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FOR the Point of View column on the final page of the 4 June 1999 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, two Amherst professors wrote an essay entitled "If It Please the Class." Purporting to be "a useful guide for the perplexed academician" in "these perilous times in the world of academe," the piece offers rules for classroom behavior designed to help the professor "connect" with today's students. Among the tidbits are, "Don't make allusions to famous events in antiquity. Likewise, presume absolutely no knowledge of any great literature; otherwise, you will at best fail to connect, and at worst alienate students with your respect for dead white males." Under "reading," the tongue-in-cheek advice is "Don't assign any. Consider substituting cereal boxes or bus-shelter advertisements."
Despite the broad and rather desperate satire, the essay does point to issues implicit in the question of what we will teach and how we will teach it in the classrooms of the new century. Within the last decade most English departments have altered curricula to accommodate the explosion of the canon, the emphasis on cultural studies, the arrival of new technology in writing and literature classrooms, and the varied learning styles of students. If your department resembles mine, however, many of these changes have been patches--additions or, less frequently, cuts--rather than a substantial holistic revisioning of what we are about.
An English department like Lehigh's--with 17 faculty members, 120 undergraduate majors, 55 graduate students, and a two-semester freshman writing requirement for all the university's 1,100 incoming students--faces these issues on both undergraduate and graduate levels. We must ready graduate students to teach an altered curriculum without compromising their doctoral education.
Lehigh's department was forced to confront the issue of curriculum head-on a few years go when a change in course credit hours (from three-credit courses to four-credit courses) and subsequently in faculty teaching load (from a three-two teaching load to a two-two teaching load) reduced departmental course offerings by one-fifth.
This reduction meant that, willy-nilly, we had to rethink the curriculum from the ground up. For years our departmental tree of courses had been sprouting new branches, but as we had added courses in multicultural literature, literary theory, film, and postmodern fiction, we rarely pruned the original branches. Our catalog was swollen with courses that, even with our old teaching loads, could be taught only once every two or three years. With the new four-course load for faculty members and a nine-course major for undergraduates, many of these courses would be eliminated or would become infrequently taught electives.
Another problem also demanded our attention. In an effort to give our senior majors a capstone experience, a course just for them that would not be shared by our graduate students (as many of our 300-level courses are), we had created a required senior seminar that allowed senior English majors to use the skills they had learned by working with a faculty member on a literary problem. After three or four faculty members had taught these appealing fifteen-student seminars, they began to confer and to agree that our senior majors had too few skills to pursue the kind of problem-oriented course we had envisioned. Close reading, textual analysis informed by critical theory, multiple perspectives, and library research seemed new ideas to many of the students, despite their high grades in earlier literature courses.
At first we blamed one another for not providing the appropriate training in the Shakespeare course or the American literature survey. But we soon realized that our students had understood our courses as knowledge based and not skill based. Textual analysis of a Shakespeare play applied only to that play. Few students saw a connection between the work they did with Shakespeare and what they were to do with a Hawthorne short story or a postmodern novel. We had expected students to acquire certain skills, but we frequently had not explained our expectations nor had we emphasized these skills or told students why they were important.
Students decoded our historically based curriculum--required English literature and American literature surveys, required courses in Shakespeare and either Chaucer or Milton, and so on--as courses in which they were to read important texts and acquire as much information as possible about them. Along the way, they expected to learn to write better: that's what English majors could claim, after all--to be good writers. They were surprised to be asked, in their capstone seminar, to define a problem and then to find ways to address it.
It was tempting to abandon the problem-oriented senior seminar. But in the face of the reduction in the number of courses we could offer, we decided, after long debate, to reframe our curriculum to prepare our students better for such a course. Without completely giving up a historical core--which we regard as the baby--we chose to frame that core with courses emphasizing skills needed to work with any texts, rather than to foreground a set of particular, related texts. We created a gateway skills course, the first course most of our majors take. The course is to be rotated among department members, each of whom will select the particular texts his or her seminar will examine:
Working with Texts aims to foster a series of skills that we all need in order to think about any literature we encounter. These skills or attitudes include the capacity to read closely, attending to the form, not just the summarizable content, of texts; the capacity to make arguments about texts, supporting these arguments with textual evidence and analytical prose; the capacity to research what others have thought about texts; the capacity to engage with others' ideas, whether generated by critics or by each other in class. By challenging our unexamined assumptions and provoking us to ask more varied and sophisticated questions of the texts we read, this course hopes to help us become more analytical thinkers, capable of seeing what arguments particular texts may be making and of making our own arguments about texts.
After this gateway course, English majors choose four courses from four different historical periods. In these courses, which are somewhat revised but not themselves new, we try to make clear that we are using the skills of literary analysis to read the culture and the texts of particular historical moments. In addition to these historically based courses, students choose three electives, among which are survey courses and courses in Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, postmodernism, African American literature, and so on, and complete one of the senior seminars described above.
The addition of new areas of focus and new texts had long ago prevented any true coverage in the old curriculum, though the required surveys had offered the illusion of coverage. In our new curriculum, we have abandoned the illusion.
By foregrounding the skills they must learn, we want to empower students to deal with texts old and new, literary and nonliterary. As we emphasize the how, we continue to present students with a selection of texts that may be read for their aesthetic and cultural value and for pleasure. The message, we hope, is not that these are the texts but that these are important and influential texts and that learning to work with them will enable students to work with any text. If our hopes are realized, our students will be able to read, with awareness of how what they read functions, cereal boxes and bus-shelter advertisements as well as Chaucer, Austen, Ellison, and Amis.
