A Reflection on Teaching, Multiculturalism, and Access (original) (raw)

Problems in Studying and Teaching Eighteenth-century British History

Studia Anglica Resoviensia, 2018

The eighteenth century was a time of great events, developments and achievements in Britain's history, yet it tends to be neglected by both scholars and teachers compared with the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and a number of other periods in Britain's past. The primary aim of this essay is to explain what makes the understanding and teaching of eighteenth-century British history so difficult. There will be special emphasis on the positive and negative aspects of Sir Lewis Namier's historical scholarship, which revolutionised our understanding of the period in the middle of the twentieth century but created new complications as well.

Teaching the Eighteenth Century: Historical study through performance

2011

AFTER A DECADE of delivering the contents of my eighteenth-century opera module (“Opera in England from Purcell to Handel”) through a series of lectures, I had a clear sense that this approach invariably met with mixed levels of engagement and attainment on the part of my students. The lecture format was not engaging my students to develop an appreciation of how these “old” operas were once important participants in eighteenth-century culture. I felt distanced from their learning processes since attempts to incorporate devices such as “brain

Institutional and Disciplinary History in a Cultural Studies Curriculum

1992

Educators of graduate students of English who are simultaneously teaching undergraduate composition courses should focus on how the study of institutional history might shed light on contemporary praxis. The Cultural and Critical Studies Ph.D. Program in the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) English Department combines an innovative approach to theoretically aware and historically based advanced work in English Studies with a comprehensive teacher-training program. Seminar work connects teaching and theory, disciplinary history and current practices, cultural studies and composition. Within a cultural studies context, the required two-semester teaning seminars taken by all first-time composition teachers are designed to help them compose their stances as teachers. These seminars focus on intensive reading of, followed by written assignments about, important historical texts concerning the "social mission" of English teachers. Students must reflect on their pedagogical goals, assignments, and philosophies of education. Extensive quotes from three papers by different students show that a range of positions results from these assignments. These texts represent teachers in the process of constructing and revising self-conscious positions about teaching composition within the structures of the contemporary department and university, as well as reflect diverse ruadings of institutional history. A shift in the paradigm of graduate training, as exemplified by the University of Pittsburgh's program, constitutes an important and progressive aspect of a cu1turR1 studies curriculum in English graduate education.

After English: What do we Teach when we Teach Literary and Cultural Studies

Artha: Journal of Social Sciences, 2019

English Literature today is very different from what it was in the early 1990s, when the discipline was called upon to justify its existence by a vocal section of teachers and students. As a result of the changes inaugurated by the ‗crisis in English Studies' and due to the comfort afforded by the demand for English language, the discipline has been relatively free from internal and external pressures to justify its existence. This is, therefore, a good time to raise the question of disciplinary relevance. I draw on my experience as a student, teacher and researcher formed by the 1990s to argue that the transformation of the discipline was at least partly facilitated by its investment in the engagement with texts and texutality. Reading and interpretation, albeit framed by a very different set of concerns, remain at the heart of Literary Studies as well as its offshoot, Cultural Studies. I, therefore, suggest that we consciously focus on building this capability, even as we introduce our students to an every-expanding range of textual forms.

Teaching a "New Canon"? Students, Teachers and Texts in the College Literature Classroom

