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Wordplay Issue 3 • April 2010 ISSN 2040-6754 The Magazine of the English Subject Centre April 2010 • Issue 3 Undergraduate English: what the students say The implied aesthetic Morag Shiach: teaching of English teaching as a shared practice Transforming professional writing From student to lecturer at UEA with market-savvy students ISSN 2040-6754 WordPlay Issue 3 • April 2010 ISSN 2040-6754 WordPlay is published twice a year by the English Subject Centre, part of the Subject Network of the Higher Education Academy. The English Subject Centre provides many different kinds of help to lecturers in English literature, Creative Writing and English language. Details of all of our activities are available on our website www.english.heacademy.ac.uk Inside WordPlay you will fi nd articles on a wide range of English-related topics as well as updates on English Subject Centre work, important developments in the discipline and across higher education. The next issue will appear in October 2010. We welcome contributions. If you would like to submit an article (of between 300 and 2,500 words), propose a book or software review (perhaps a textbook review by one of your students) or respond in a letter to an article published in WordPlay, please contact the editor, Nicole King ([email protected]). Views expressed in WordPlay are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the English Subject Centre. Website links are active at the time of going to press. You can keep in touch with the English Subject Centre by subscribing to our e-mail list, www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/ english-heacademy.html, coming to our workshops and other events or exploring our website. WordPlay is distributed to English, Creative Writing and English language departments across the UK and is also available online at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/wordplay. If you would like extra copies, please e-mail [email protected] The English Subject Centre Royal Holloway, University of London Egham TW20 0EX T 01784 443221 Is WordPlay F 01784 470684 E [email protected] What You Want? www.english.heacademy.ac.uk We’re thinking about whether to continue printing WordPlay next year. Tell us what WordPlay means to you by completing a short online survey available at The English Subject Centre Staff www.surveymonkey.com/wordplaysurvey Jane Gawthrope Manager You could win £50 in gift vouchers! Jonathan Gibson Academic Co-ordinator Nicole King Academic Co-ordinator Ben Knights Director Brett Lucas Website Developer and Learning Technologist Rebecca Price Administrator Candice Satchwell Liaison Offi cer for HE in FE Carolyne Wishart Administrative Assistant Design: John Gittins Student Voices 06 22 36 40 Starters Creative Pedagogies 02 Welcome 30 Here when you want them: statistics on English and Creative Writing 03 Events Calendar 36 Odour of Chrysanthemums: a text in process 04 IT Works! 42 Bologna: 10 years on Features 06 Student Voices: a report on the Student Perspective experience of studying English in the UK 44 Meet our student Bloggers! 14 Teaching as a shared practice: an interview with Morag Shiach Book Reviews 18 The Anxiety of Infl uence: inside UEA’s 48 Teaching North American Environmental Literature Creative Writing MA 49 A History of English Literature, 2nd edition 22 The Implied Aesthetic of English Teaching 26 Not more of the same: a modern twist on professional writing Endnotes 50 Desert Island Texts 52 The Last Word Recycle when you have fi nished with this publication please pass it on to a colleague or student or recycle it appropriately. WordPlay • Issue 3 • April 2010 01 Welcome Nicole King As I write this Welcome spring is still My interview with Morag Shiach, a Professor and Vice Principal hesitating. The clocks have moved at Queen Mary, University of London, concurs with the ideas forward, the daffodils have made it, but and data presented by Knights and Hodgson. She is a fi rm gloves, boots and woolly jumpers are still believer in team-teaching and using technology to extend the in rotation. However it is the economic opportunities we have to interact with our students. Given climate of higher education that has the many different ways of reading and the different types of our full attention. Many universities are texts we place in front of students, they can be understandably facing funding cuts and recruitment wrong-footed by the diverse reading skills we expect them to freezes while voluntary redundancy cultivate and deploy in any given term. She told me, ‘I think we packages are quietly proffered. Through it all the work of teaching underestimate the complexity of some of the core things that we and learning continues, as it must. At this time of year, amidst the ask students to do.’ regular teaching, there will be review sessions, dissertations to Andrew Cowan, once a student on the University of East Anglia’s complete