Foregrounding the how rather than the what, however, demands different teaching strategies. The most common classroom sentence becomes an interrogative rather than a declarative. Instead of offering a diluted version of graduate school seminar materials to undergraduates, teachers must be prepared to engage students in inquiry, to help students expand their tolerance of and appreciation for ambiguity and lack of closure, and to lead students toward a discerning use of the varied technologies available to them for retrieving information and texts.
What does this mean for graduate education? To be successful in preparing graduate students for the next century's classrooms, programs like Lehigh's--which aims to prepare graduate students to teach in two-year or four-year programs, in community or junior colleges and liberal arts colleges--must give more attention to pedagogy, without throwing out an emphasis on mastering a body of texts and on original research. (A survey of PhDs in English ten years after their degree reported that the recommendation to English departments offered most frequently by those employed in academia was "teach how to teach." The need for pedagogical training ranked above "downsize," "provide interdisciplinarity," and "help with publishing" [Nerad and Cerny 51].) This may sound like another version of the unpruned undergraduate tree--more courses sprouting without control. Such unchecked growth would not be unusual. Graduate training has, of course, been demanding more of graduate students--participation in conferences, publication in refereed journals, instruction of a range of courses, service on departmental committees--for years. Students have metamorphosed into apprentices, available to take up the slack for us, to do the tasks we are too busy or too few to do ourselves. In an ideal scenario, a pedagogical emphasis would lighten the burden of graduate students by helping them with work they must otherwise learn to do unaided.
We are experimenting with a series of one-credit pedagogical courses, which graduate students can elect at any time during their graduate school careers. Students selected as teaching fellows at Lehigh are required, during the first semester of their appointment, to take a two-credit course in theories of writing and a one-credit practicum that focuses on pedagogical strategies. All other pedagogical courses are voluntary (and paid for within our tuition remission arrangements for our teaching fellows). Most of our students elect to take one or more of these courses in pedagogy. At the moment, our department offers three pedagogical options: a course in teaching in the computer classroom (the semester this course is elected or the semester that follows, the graduate student teaches in a computer classroom); a course in teaching ESL (once this course is completed the graduate student may elect to teach a composition section designed for ESL students); and an apprentice teaching arrangement in which the graduate student works closely with a faculty member in a particular course, planning the syllabus and assignments, doing some evaluation of papers and exams, teaching at least two sessions of the course, holding office hours, and consulting on the final grade assignments. This course is usually elected by the few graduate students who have not been teaching fellows, but it is also popular with teaching fellows, who use it to get experience with teaching a literature course and as a way of solidifying their preparation in a particular area of the curriculum before their exams or for their dissertation.
Another option, being tried for the first time this year, is to have senior teaching fellows create and teach a course outside the freshman program under the supervision of a faculty mentor. In this new program, instead of the student's apprenticing in the faculty member's course, the faculty member acts as an adviser on the design and implementation of the graduate student's course, with occasional visits and consultation.
One final possibility that we are cautiously exploring is full-credit graduate courses that emphasize the pedagogical and may be taken as part of a student's regular graduate program. Last fall, a colleague offered a course entitled Teaching the Early British Literature Survey. Using the Norton anthology as its primary text, the course focused on how to select readings, prepare a syllabus from an anthology, select desirable or necessary supplements to the anthology, work with the language of medieval and early modern texts, present material in ways accessible to undergraduate students, decide on secondary materials that would be helpful to teachers and to their students, craft research assignments within the scope of the course, and foster student inquiry about the periods and their texts. The course took as its premise that the survey course should be more than a rushed journey through high-spot texts, in which students take notes on the information the teacher provides. The graduate students who elected it were enthusiastic about the way it allowed them to talk both about teaching and about the texts themselves, and several noted that it was excellent background preparation for exams in the medieval and early modern period.
Refocusing our curriculum did not radically change what we do, in large part because we believe in its value. But it was important for us to say collectively what we valued. We are learning to present material in new ways and to articulate more clearly what we hope students will learn and why. The process of working through these changes, especially the development of shared courses, has had a positive effect on our department. Though we all have lost a course or two that used to be offered in some regular rotation, the opportunity to choose our own materials when teaching the sophomore text seminar and the senior problem-based seminar means that we can often work with our favorite texts in a differently shaped course. We talk more to one another about how these courses are working, understand one another better, and trust one another more. The graduate pedagogy seminars--usually small and graded only as pass or fail--seem to diminish competitiveness among the graduate students. Within those courses, we all feel part of a collective enterprise--to teach better--and faculty members say that they know more than before about the students and the direction of their work.
Ours is not a model that all departments could or should follow. But no matter what the shape of the curriculum that emerges, I believe that the communal process of reexamining curricular goals has its own value. Our faculty members can talk about what we are doing as a department and why (the result of many long sessions in which we debated each change and its rationale). As chair I feel able to speak confidently in the name of the department to administrators and outside evaluators.
Because we can explain what we are doing and why, our revised curriculum has been well received. We have been given replacements for our retiring faculty members and a new faculty line and have been allowed to create the position of senior teaching fellow. Almost all our new PhDs have academic jobs. We hope we are flexible enough to teach effectively in the classrooms of the next century.
The author is Professor of English and Chair, Department of English, at Lehigh University. This paper was presented at the 1999 ADE Summer Seminar East, hosted by Purchase College, State University of New York, in Rye, New York.
I would like to thank my colleague Barry Kroll for his constructive suggestions about the final draft of this essay.
Douglas, Lawrence, and Alexander George. "If It Please the Class . . ." Chronicle of Higher Education 4 June 1999: A60.
Nerad, Maresi, and Joseph Cerny. "From Rumors to Facts: Career Outcomes of English PhDs." ADE Bulletin 124 (1999): 43-55. [Show Article]
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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