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AT A particularly trying moment in our department's five-year process of curriculum revision, my department chair quipped with some exasperation, "We are a church in a state of perpetual reformation." Now, as the undergraduate director charged with implementing the revision that I had guided as curriculum committee chair, I have discovered the deep and abiding truth of his quip. I've even come to accept that perpetual reformation is good and necessary, if exhausting.
The English department at Louisiana State University, in its programs and faculty, is huge: we have more than one hundred full-time faculty members; we offer an undergraduate major with three concentrations and the MA, MFA, and PhD degrees; and we teach courses in literature, writing, rhetoric, literary and cultural theory, popular culture, film, folklore, and linguistics. With such a large faculty and so many programs, few faculty members understand how their areas of teaching and research relate to those of their colleagues. Only through thinking and rethinking our curriculum can colleagues find the words to explain to students, parents, and administrators the goals of our shared work. More important, only through this often messy process will colleagues be spurred to adopt these goals in their teaching. To illustrate the necessity and value of perpetual reformation, I would like to spotlight one site where our new curriculum (formally adopted in 1995) calls us toward further change: the juncture between the undergraduate and graduate curricula. Looking at this site will also illustrate the benefits of adopting a document that articulates curricular goals.
In January 1998, the Graduate Programs Assessment Committee began to review our graduate curriculum in the light of a decline in applications, the consequent decline in graduate seminar enrollments, and the pattern of placement of our PhD graduates in jobs emphasizing teaching over research. In early deliberations, the committee proposed (sensibly enough) to eliminate the duplication of material taught in undergraduate courses and graduate seminars and thus to teach both curricula more economically by replacing some graduate seminars with senior-level undergraduate courses. The committee presumed that graduate students would be able to take advanced surveys of British and American literature in courses that combined advanced undergraduates with beginning graduate students; then second- and third-year graduate students could take true graduate seminars in special topics. What this well-meaning committee had forgotten, however, was the sequencing of courses in the new undergraduate curriculum--a sequence that they had adopted by a vote only four years earlier:
2000-level courses are introductions designed to teach basic skills of reading and writing about texts (e.g., Critical Strategies)
3000-level courses are surveys that provide students with an overview of a historical period of literature, a genre, or an approach to literary study (e.g., British Literature I: The Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Eighteenth Century)
4000-level courses are special topics courses, designed to enable students to study a topic in depth (e.g., The Harlem Renaissance; Film and Gender; Beowulf; or Witches, Indians, and Slaves in Early American Literature)
This coherent sequencing of courses was itself based on a document that initiated our curriculum revision process in 1990, "The Goals and Objectives for the English Curriculum" (see app.). Over the past nine years, I have found this document, which has the authority of an overwhelmingly positive faculty vote, to be extremely valuable: it guided our redesign of courses during the curriculum revision process; once the revision was adopted, it has enabled us to explain what we do in strategic planning reports sent to administrators; it provides new faculty members with a framework for designing syllabi for individual courses; and it is the basis on which we plan to assess our students' learning.
Although administrators--who, like me, regularly review this document with new teachers, recall it to refocus confused committee meetings, or quote it in reports to the upper administration--may remember its language, most of my colleagues, buried under stacks of ungraded papers and harried by research deadlines, do not remember what they approved nine years ago. Obviously, when the Graduate Programs Assessment Committee proposed that graduate students take advanced surveys in senior-level undergraduate courses, they did not remember either the structure of undergraduate course sequencing or the curricular goals on which that structure was based. Furthermore, they did not remember that, although the graduate curriculum has no document defining its goals, a coherent sequence of learning is implicit in its course numbering. All 70-- courses are supposed to be period surveys, while all 79-- courses are supposed to be special topics seminars. Over the years, however, faculty members have fallen into the practice of offering special topics regardless of the seminar number.
Thus undergraduate English majors gain an overview of British and American literature through a series of 3000-level courses, while graduate students are supposed to take advanced surveys in courses numbered 70--. Only through the messy and confusing process of defining a problem in graduate student preparation, considering a possible solution, and discovering that this solution was a dead end did the Graduate Programs Assessment Committee rediscover not only the goals of the undergraduate curriculum and its sequencing of courses but also the goals and sequencing implicit in the current graduate curriculum--goals that have yet to be fully articulated by the faculty.
This moment of conflict between the needs of the graduate and undergraduate curricula is instructive in two ways. First, it demonstrates the usefulness of faculty-generated documents that define curricular goals. Our curriculum steering committee initiated the revision process in 1990 by taking an entire semester to compose the goals document, a decision that sparked objections from several colleagues who were suspicious of bureaucratic prose and eager to get on to the revision of specific courses. Now, however, because our new undergraduate curriculum has clearly stated goals and objectives that provide a coherent structure for student learning and that have the authority of a faculty vote, we have a rationale for resisting financial pressures to teach more cheaply by combining advanced undergraduates and new graduate students in the same courses.
