Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—W.B. Yeats “The Second Coming,” 1919.
My Emily Carr colleagues and I have be asked to come up with a new approach to teaching undergraduate English. After protracted debate among Critical and Cultural Studies faculty, Dr. Joy James and I agreed to undertake a pilot project to redesign English 101: Literature and Composition II (Poetry and Drama) for delivery in 200-student lecture format, as opposed to in small-group (20-25 student) seminars. This pilot project is scheduled to come online in Jan. 2010.
Because this new delivery model will involve a significant rethinking of English/Literary Studies in light of recent developments in digital media, educational technologies and social networking, I am proposing a series of blog posts with which to chronicle the process and research involved. This is the first in that series.
A Model
In broad strokes, the model Dr. James and I will be working with is built around three overarching principles:
- reliance on collaborative, participatory learning: we see this course developing through process-based collaborations among faculty and with students—team-teaching and team-learning.
- commitment to studying literature in context: drawing on the strenghts of Emily Carr faculty in cultural and media studies, as well as comparative literature, the course will help to situate literary studies within an art and design context.
- engagement with blended learning approach: to mitigate the potentially alienating effects of large lecture format, the course will augment lecture materials and break-sessions with an extended use of educational technologies and open source LMS (learning management system), Moodle, in conjunction with other social networking applications (e.g., facebook, flickr, twitter, etc.).
In the following series of posts, I will attempt to work through some of the ideas and issues that arise as we undertake this work. Because this is a pilot project, and one that many faculty and students inside and outside Emily Carr have a stake in, I thought I’d use this opportunity to reflect on the process and an emergent rationale. I’m hoping that some of the issues broached here will generate dialogue—through comments and other channels.
Caveat lector: This is a collaborative project. The thoughts expressed in these post owe a significant debt to collegueas at Emily Carr. In particular, I want to recognize my collaboration with Joy James, with whom I have the privilege of discussing the possibilities and pitfalls of the model. I apologise up front for failures of omission or ascription in the discussions that follow.
Reinventing English (again)
Before I launch into any sort of focused discussion, I thought I should acknowledge that this pilot project has not been undertaken lightly. The decision to experiment with a new form of delivery comes out of a lot of deliberation—and more than some trepidation. Thinking through possible transformations English or Literary Studies delivery models is a difficult, for many painful proposition, especially since it will involve dramatic challenges to our conception of the work of (teaching) English.
Nevertheless, the exigencies of a new era of budgetary restraint together with the opportunities brought about through recent changes to the mode and means of knowledge production—witness the popularity of terms such as KT (knowledge translation), KM (knowledge mobilizations) or LMS (learning management systems)—have put English professors in a position of rearticulating what we do. The door has opened for radical thinkg about how (and I would argue why) literary studies is taught. It is time again, for another reinvention of English. Dare we call ENGL2.0?
I say another reinvention of English, because I think it is important to see the most recent changes within a larger historical trajectory or trajectories. Literary historians such Gauri Viswanathan (1989) Edward Said (1993), John Guillory (1995) have pointed to the role literature has played in the development and debate of empire. Closer to home, researchers such as Frank Davey, Robert Lecker, Heather Murray, Peter Dickinson, again just to name a few, have looked at the particularities of local cultures and/or nationalisms have played in the development of what we call English. This is a massive field and there are many others who have a lot more to say about it than I do. I raise the point because, simply because I think it is important to recognize from the outset that English is always already a contested site and the perhaps its most characteristic feature—after all that has been said about canons—is its resilience.
There is more to say here about the history of English seminars and a genre-based approach but I will leave it for others.
The TED Commandments
As a point of beginning, I’d like to propose consideration of the following TED Commandments-Rules Every Speaker Needs to Know, from the wildly successful TED Talks.
Admitedly this puts initial emphasis on the lecturer, rather than the more fashionable “guide on the side,” as is the focus of many current eLearning discusions. With that in mind, I’d like to suggest that since we are talking about using our expertise to reconsider or transform a field of study, English, and that the model proposed is a lecture model, this might not be a bad place to begin.
For now, until my next post, I want to leave these points hanging. Thanks to Tim Longhurst for so thoughtfully transcribing them.
- Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick
- Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
- Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion
- Thou Shalt Tell a Story
- Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Skae of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy
- Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
- Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desparate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
- Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
- Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
- Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee
More to come.
