoral Studies in English in 21st Century Britain

 

Number 9 Supporting English Studies? Reflections on the Changing Academic Library, by Tom Lockwood, Oliver Pickering and James Fitzmaurice, edited by Oliver Pickering

As in all other areas of life concerned with information handling, academic libraries are changing rapidly, and not everybody likes it. Research activity and student learning are equally affected. In the services and resources they currently offer, are libraries providing appropriate support for university English studies?

This booklet arose out of a concern expressed by the HE committee of the English Association that this support may indeed be less good than it once was, for a variety of reasons. Libraries have changed their style, librarians have changed their ways, information comes in new forms. Is too much being lost, or are libraries in some respects failing to anticipate new developments? Generalization is difficult, as the perception of worse or better service depends not only on the individual need or on the starting point (or on the level of funding, or degree of reorganization), but on the optimism or pessimism of the observer. Libraries, after all, have always varied greatly.

 

 

 

 

Number 8 Talking About Travel Writing, A Conversation Between Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs

In 2002 Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs jointly edited the Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Hulme has analysed early modern travel writing to the Americas in his Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (1986) and more recent travel writing about the small indigenous community on the Caribbean island of Dominica in Remnants of Conquest: Visitors to the Caribs, 1877-1998 (2000). His current project concerns writing about Oriente, the eastern part of Cuba. Youngs is the author of Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues 1850-1900 (1994) and has edited several books on travel writing. He is the founding editor of the scholarly journal Studies in Travel Writing, of which Hulme is an associate editor. In 2006 Hulme and Youngs were contracted by Routledge/Taylor & Francis to edit ‘Routledge Research in Travel Writing’, a series of scholarly books on travel texts. In the dialogue that follows, Hulme and Youngs discuss some of the questions that continue to preoccupy them after more than twenty years of work on the subject.

ISBN 978 0 900232 328 2

 

Number 7 100 Years of English Teaching: the problems that can't be ignored, by Sue Palmer, Geoff Barton and Peter Barry

With so much venting of spleens, so much opinion on so many issues, it can be hard to tell the important issues from the trivial. Here's one that isn't trivial - growing evidence that something is going profoundly wrong in the way we teach English. It isn't just that progress towards national targets has stalled. It's as if we are squeezing the life out of our most important subject.
Take Ofsted's report on English published a year ago. They reported the following:

• The 2003 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) found that, although the reading skills of 10 year old pupils in England compared well with those of pupils in other countries, they are less interested in reading than those elsewhere.
• An NFER reading survey (2003), conducted by Marian Sainsbury, concluded that children's enjoyment of reading had declined significantly in recent years.
• A Nestlé/MORI report highlighted the existence of a small core of children who do not read at all, described as an 'underclass' of non-readers, with families where reading is irrelevant.

One hundred years ago the English Association was founded to further the knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of the English language and its literatures and to foster good practice in its teaching and learning at all levels.

Back in 1922 school inspector and writer George Sampson complained that the fledgling subject of English was seen solely as something that could be "examined, tested, marked." That obsession with testing remains an enduring characteristic of English here at the start of the twenty-first century. It has led to a narrowing of the curriculum and an apparent loss of confidence by teachers in how to teach the subject in a way that ignites the enthusiasm of youngsters.

In an age of internet knowledge and global competition on the job market, we cannot afford to lose the critical reading skills or passion for literature of a generation. A feel for language that goes beyond the purely mechanical was never needed more than now.

That's why Sue Palmer, Peter Barry and Geoff Barton have written a polemical pamphlet to mark the English Association's centenary. It's not just another of those whinge-fests, bleating about how awful the world has become. Instead it is a serious attempt to step back and take a detached look at the state of primary, secondary and higher education English.

It's a plea to scrap micro-control of the curriculum and to reignite the core of creativity that ought to characterise English teaching.

We believe it's a debate we cannot afford not to have.