Second, this amount of conflict between graduate and undergraduate curricula illustrates the need for perpetual reformation. Or, since chairing an English department is frequently compared to herding cats, let me change my metaphor: this moment of conflict illustrates the need for every cat to scratch and piss in the litter box before Miss Puss becomes a reliable box user. Only by repeatedly scratching around in the mess of document revision and course review will faculty members become reliable users of curricular objectives. Committees may change catalog descriptions, course sequences, and even program design, but no real change occurs until faculty members incorporate the stated curricular goals into their syllabus designs, book choices, and classroom practices. My colleagues will use only what smells and feels like something that bears the marks of their ownership.
Having rediscovered the rationale for course sequencing in both the graduate and undergraduate curricula, the Graduate Programs Assessment Committee has now decided to affirm and enforce the two-tiered structure of graduate courses: advanced surveys numbered 70-- and special topics seminars numbered 79--. But would not a strict enforcement of this structure duplicate faculty work, requiring professors to teach surveys at the 3000 and the 7000 levels, and could we reliably staff both programs? Since graduate and undergraduate programs draw on the same faculty members and work with the same limited budget, we will have to solve this problem together. Furthermore, ensuring that students have an adequate overview of British and American literature is a problem common to both programs.
At the core of the undergraduate concentrations in literature and creative writing are four 3000-level courses designed to provide students with this overview of British and American literature. These courses are also popular with a variety of students seeking to fulfill general education literature or humanities requirements--non-English majors from the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Basic Sciences, English education majors, mass communication majors, and a scattering of majors from the Colleges of Business, Agriculture, Music, Design, and Engineering. Naturally, students from this wide range of majors have a wide range of abilities. To cope with this diverse student population, some professors have proposed creating separate sections of these courses for English majors or instituting prerequisites, but the prevailing opinion is populist: we should teach any student who wants an overview of the literature in their language, and we should not segregate English majors, who are not always the best students by any means, from non-English majors, some of whom are first-rate. Besides, we can use these courses to recruit more English majors.
According to our rationale for the undergraduate course structure, all 3000-level courses provide an overview, most often of literary history. Courses that precede them at the 2000 level are supposed to foster direct engagement between student and text in order to teach the arts of interpretation. Courses that follow them at the 4000 level are supposed to require student research about a special topic. Teaching beginning students reading and writing competencies requires smaller classes that foster question and dialogue, and teaching a special topic at the senior level can offer students the experience of a seminar. But most faculty members teach literary history through lectures designed to convey information. Thus in our 3000-level survey courses, we have begun to experiment with large-enrollment classes--to the delight of upper administrators, always eager to teach more students with fewer faculty members, but to the dismay of some colleagues, who fear the slippery-slope slide to large, impersonal lectures with a consequent reduction of faculty positions. Some sections of these experimental survey courses are allowed to enroll up to eighty students and are taught by a professor with a graduate teaching assistant. By teaching large-enrollment sections at the 3000 level, where the pedagogical goal of providing an overview seems appropriate to the lecture format, we hope to be able to offer small seminars for majors at the 4000 level. Again, our goals document and our rationale for course structure have allowed us, not the upper administration, to determine where to experiment with teaching more students with fewer faculty members.
In addition to the goal of teaching our curriculum more efficiently, a second goal of this experiment is to provide a training ground in the teaching of literature for our graduate students, a goal shared by the new Graduate Program Assessment Committee. Focusing on the placement data of recent PhDs, the committee has set out to improve our graduate students' marketability by improving their teaching credentials. The committee is considering a seminar in the analysis and evaluation of literary study, in which graduate teaching assistants will study pedagogical theory and practice, and a one-hour pedagogy tutorial, which will provide mentors for GTAs teaching their first literature courses.
Perhaps this confluence of goals might provide a solution to the conflict between the undergraduate program's need to teach survey courses at the 3000 level and the graduate program's need to staff 7000-level advanced surveys. Graduate students assigned to assist in teaching large-enrollment sections of the 3000-level courses have a perfect opportunity to survey the range of British and American literature. Because they are required to guide student discussion, grade half of the papers and exams, and prepare a few lectures in areas in which they have expertise, these GTAs must master the material of the survey course to which they are assigned. Furthermore, they perform these duties under the direction of a professorial faculty mentor who monitors their preparation and in-class performance and thus is in an excellent position to write letters of recommendation that specifically address the graduate student's teaching credentials.
