What is the Purpose of the English major?
Nicole: Thank you for coming to the Winter Meeting of the Critical Pedagogy Initiative. This Initiative seeks to create a space for graduate students and professors to come together to discuss share and learn about pedagogy in our department. The Initiative is supported and sponsored by our Chair Enda Duffy, the Undergraduate and Graduate Committees, and the Committee of Graduate students. Thank you all! We envisioned three yearly meetings that would gradually expand in scope; as you recall, in the Fall we asked “What does it mean to teach literature?” Many of the responses and remarks agreed that good teaching, in general, depends on: attention and acknowledgement, awareness of relationality, and building on prior knowledge. To respond more specifically to teaching literature, we discussed our particular content: the potential of the signifier and the transformative power of literature. I’d like to remind you all that the notes from that meeting can be found on our website, along with other resources and helpful links for students and instructors.
Today, we expand the scope from the classroom to the department to ask “What is the purpose of the English major?” We do not only want to consider the instrumentalist arguments that this question would seem to invite; we are asking about the purpose of the major to get at the raison d’etre of English literature. Although we framed the question around the major, we are also interested in the goals of courses that fulfill the literature general education requirement. What skills, knowledge, ideas, insights, and beliefs should students have when they leave our program? After a single class that may be their only English course at the college level? These questions are particularly important to graduate students because we serve as Teaching Assistants during the school year and get to design our own courses over the summer.
Looking ahead, in the Spring we will expand the scope even more to consider institutional philosophy: What is the role of humanistic pedagogy in today’s political climate?, which is a question which we already began to consider in our emergency meeting after the election. We are grateful and proud that our department made a strong statement in response to the 2016 election, which you can find on the Critical Pedagogy website as well as the Department main page.
Corinne: Thank you again for attending this and the previous meetings. The insights and ideas shared at those meetings have already sharpened the way we think about pedagogy and influenced the choices we make in the classroom. I hope the same is true for all of you as well even if you have been teaching for decades. I am especially grateful for the sense of solidarity and resistance expressed in the post-election meeting. It is important to continue to work to make the university and our community protected spaces for those targeted by the campaign rhetoric and the violence it engendered. Many are already organizing to do this: the Faculty Association is hosting A Day of Democratic Education on January 18th, Lizzie is organizing rides to the Women’s March in LA on the 21st, and Felice is facilitating a teach in on the 23rd. At the end of today’s meeting we will have a time for announcements about these and other upcoming events.
But today, we want to focus on our purpose here as teachers in the English department. I now feel a sense of exigency that is different from when we originally convened the Initiative. Before November, we measured the crisis of the humanities in numbers– the number of majors lost, the number of programs cut, the number of language and literature departments consolidated, the number of adjuncts, the number of jobs. But in November this already precarious world got darker because the very cornerstones of the humanities– the abilities to think critically, to argue well, to read closely, to practice empathy– lost their currency on the national stage. So in addition to teaching our students these vital skills, we must also equip them with the language to explain how these foundational modes of considering and making the world are important. We must share with them ideas that we assume to be true, but can no longer take for granted: the fundamental belief that literature is an essential sphere for working through real world problems– that fiction is an important space where we can learn how to live meaningfully, and that through literature we can bridge seemingly insurmountable divides.
Nicole: To begin today’s meeting, we ask that in groups of four or five we consider the projected questions: What do you expect students to know when they enter your classes? What do you hope students know when they finish your courses? And how does this differ when teaching majors, non majors, or both? The way we’ve framed these questions assumes all English courses strive to teach similar things. We do not mean to foreclose conversations that understand that particular courses (and professors) have particular objectives. Through this discussion, we want to know how these specific differences relate to our broader curriculum. After ten minutes, we want to collect the broad categories to which our responses belong. Then we can go through each category and discuss what we mean by it.