Abstract
Explains the concept of ‘pedagogic criticism’, and contextualises the argument of the book. English literary studies, it is argued, were formed and continue to be reformed in dynamic pedagogic relationships. This intellectual and educational domain is therefore performative and dialogic in nature: the co-production of knowledge and forms of enquiry. The book brings together intellectual history and educational research to generate insight into the pedagogic process. Further, it analyses pedagogy in the oblique light shed by selected fictional texts construed as parables of learning.
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Notes
- 1.
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California, 1988: 4.
- 2.
In the UK, the Subject Centres (like the National Teaching Fellowship and in due course the Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) formed an element in the attempted rebalancing of the universities towards teaching which followed the 1997 Dearing Report Higher Education in the Learning Society. Funded by the UK Funding Councils (at first through the Learning and Teaching Support Network, and subsequently the Higher Education Academy), they were designed to support and develop teaching and learning in the disciplines. Each centre had a small staff team which worked through a mixture of research on teaching in the disciplines, projects, face-to-face workshops and conferences, consultancy, and the creation of print and web resources. A flavour of the work of the English Centre can still be gained from the archived website: http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk; also Paul Kleiman and Anthony Rosie, in (eds) Veronica Bamber, Paul Trowler, Murray Saunders, and Peter Knight, Enhancing Teaching, Learning, Assessment, and Curriculum in Higher Education. Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press, 2009.
- 3.
The starting place is Marton and Säljö (1976). Summary and development in Marton with Dai Hounsell and Noel Entwistle, The Experience of Learning. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985. During the 1980s and 1990s phenomenographic approaches achieved a hegemony in higher education studies. Samples of the new orthodoxy which percolated through canonical educational texts of 1990s and 2000s include Michael Prosser and Keith Trigwell, Understanding Learning and Teaching: The Experience in Higher Education, SRHE and Open University, 1999; and Paul Ramsden, Learning to Teach in Higher Education. London: Routledge Falmer, 2003.
- 4.
The Development of University English Teaching Project (DUET) was founded in 1979 at the University of East Anglia. It is discussed in detail in Evans 1995. Between 1980 and 1998 it ran a series of annual UK residential workshops, as well as shorter workshops in the UK and Continental Europe. The workshops drew extensively on the Tavistock school of group relations, creating frameworks in which colleagues could reflect upon their relationship to their discipline, their institution, their colleagues, and their students. Each comprised a weave of elements, known as ‘events’. Typically these comprised an academic (text-based) event, a writing event (see Chapter 9 of this book), and a group study event. The project carried on a vigorous life on the margins of the profession of English into the late 1990s, and influenced much of the subsequent work of the English Subject Centre. DUET returns in Chapters 7 and 9.
- 5.
‘Disciplines, Discourse, and Orientalism: the Implications for Postgraduate Certificates in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education’, Studies in Higher Education, 34(8), 2009: 917–928.
- 6.
A conspectus of scholarship of teaching dedicated to HE English can be found in the Arts and Humanities in Higher Education virtual special issue, http://ahh.sagepub.com/site/includefiles/vsu2.xhtml.
- 7.
I have used the familiar version, as the discovery of Trollope’s MS excisions occurred so recently.
- 8.
For example in Kangaroo. The idea is analysed by Robert Burden in Radicalizing Lawrence: Critical Interventions in the Reading and Reception of D.H. Lawrence’s Narrative Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.
- 9.
Cf. Knights, ‘English on its Borders’, in (eds) Gildea et al. 2015.
- 10.
See summary in Angela Goddard and Adrian Beard, As Simple as ABC? Issues of Transition for Students of English Language A Level Going on to Study English Language/Linguistics in Higher Education, English Subject Centre Report Series, No. 14 (2007).
- 11.
Tony Biglan originated the conceptual scheme for disciplines subsequently adopted by Becher and Trowler (2001).
- 12.
See, for example, ‘Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics’, reprinted in (ed.) Jane Tompkins, Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. The argument was anticipated by Louise Rosenblatt in ‘The Poem as Event’, College English, 26, 1964: 123–128. For an example of how close ‘reader response’ criticism moved towards pedagogy while keeping its distance, see essays collected in (ed.) John Gregor, Reading the Victorian Novel: Detail into Form. London: Vision, 1980.
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Knights, B. (2017). Introduction. In: Pedagogic Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27813-5_1
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