CONTENTS

'The Swing of the Primary Pendulum' Sue Palmer argues that a politically-motivated tests-and-targets approach to literacy has been counter-productive, and is now damaging children's ability to speak, read and write the English language.

'The View from the Secondary School Prison Yard' Geoff Barton suggests that, rather than a mechanical utilitarian curriculum, students in a multimedia world need English teaching that inspires and equips them to become discriminating users of the English language.

'English in Higher Education' Peter Barry expresses the conviction that, beneath the growing mountain of useless red tape, the spirit of English survives in Higher Education - just!

ISBN 0 900232 277 20pp

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Number 6 Assessing Research Assessment in English, by Martin Dodsworth

Publication date: 6 November 2006

Martin Dodsworth, who has served three times on the English panel of the RAE, writes a personal account of research assessment in English as he has seen it, together with some observations on the 2008 Exercise and on the future of research assessment.

In 2008 there will once again be a Research Assessment Exercise, eight years after its predecessor. Preparation for the RAE is stressful in the extreme, and it is the cause of much unrest in departments as they attempt to boost their grades by the recruitment of supposed superstars and by the offer of enforced sabbatical leave or early retirement (sometimes both) to those who are deemed underproductive. So we must be grateful that there has been a pause since the last one – time for a little stability and, it should be hoped, reflection before the next great onslaught.

Colleagues in English departments might like to reflect on their good fortune. The RAE affects different subjects differently, one reason being that some (notably the sciences with their heavy laboratory costs) are funded much more generously per capita than others. For some (the sciences again), continuity of research can be a large problem; if a project overruns the period between RAEs it can risk serious loss of funding. English, which receives minimum funding for research, might seem to be in a position not to have to worry greatly about the RAE just because its research is relatively cheap. There are irritating hoops through which to jump if you want money for research in English, and it is possible to fail in jumping through the right ones, but by and large money is not a problem, and neither is continuity. So why do people in English get into such a lather about the Research Assessment Exercise?

Martin Dodsworth, p. 1

ISBN 0 900232 26 9 36pp

Number 5 Irish Studies and English Studies. Two essays by Shaun Richards and Eve Patten, edited by Norman Vance

Publication date: October 2006

This pamphlet reviews the controversial recent past, present and future of Irish Studies in relation to English Studies, the rise of 'theory', 'Cultural Studies' and 'interdisciplinarity'. The first contributor, Shaun Richards, teaches at an English university while the second, Eve Patten, teaches at an Irish university, so they bring different perspectives to the topic. Eve Patten shows how Ireland's literature encountered different treatment in England and in Ireland. As Shaun Richards points out, the development of Irish Literary Studies can be seen as a microcosm of the development of English studies more generally, but only up to a point.

Perhaps because teachers are still struggling to catch up, because such new perspectives are still being assessed institutionally and any claimed consensus is likely to produce scepticism and noisy dissent in Belfast, Derry, Dublin or Cork, not to mention Canberra, Columbia (New York) or South Bend (Indiana), there has until now been little attempt to put it all together and to confront the full political and social significance of doing Irish Studies in Britain or indeed elsewhere outside Ireland. The cultural materialists and sociologists of literature in the academy have long made us familiar with argument about the significance of politics, economics and class not just as a factor in literary production in the traditional British version English Literature but in the processes of reading and studying it and in the institutions responsible for teaching it. The contexts of Irish cultural polemic and the institutional processing of Ireland’s English Literature are beginning to attract the attention of Ph.D. students and younger scholars such as Conor McCarthy, author of Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992 (Dublin, 2000). But even though culture and dissidence are Ireland’s most durable exports we are still waiting for a fully comprehensive Irish version of Chris Baldick’s Social Mission of English Studies 1848-1932 (1983) or Alan Sinfield’s Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (1992). This is the more surprising when we recall that one of the first modern surveys of Irish writing in English was written in 1916 for the pioneering Cambridge History of English Literature by the Irish (but London-based) Inspector of Schools and man of letters A.P. Graves. Rather more dramatically, among the men the English shot in the same year were the teacher-poet Padraig Pearse and a poet who was also a university teacher of English, Thomas MacDonagh, Lecturer at University College Dublin, author of the pioneering study Literature in Ireland (1916). An interesting if unnerving development of the subversive potential of MacDonagh’s writing and teaching can be found in the extreme positions developed by the contemporary critic David Lloyd who has attempted to privilege the politicised writing of embattled republican internees at the expense of the politer letters represented by the poetry of Seamus Heaney or Michael Longley.