The neatness of this solution seems too good to be true, and maybe it is. As we all know, courses intended to survey wide swaths of British or American literature are among the hardest to teach. They require inexperienced undergraduates to read and comprehend very difficult texts, for example, book 3 of The Faerie Queene or "Sailing to Byzantium"; to recognize the generic conventions that structure these texts; to place these texts in appropriate social, religious, economic, and political contexts; and to develop the sophistication to write about text, genre, and context. Furthermore, students must accomplish these course objectives (all neatly defined in our goals document) very quickly because, after one or two lectures, they must move on to Oroonoko or To the Lighthouse and beyond to complete the syllabus by the end of the semester. Add to these endemic constraints a student population that ranges from the avid readers who are discovering a brave new world of literature to the hapless souls who need a 9:30 Monday, Wednesday, Friday general education humanities course because that is the only time slot they can fit in between their required marketing courses and their job at Tires-R-Us. Add to this widely varied student population a course size of eighty and a job description for the professor that includes mentoring graduate students who are teaching literature for the first time and who are supposed to be expanding their knowledge of the range of British and American literature.
As impossible as this teaching situation seems, it has, in my utopian imagination, the potential to enliven both our graduate and undergraduate programs. Let me outline some realities and a visionary scenario. For professors in our department, graduate teaching carries far more cachet than does undergraduate teaching. Professors compete to teach graduate seminars, but they seldom attend departmental workshops on pedagogy. Because of the publication pressures of a Research I university and the reward system that valorizes research over teaching, professors have little incentive to reimagine their lower-division teaching or to experiment with new pedagogies. To some colleagues, the temptation to stand in front of a class--no matter how small--and lecture is irresistible.
Here endeth reality; here begineth utopian fantasy. What if teaching undergraduates became part of a professor's graduate teaching? What if the professor chose his or her own teaching assistant, a graduate student eager to learn from a mentor, perhaps even from his or her major professor? What if this GTA, fresh from a seminar on the analysis and evaluation of literary study and simultaneously enrolled in a pedagogy tutorial, were present in the professor's undergraduate class every day? (Nothing like a knowledgeable audience to keep you on your toes.) What if the professor and GTA collaborated on planning the syllabus, preparing exams, designing writing assignments, and implementing some of the pedagogical ideas discussed in the seminar and tutorial? What if all professors and GTAs teaching these courses met regularly to discuss innovations proposed by computer-savvy junior faculty members and graduate students--innovations such as linking all the sections of a given course through a home page containing a set text, discussion questions for e-mail exchange, and hypertext links to illustrations, ancillary texts, and critical essays? Might not this kind of collaboration rekindle the professor's interest in undergraduate teaching? Would not the professor's lectures, the graduate student's preparation for in-class discussion and individual conferences, and even the informal professor-GTA exchanges expand and deepen the graduate student's knowledge of the range of British and American literature?
At another particularly trying moment in our five-year curriculum revision process, my department chair (a different one) quipped, "Sometimes, I think that you are the most naive person I have ever known." Yet again, I have learned the deep and abiding truth in a chairman's off-hand quip. Nevertheless, I am proposing my visionary scenario to the Graduate Programs Assessment Committee for two reasons. First, it might work. Second, discussing my scenario will require more faculty members to rethink our curricular goals--to relearn the ones we've already stated and perhaps to revise them to meet more nearly the needs of both graduate and undergraduate students. This kind of perpetual reformation is the only feasible option I see for the twenty-first century.
The author is Alumni Professor of English and Director, Undergraduate Studies, at Louisiana State University and A&M College. This paper was presented at the 1999 ADE Summer Seminar West, hosted by Montana State University, Bozeman, and the University of Montana in Polson, Montana.
Foundation
We define the subject of our curriculum thus: how English-speaking peoples have imagined and represented themselves and their cultures in language.
Although most of our courses emphasize written texts, some also consider language in oral and visual texts. Although our province is, strictly speaking, the English language, we also teach literature in translation as it affects English-speaking cultures. So, although our courses and specializations may vary widely, they all converge in creating, interpreting, and analyzing texts in English. This is our common ground.
We can represent this common ground in four apparently simple assertions:
Texts are authored.
Texts have audiences.
Texts use the formal properties of language.
Texts exist within contexts.
We know, however, that in any act of writing, interpretation, or analysis these attributes of texts interact simultaneously in complex ways. This complex process of interaction is the foundation of all our courses.
Sharing this common ground, we can define a common goal: to help students become competent and responsible readers and writers through attending to the formal properties of language that allow texts to mean and to move emotions, through understanding how context limits and enables meaning, and through recognizing the ethical dimensions of the use of language.
Program Objectives
We meet our goal through three interrelated objectives: helping students
(1) write and communicate,
(2) read and comprehend, and
(3) analyze critically the process of writing and reading.
