Table Of ContentTEACHING THE NEW ENGLISH SERIES
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TEACHING
LITERATURE
Text and Dialogue in the English Classroom
Edited by BEN KNIGHTS
Teaching the New English
Series Editor
Ben Knights
Teesside University
Middlesbrough, UK
Teaching the New English is an innovative series primarily concerned
with the teaching of the English degree in the context of the modern
university. The series is simultaneously concerned with addressing excit-
ing new areas that have developed in the curriculum in recent years and
those more traditional areas that have reformed in new contexts. It is
grounded in an intellectual or theoretical concept of the curriculum, yet
is largely concerned with the practicalities of the curriculum’s manifes-
tation in the classroom. Volumes will be invaluable for new and more
experienced teachers alike.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14458
Ben Knights
Editor
Teaching Literature
Text and Dialogue in the English Classroom
Editor
Ben Knights
Teesside University
Middlesbrough, UK
Teaching the New English
ISBN 978-1-137-31108-5 ISBN 978-1-137-31110-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-31110-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937742
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S e ’ P
erieS ditor S reface
One of the many exciting achievements of the early years of the UK
English Subject Centre was the agreement with Palgrave Macmillan to
initiate the series ‘Teaching the New English’. The intention of Philip
Martin, the then Centre Director, was to create a series of short and
accessible books which would focus on curriculum fields (or themes) and
develop the connections between scholarly knowledge and the demands
of teaching.
Since its inception as a university subject, ‘English’ has been com-
mitted to what is now known by the portmanteau phrase ‘learning and
teaching’. The subject grew up in a dialogue between scholars, critics,
and their students inside and outside the university. Yet university teach-
ers of English often struggle to make their own tacit pedagogic knowl-
edge conscious, or to bring it up to a level where it might be shared,
developed, or critiqued. In the experience of the English Subject
Centre, colleagues found it relatively easy to talk about curriculum,
but far harder to talk about the success or failure of seminars, how to
vary modes of assessment, or to make imaginative use of virtual learn-
ing environments or web tools. Too often, this reticence meant falling
back on received assumptions about how students learn, about how to
teach or create assessment tasks. At the same time, we found, colleagues
were generally suspicious of the insights and methods arising from
generic educational research. The challenge for the extended group of
English disciplines has been to articulate ways in which our own subject
v
vi SErIES EDITOr’S PrEfACE
knowledge and forms of enquiry might themselves refresh debates about
pedagogy. The need becomes all the more pressing in the era of rising
fees, student loans, the National Student Survey, and the characterisation
of the student as a demanding consumer of an educational product. The
implicit invitation of the present series is to take fields of knowledge and
survey them through a pedagogic lens.
‘Teachers’, people used to say, ‘are born, not made’. There may be
some tenuous truth in this. There may perhaps be generosities of spirit
(or, alternatively, drives for didactic control) laid down in early childhood.
But the implication that you cannot train or develop teachers is dubious.
Why should we assume that even ‘born’ teachers should not need to learn
or review the skills of their trade? Amateurishness about teaching has far
more to do with the mystique of university status than with evidence
about how people learn. This series of books is dedicated to the develop-
ment of the craft of teaching within university English Studies.
Ben Knights
Emeritus Professor of English and Cultural Studies
Teesside University
Visiting fellow
UCL Institute of Education
c
ontentS
1 Introduction: Teaching? Literature? 1
Ben Knights
2 Contrasts: Teaching English in British and American
Universities 17
Gretchen H. Gerzina
3 Transition and Discontinuity: Pitfalls and
Opportunities in the Move to University
English Universities 31
Andrew Green and Gary Snapper
4 The Shame of Teaching (English) 51
rosie Miles
5 Transition into the Profession: Accuracy, Sincerity
and ‘Disciplinary Consciousness’ 67
robert Eaglestone
6 ‘Getting in Conversation’: Teaching African American
Literature and Training Critical Thinkers 81
Nicole King
vii
viii CONTENTS
7 Beyond the Essay? Assessment and English Literature 99
Jonathan Gibson
8 Critical or Creative? Teaching Crossover Writing
in English Studies 115
Chris Thurgar-Dawson
9 Teaching ‘Literature+’: Digital Humanities
Hybrid Courses in the Era of MOOCs 133
Alan Liu
10 Teaching Stylistics: Foregrounding in E.E. Cummings 155
Dan McIntyre and Lesley Jeffries
11 Teaching Historically: Some Limits to Historicist
Teaching 173
Simon Dentith
12 Towards an Unprecedented Ecocritical Pedagogy 189
Greg Garrard
13 Opening up the Seminar: Children’s Literature,
a Case Study 209
Pamela Knights
Index 249
a e
bout the ditor
Ben Knights is an Emeritus Professor at Teesside University, UK, and
former director of the HE Academy English Subject Centre. His book
Pedagogic Criticism: Reconfiguring University English Studies is due with
Palgrave in 2017.
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