The different perspectives offered by the essays which follow can be seen as an attempt to reconsider the conceptual basis, the mission, and perhaps even the unsettling menace, of Irish Studies in relation to contemporary English Studies and higher education in these islands, now.

Norman Vance, Introduction, p. 4

ISBN 0 900232 24 2 28pp

 

Number 4 Second Reading: a Report Debating the Present State of English at AS and A Level and Identifying Priorities for Revising the English Subject Criteria, by Adrian Barlow

Publication date: November 2005

With new subject criteria for English about to be drawn up by QCA and revised specifications due to be developed by the awarding bodies in the coming year, the debate about the future direction of English at AS and A level is more urgent than ever.

Second Reading, the English Association’s newly published report, is an important contribution to this debate. Its findings are controversial and are designed to pave the way for a fresher approach to English teaching in the sixth form. The report has now been submitted to the Secretary of State for Education and to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

Part 1: Introduction

Part 1 sets out the context for the report and identifies key needs to be highlighted in the main body of the report:

The need to decide whether English at A level has been well served by being divided into three free-standing subjects or whether it should be treated as a single integrated subject through which teachers can select the most appropriate routes for their students
The need for substantial revision to the Subject Criteria (in particular the Assessment Objectives)
The need to rediscover a stronger emphasis on creativity in the teaching, studying and assessment of English at this level
The need to address issues of progression both from GCSE to AS/A level and from A level to English Studies in Higher Education
The need for Higher Education to make clear what knowledge and skills it expects students to possess at the start of an English degree course, and to ensure that new teachers are themselves equipped to teach these.
Part 2: Curriculum 2000 and A level English now

Part 2 reviews the current Subject Criteria for AS/A level English after the first five years of the Curriculum 2000 specifications. The review includes:

an analysis of the statistical evidence of student and centre participation before and since the introduction of Curriculum 2000
a commentary on the current Subject Criteria and of their impact on English departments, together with
an assessment of teacher experience of introducing and teaching the new specifications
a discussion of the impact of modular assessment on teaching and learning in English at AS/A level
a summary of issues of progression, transition and integration (from GCSE to AS / A level to HE), including the role of AEA and other proposals for identifying potential in high-achieving candidates.
Part 3: Redefining English and revising AS/A level Subject Criteria

Part 3 sets out the EA’s proposals for revision of the Subject Criteria. It begins with a statement of the need for a clear vision of English and argues the case for a single set of Subject Criteria covering both language and literature. It concludes by identifying and discussing the specific issues that need to be addressed in Subject Criteria revision, including:

relaxing the excessive prescriptiveness of current criteria and subject cores, particularly the assessment objectives
adopting the Tomlinson proposal that assessment should put more emphasis on sampling rather than aiming for complete coverage of all subject content
defining the place of an extended project within or alongside AS English and arguing the case for coursework and increased opportunities for creative approaches to literary and language study
redefining the importance of synoptic assessment and evaluating the lessons to be learned from the success of AEA English
emphasising the need for ‘functional English’ at post-16 to embrace the importance of independent learning and oral as well as written skills.
ISBN 0 900232 22 6 53pp

 

Number 3 Write or Wrong? Creative Writing in the Academy. Three Essays by Maureen Freely, Robert Hampson and Linda Anderson, edited by Maureen Moran
Publication date: 2005

The essays in this volume explore some of the challenges that academics, departments and institutions face with the increase of creative writing courses in UK higher education. Currently, both literary criticism and creative practice are subjects embraced by the term 'English'. The connections and discontinuities between these fields can be uncomfortable as well as stimulating as Maureen Freely, Robert Hampson and Linda Anderson point out. Their essays offer different perspectives on the construction of Creative Writing as an academic discpline and on assumptions that often underpin its new siting in the academy.