Objectives for the Rhetoric/Composition Program
Our goal is to offer a sequential program that helps students become better writers. Students will develop rhetorical strategies while attaining basic competencies. More specifically, at the end of the program, students should be able
to identify, analyze, and address particular audiences,
to adopt a voice appropriate to purpose and audience,
to write a text with a limited but significant controlling thesis which addresses the task,
to support that thesis with sound reasoning and specific evidence to accomplish the purpose for writing,
to supplement personal observation and experience by locating and using source material and to avoid serious grammatical, mechanical, and spelling errors.
While the rhetoric/composition program focuses on developing students' writing abilities, it simultaneously teaches them to read more critically their own texts as well as the texts of others. Students will develop competency in reading critically in order to analyze models of good writing, to find subject matter for writing practice, to marshal evidence for their own writing, and to detect fallacious reasoning.
Students should also be able to think about the process of writing itself--its demands, its contexts, and its ethics. They should be able to identify the demands of a given writing task and, on the basis of these specific demands, to choose among a variety of writing processes for planning, drafting, revising, and editing. They should begin to understand that their writing is embedded in larger cultural contexts through stylistics and rhetoric. They should recognize their obligation to report facts accurately, to quote accurately, and to use source material fairly in accordance with recognized conventions of citation.
Objectives for Introductory Literature Courses
Introductory literature courses must serve the needs of prospective English majors and minors, liberal arts majors, and students majoring in more scientific or technical fields. Each course will delimit its own subject matter, which students will be expected to learn. Yet fundamental objectives in reading, writing, and critical analysis are common to all these offerings.
Since reading is a major focus of these courses, students will practice a variety of interrelated reading and interpretive skills. More specifically, upon completion of their requirements in introductory literature courses, students should be able
to paraphrase passages accurately,
to read closely in order to explicate the literal and figurative meanings of passages,
to identify larger themes, structures, and patterns in a literary work as a whole,
to begin to relate a literary work to relevant discursive contexts, such as generic conventions and literary traditions, and
to begin to understand the larger cultural contexts of a literary work, both diachronic and synchronic.
These courses should further develop students' writing in coordination with the objectives of the rhetoric/composition program. Students should write frequently to communicate their critical and interpretive insights about literary texts. Their writing should move beyond merely retelling a story, into analysis, interpretation, and argumentation.
Students should also think about the process of reading itself. They should be able to identify and use terms basic to literary interpretation and to be aware that a variety of methodologies may be used to analyze texts.
Objectives for the Undergraduate Major
The structure of the curriculum for English majors should balance breadth and depth of knowledge. Regardless of their concentration, majors should be proficient in skills fundamental to participation in linguistic culture and should have a basic knowledge of the range of writing in English. They will study one area, their chosen concentration, in more depth. While further developing skills practiced in composition and introductory literature courses, the curriculum should move majors toward participating in the complex interactions through which texts both shape and reflect culture.
English majors should be proficient writers, able
to communicate with a generally educated audience or an audience with specialized training in the study of literature and language;
to revise and edit others' and their own writing;
to articulate rhetorical issues of voice, form or genre, and audience, as well as issues of content;
to distinguish among styles; and
to locate commentary on texts, quote published material, and document their borrowings according to conventions of publication.
They should be skilled readers, able
to paraphrase accurately and understand, with the help of scholarly notes, passages from literature beyond the confines of their immediate experience, for example, a soliloquy by Shakespeare, a passage from James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, or the dialogue in a short story by Zora Neale Hurston;
to read closely with attention to nuances of meaning and form, with sophistication that does not limit them to literal meanings, and with sensitivity that does not violate literal meanings;
to relate patterns, structures, and themes into an interpretation of an entire work;
to identify basic conventions of such modes as pastoral and satire, of such genres as epic and tragedy, of such forms as sonnet and short story; and
to summon those basic contexts--historical, social, religious, economic, and/or literary--which enable reading of a given text.
They should also be knowledgeable readers, having read
works in the traditional canon of British and American literature, and
works offering perspectives not always included in the traditional canon--such as works by women, African Americans, other ethnic and racial minorities, and Anglophone authors beyond Great Britain and the United States.
They should begin to develop a sophistication of critical analysis that will lead them
to see significant connections and differences between texts, styles, genres and modes, authors, periods of literary history, literary cultures, etc.;
to recognize some of the complex ways in which text and context interact;
to discover their bases for judging the value or importance of a text;
to be aware of the processes of canon formation; and
to recognize a range of critical approaches used for interpreting texts.
Through their writing, reading, and thinking about these processes, English majors should come to see themselves as shaping and sustaining the literary culture they study.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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