and, of course, the exam period is just around the corner. Creative Writing MA programme and now convener of its MA So it is perhaps appropriate, given the season and the current fi scal in Prose Fiction, provides a retrospective account of his student realities, that with this issue of WordPlay we turn our attention to experience and how it affects the work he does at UEA as a the student experience which we have chosen to approach from member of staff. His article highlights some of the tensions several different angles in each of our featured articles. between the craft and business side of Creative Writing that We think our lead article, ‘Student Voices,’ contains such many MA programmes wrestle with. Christina Bunce, who is important commentaries from students that we have given it course leader for the MA in Professional Writing at University extra space. It is an excerpt from a report the Subject Centre College Falmouth, profi les her programme in ‘Not more of the commissioned partially in response to requests we have received same: a modern twist on professional writing’ and describes how from many departments of English and Creative Writing for data Falmouth is succeeding with its students by adopting a brazenly that goes beyond the National Student Survey. Based on focus market-focused approach. groups at six universities, led by John Hodgson (University of The student experience is captured elsewhere in WordPlay too – the West of England), the result is a rich compilation of student you may wish to read about the latest developments regarding experience across a number of broad topics and themes such the Bologna Process for making national systems of higher as assessment, feedback and progression. Students were also education across Europe more compatible (p. 42). Sean Matthews asked about their reading habits and were given the opportunity reports on his completed Subject Centre mini-project, a website to comment on how gender shapes classroom discussion, given that introduces genetic criticism using D H Lawrence’s ‘Odour of that only 28% of undergraduate English and Creative Writing Chrysanthemums.’ In ‘Here when you want them’ Subject Centre students are male. One conclusion that Hodgson reaches is that Manager Jane Gawthrope crunches the numbers for all of you all students interviewed, whether at pre- or post-92 universities, who are interested in what the statistics say about English and ‘encounter at university a practice of literary study which differs Creative Writing. from their previous experience, which may not be made explicit, and which somehow has to be grasped.’ Finally, a serious question: is WordPlay what you want? We want to make sure we’re providing the features and articles that matter The implicit nature of English teaching is a theme picked up by and which interest you. As a cost-saving measure we are also our Director Ben Knights in his article ‘The Implied Aesthetic thinking about whether to continue printing WordPlay or simply of English Teaching.’ He tackles the ‘tacit rules and hidden providing it online and we would like to hear your opinion. Tell us networks’ which many students struggle to access over the what WordPlay means to you by completing a very short online course of their degree while others, a minority, acquire it easily, survey available from our home page and you could win £50. becoming model students perhaps even future lecturers. Knights asserts that ‘the professional community favours argumentative If you would like to contribute to WordPlay or have an idea for a suppleness, metaphorical play, the ability to engage in topic you think we should cover, please get in touch. In the mean representations which […] are at least distantly commensurate time, enjoy the issue. with the complexity of the representations under study.’ He suggests that as a discipline community it is time to ‘make explicit and refl ect upon our unacknowledged pedagogic aesthetic and its infl uence on the identity of both the learner and teacher.’ One consequence of such a process would be a deeper understanding of how students engage with our subjects and how we can actively enhance that engagement and experience. Within this Nicole King issue of WordPlay (p. 44), readers might also be interested in Editor reading excerpts from our six undergraduate student bloggers (or go to our website to read their unexpurgated blogs). 02 WordPlay • www.english.heacademy.ac.uk Events Calendar English Subject Centre Spring/Summer 2010 For further details about any of these free events please visit our website www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events Networking Day for Subject Leaders of English and Creative Writing 22 April, St Anne’s College, Oxford The annual networking day for Subject Leaders, Heads of Department (and related roles) takes place at a moment of unusual uncertainty and stress in the sector.
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