Creative Writing is now an established programme in the UK higher education sector. But where it goes from here, we can get right or very seriously wrong. Making the most of the subject means attending to the distinctiveness of creative writing as an intellectual discipline in its own right. It means protecting it from imposed standards and structures of teaching and research appropriate to other - but different - work in the arts and humanities. It means valuing its contribution to sustaining and enhancing the literary culture of our society, whatever contributions it might make in a adjunct way to critical activities. Above all it means debate - not assumption - about its methods, principles and purposes. The English Association offers these essays as an incentive to continue productive discussion about a subject which energizes our general culture and, in particular, university students for years to come.

Maureen Moran, Introduction, p. 7.

ISBN 0 900232 21 8 30pp

 

Number 2 Vital Signs: English in Medieval Studies in 21st Century Higher Education
Three essays by Wendy Scase, Richard K. Emmerson and Robert E. Bjork, edited by Elaine Treharne
Publication date: Thursday 4 April 2002

The position of Old, and to a lesser extent, Middle English has been under pressure from an expanding modern syllabus, increased student numbers and underinvestment in staff or infrastructure. Despite these pressures, however, Medieval Literature continues to flourish in many institutions in the British Isles, Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia. As the three papers in this collection illustrate, the future of Medieval Studies seems assured. There is, though, no room for complacency or stasisMedieval Studies must continue to adapt and evolve to meet the needs of new generations of students and to reach out to a wider audience.
Wendy Scase discusses the challenges facing scholars in English Departments, focussing on the need to provide interesting and accessible tools for students whose knowledge and appreciation of early literature and language is often very limited.
Richard Emmerson evaluates major scholarly publications in the field through the 1990s and early 2000s that assimilate disciplines, cross traditional chronological boundaries and elucidate new critical modes of analysis, and also looks beyond the academy to the public conception and reception of the medieval.
The relationship between professional scholars and 'popular medievalism' is one of Robert Bjork's focal points in his contribution: he illustrates the benefits of collaborative endeavours within a range of activities. His highlighting of the possibilities for medievalists, particularly with regard to 'outreach' gives much food for thought.

ISBN 0 900232 20 X 35pp

Number 1 Doctor! Doctor! Doctoral Studies in English in Twenty-first century Britain
Two Essays by Annabel Patterson and Judie Newman
The English Association Issues in English, Number 1, 2001.
Publication date: Thursday 3 May 2001

Help! Doctoral studies in the humanities in Britain are in trouble. One problem is getting students to finish their theses within the expected four years while maintaining traditional high standards. Another is what to do with the large number of doctoral students in the arts once they have got their degree.
The first pamphlet in a new series called Issues in English published by the English Association looks at these problems in two essays by distinguished academics: Annabel Patterson, Professor of English at Yale, and Judie Newman, Professor of American Literature at Nottingham.
Doctor! Doctor! Doctoral Studies in English in Twenty-first century Britain looks at the case for restricting access to the doctorate and changing its structure. It also considers reasons why the traditional doctorate and its stringent standards should be retained. Is it good training for anything other than life as an academic?
Doctor! Doctor! asks questions and canvasses solutions in the hope of sparking off discussion in the higher education community at large, as well as in the more restricted circle of English studies. It is especially timely in view of the pressure on departments to take more and more doctoral students (they mean money and status). It appears at a moment when quotas in the giving of student grants are actively under consideration by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. It is essential reading for those engaged in shaping postgraduate study in the arts.

ISBN: 0 900232 19 6 28pp

 

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