Teaching Romanticism with ICT

Abstract

This essay originated in a talk I gave several years ago at a conference in London that dealt with teaching British Romanticism. Because I am an American, I began my remarks by musing upon the anomaly of an American talking to colleagues from Britain about teaching British Romanticism to American students. My larger subject, though, was teaching today’s students in what are, for the most part, yesterday’s classrooms. In reality, those of us who teach Romanticism — on both sides of the Atlantic — have much in common when it comes to pragmatic issues concerning what increasingly corporate-minded administrators are fond of calling the “delivery” of our courses to those “consumers” that most of us still call “students.” This administrative-speak finds its unfortunate parallel in that variety of student-speak that identifies the goal of college as a “university degree,” rather than anything that includes “education” or any related variant. Today’s curriculum, it seems, is driven less by “what we can (or should) offer” than by “what students will take.” We have all grown accustomed to walking into classrooms populated by students — at all levels and regardless of academic concentration — who have little sense of historical or cultural continuity with respect either to discrete subject matter (say, “Romanticism”) or to national or international history (including cultural history, or the “history of ideas” tradition). Perhaps conditioned by a determinedly localizing and instant-gratification-oriented culture, students often have as little sense of what happened during a period that they are studying as they have of what preceded and followed it.