College Composition and Communication, 1997

While graduate students at the University of Iowa, we were lucky enoughtruly, privileged enoughto have the opportunity to reflect upon what it might mean to be a "teacher" of literature in the post-secondary classroom. And while appreciative of that opportunity and of mentors, students, and colleagues, each subject to the consequences of our early mistakes, we also recognized that our training and reflection were largely improvisatory. We "made up" syllabi, grading policies, seating arrangements, presentation styles, responses to student writing, and so on. As we matured as teacherscholars in the midst of debates about the canon and cultural diversity, this pedagogical "creativity" was tested as a reliable means of action in response to the dizzying array of demands placed on us by students, texts, and the institution. We recognized early on that an attention to difference in the classroom must mean a disorientation and resisted the temptation to oversimplify, to retreat into the safety of text-based, teachercentered approaches. Bruce recalls sensing such a pedagogical epiphany when he realized that students' needs, knowledges, and expectations were perhaps the most important text of any class: My interest in the social dynamics of the literature classroom arose primarily out of my experience with a radical juxtaposition of two different teaching contexts. 1 began my college teaching career at California State University, Fresno. where classes were filled with students of amazingly diverse heritage. In a single class, I might have students of Basque, Armenian, African, Mexican, Hmong, Chinese, Japanese and European heritage. The degrees to which these students continued to share in the cultural values and beliefs a these origins depended, Of cool se, xi xii Bruce A. Goebel and James C. Hall For Jim, the need to explore a comprehensive pedagogical strategy was precipitated by the realities of identity politics: As a white scholar and teacher being trained as an African-Americanist, I was aware each and every day of the complexities Of my position in the classroom. Wht.t might "teaching" mean if' it was necessary for me to resist culturally imperialist 1' NS. xiv Bruce A. Goebel and James C. Hall any way." Despite the inclusion of canon-opening texts, the values and biases of the traditional canon remained unchallenged in the social dynamics of the classroom. We felt most imposed upon by these values, for example, when trying to think through questions of evaluation. How were we to reconcile what seemed to be a fairly straightforward decentering of authority with institutional responsibilities to "grade?" Our conversations together were marked by an anxiety about "consistency" and "integrity." How could we be telling students about cultural pluralism and the joys of interpretation while engaging in what seemed at times to be a fairly crude process of determining when people were "right" and "wrong?" While we were never radical relativists, it did seem incumbent upon us to discover what "evaluation" might mean if one was serious about democratic principles and canonical reform. A "new canon" was going to require an intense self scrutiny. These ruptures between literature, theory, and pedagogy brought us to the realization that there was a real need for systematic exploration about the relationship between classroom practice and the institutionalization of cultural democratic ideals. We set out to put together a collection of essays that would explore the needs of teachers who wish to serve their students effectively and also serve the idea of a "new canon." Within this collection, the "new canon" refer3 to more than a set of multicultural texts, fixed or changing. Instead, it indicates and describes comprehensive curricular change and an expanding repertoire of self-reflective teacher knowledge and strategies. In this sense the "new canon" emerges from and embodies an ethical, democratic process removed from utopian theory by its very application to the lives of real, diverse, complex students, teachers, and texts. As James Marshall pointed out during a recent NCTE conference session, theorists of culture and democracy have succeeded in identifying and articulating much of the problematics regarding race, gender, and social class, but they have failed to create a corresponding pedagogical technologylargely because they have failed to account for the social dynamics of real classrooms. Recent pedagogical specialists, from writing process advocates to reader-response theorists, have concretely outlined practical classroom methods but have failed to adequately connect them to contemporary debates regarding the relationship among a literary education, cultural diversity, and democracy.

The Changing Structures of Historical Knowledge and Undergraduate Curriculum. Paper Number 1

1969

Advocating reform of the history curriculum, this paper builds upon the uparadigmatic impact of scientific advancement upon social and cultural, as well as intellectual and scientific, communities. Historians are constructing new paradigms of the discipline structure by stressing theory, methodology, and by relating historical knowledge to general knowledge, all pointing to the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach to promote good scholarship and analytic history. New perspectives are reflected in historians' works but not in curriculum structure. The profession could incorporate changes, first, by delineating theories of curriculum accepted by history departments, and second, by examining tactics utilized to transform the curriculum, eight of which are: 1) structuring curriculum to reflect a particular theory of history; 2) introducing new methodology courses; 3) providing alternative courses of study; 4) using senior level interdisciplinary seminars; 5) encouraging a particular approach to history through requirements; 6) incorporating area studies courses into the curriculum; 7) using national history at an introductory level; and 8) developing courses with topical and thematic approaches. Historians and educators, if able to harmonize curriculum structures with the new paradigms in historical thinking, could revitalize higher education. (Sall