Teaching Literature: Text and Dialogue in the English Classroom

Description

This book comprises reflections by experienced scholar teachers on the principles and practice of higher education English teaching. In approaching the subject from different angles it aims to spark insights and to foster imaginative teaching. In the era of audit, and the Teaching Excellence Framework it invites teachers to return to the sources of their own teaching knowledge. The shift from a student-centred to a research-centred paradigm has particular implications for a discipline which prides itself on its teaching, and has always had teaching and dialogue at its heart. One which also talks across the tertiary / secondary border to the cognate (though different) subject called ‘English’ in school. The argument which informs this book, and which is developed in the individual chapters, is that the future of the subject relies not alone upon fostering communities of ‘research excellence’, but on re-awakening and reviving its pedagogic traditions. Front Matter ....Pages i-xi Introduction: Teaching? Literature? (Ben Knights)....Pages 1-15 Contrasts: Teaching English in British and American Universities (Gretchen H. Gerzina)....Pages 17-29 Transition and Discontinuity: Pitfalls and Opportunities in the Move to University English Universities (Andrew Green, Gary Snapper)....Pages 31-49 The Shame of Teaching (English) (Rosie Miles)....Pages 51-66 Transition into the Profession: Accuracy, Sincerity and ‘Disciplinary Consciousness’ (Robert Eaglestone)....Pages 67-80 ‘Getting in Conversation’: Teaching African American Literature and Training Critical Thinkers (Nicole King)....Pages 81-98 Beyond the Essay? Assessment and English Literature (Jonathan Gibson)....Pages 99-114 Critical or Creative? Teaching Crossover Writing in English Studies (Chris Thurgar-Dawson)....Pages 115-131 Teaching ‘Literature+’: Digital Humanities Hybrid Courses in the Era of MOOCs (Alan Liu)....Pages 133-153 Teaching Stylistics: Foregrounding in E.E. Cummings (Dan McIntyre, Lesley Jeffries)....Pages 155-172 Teaching Historically: Some Limits to Historicist Teaching (Simon Dentith)....Pages 173-188 Towards an Unprecedented Ecocritical Pedagogy (Greg Garrard)....Pages 189-207 Opening up the Seminar: Children’s Literature, a Case Study (Pamela Knights)....Pages 209-248 Back Matter ....Pages 249-252