A Vision Worth Working For Barbara Brothers1

CEA past presidents were asked to address the future of our organization at the 1999 convention in Philadelphia. What strengths of the organization should we build upon? In this one more look backward to move forward, I propose that we seriously consider whether we have “a vision worth working for” (Steve Gilbert, qtd. in Angelo 4). Are there unmet professional needs that college professors of English have that we might fulfill, needs that are currently not being served by our sister professional organizations?

Like other faculty in our institutions of higher education, we in departments of English are undergoing a revolution in what we teach, how we teach, whom we must answer to, and the means by which we deliver instruction. Some such as Robert B. Barr and John Tagg call it a paradigm shift from college as “an institution that exists to provide instruction” to college as “an institution that exists to produce learning” (13). Measuring the quality of our teaching is no longer a matter of what we know but of what our students learn. The yardsticks by which we are held accountable are not marked with our accomplishments (our publications, the books in the college library, the grants we have funded) but with those of our students—their levels of understanding and their successes.

First we have to identify what we want our students to learn, and then we must find the ways to produce that learning. We also have to develop in them the skills and attitudes that will enable them to continue acquiring information and using their knowledge. We must, as the motto of the honorary society Phi Kappa Phi states it, develop in our students the “love of learning” as well as learning. The lecture method has frequently been challenged as the most effective way to accomplish many of our purposes, for example, when our aim is to lead students to assess with critical and humanistic understanding the consequences of the applications of knowledge for themselves and the world in which they live. “Do we need to vary our teaching approaches according to our purposes?” “What is the role of technology in helping us to achieve our purposes?” These are questions that we have only begun to answer.

The College English Association announces itself as an organization that focuses on college teaching—“how literature and composition are taught in the classroom” (emphasis added). In light of the present call for a scholarship of teaching and for a student-centered classroom, we should at least pause to ask if our twentieth-century vision is one we want to give renewed emphasis to in the twenty-first century. Is the purpose that we set forth when the organization was founded a vision of what we might become? Do we want to take the lead in focusing on the scholarship of teaching for English studies?

A number of individuals in our profession have responded to the call of Ernest Boyer and the Carnegie Foundation that we take our role as teachers as seriously as we take our role as scholars. It is no longer just those in English education that are speaking and writing about the craft of teaching. Jane P. Tomkins, Johns Hopkins University, published three years ago A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned, and recently Elaine Showalter, former president of the MLA and another well recognized name from the realms of scholarship and graduate education, described her experience in establishing a non-credit seminar for graduate students. While most of us would still maintain that teaching is an art, we do so knowing how much of any art is a learned craft whose practice demands the continual dedication of those who would master its intricacies. Study, critical self-reflection, revision, and refinement are habits practiced by a master teacher.

In CEA and our sister organizations, we have occasionally shared our recipes, as one of the college geologist faculty members refers to the what-I-did-in-my-class presentation. But the Pew Scholar Program, the Carnegie Teaching Academy, Project Kaleidoscope (a jointly funded program of the Exxon Education Foundation and the National Science Foundation to improve the teaching of science, mathematics, and technology), along with leading education organizations are calling for us to move beyond that sharing to studies that produce demonstrable evidence in support of what does and doesn’t work. We in English studies, however, have just begun to believe that it is okay to carry on our dialogue about teaching in public view of our peers. The College English Association has not given sufficient attention to that which we said we were about—the college teaching of English.

What in addition to an attention to pedagogy would this mean? Rather than discussing what our majors need to know, perhaps we should discuss first what college graduates who are not our majors or minors need to know. We might need to precede this by determining what our understandings are of the purposes of a liberal education and of the role of literature and writing in developing the understandings of what it means to be human. Do we believe that it is to prepare our students to be citizens living in a democratic country in the twenty-first century as does Martha Nussbaum? Her statement in Cultivating Humanity of the contribution the study of literature makes to a liberal education—to develop students’ narrative imaginations—is informed by her emphasis on and understanding of the ideals of classical citizenship and of the needs of our contemporary multicultural and multinational world.

For Nussbaum, the most compelling purpose for the study of literature is to develop in a student “the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have” (10–11). If we accepted that this was one of our purposes for teaching literature, how might that shape our selections of literary works and how they are to be presented?

Nussbaum’s examination of the purposes of liberal education in our college curriculums reminds us that tradition is embedded in what we do; however, while the principles remain the same, the particulars of our world have changed. The class and gender of those being educated in our colleges are different from what they were even a few decades ago. In addition, those whose sexual preference may differ from those of the majority in our culture and those from previously excluded racial and ethnic backgrounds want to claim their place in our society with all the rights and responsibilities that the recognition of their humanity brings. What does this changed makeup of the students in our classrooms mean for not only what we teach as literature but how we teach it?

Academic respectability is maintained through currency in our discipline, as I reminded the faculty in an editorial written for our college publication, The Art and Science of Teaching. Too often, that currency for Professors of English in recent years has been defined as familiarity with critical theory. We have come to rely on the philosophical language of the various current theorist heroes not only in our scholarly publications but also in our classrooms. Perhaps the ability to speak and write about literature meaningfully employing such terms is necessary for our brightest and best who go on to graduate school, but what about the students who are fulfilling a requirement in general education in the humanities? Or what about the students in our classrooms who are preparing to teach in the elementary and secondary schools who will learn what and how to teach as much or more from our classes as they will in their English methods classes?

Just as we need to reflect upon whom we are teaching when we formulate our aims, so too do we need to reflect upon the who when we decide how we will present the literature in the classroom.   Cognitive science may be of greater use to us than is Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault. While none of us would argue that the knowledge we accumulated in graduate school is adequate for the courses that we teach, how many of us have changed the ways in which we teach? To what extent do our classroom practices reflect what developments in cognitive science have to tell us about how humans learn? Perhaps we might best spend our time researching the findings of the last 30 years in cognitive science and discussing how to apply them to our classes, as Alison Gopnik, a Professor of psychology at the University of California Berkeley, suggests in a recent review essay of Howard Gardner’s The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should Understand in The New York Review of Books.

In general, we have focused only upon subject matter knowledge when reflecting upon our profession as undergraduate teachers of college English. We have not had much to say about what we are trying to accomplish in our classes or how our teaching is changed by those purposes, even though the books we teach do not exist in isolation in our classrooms any more than literature exists apart from the society and milieu in which it is written. We compose our papers about the “new,” but the new consists of previously untaught writers, ignored genres, different contexts in which to consider the authors we teach, and literatures written in English from various parts of the globe. These are important discussions, but so too are those that ask us to reconsider how we approach teaching students from various cultural backgrounds. Infrequently, if at all, do we discuss what the differences in class, gender, race, and sexual orientation of our students make not just on the selections we teach but the ways in which we teach them.

What are the active learning strategies that we are employing to replace the lecture and discussions which account for the 50 minute/4 class meetings a week we meet with our students? When have we presented the results of our research into the effectiveness of the strategies of problem-based learning or other inquiry-based learning methods? When have we composed a defense of a particular literary selection as a more effective way of achieving our purposes than another selection? Who among us have discussed the use of technology to create learning environments that are cooperative, collaborative, and supportive and to extend the class beyond the room and meeting time? Have we done something more to take seriously a scholarship of teaching than occasionally share recipes?

A focus on the college teaching of English distinguishes our organization from our sister organizations. The National Council of Teachers of English focuses on teaching but has traditionally been dominated on the college level by English education faculty who have defined the teaching of writing and literature and the English curriculum and programs of the schools as their turf. The scholarship of literature and composition is the focus of the Modern Language Association, and the needs of research universities and graduate education predominate. The MLA sponsors the Association of Departments of English to address the needs and interests of all three categories of post-secondary education—community colleges, public and liberal arts BA/MA institutions, and research universities.

Though there is some overlapping of boundaries—discussions of critical theory and presentations of literary scholarship at National NCTE meetings and sessions on teaching and matters of the profession at MLA—the membership and professional issues addressed by the organizations are clearly enough differentiated that as chair of the English department at a public institution offering undergraduate and master’s programs I maintained membership in all of them.

My point is that there is a professional gap that we need to fill—undergraduate teaching of English, both its content and its pedagogy. I wonder if the conclusion of the story of the development of national standards for English would have been different if we had been a more powerful voice for college teaching. Instead of the standards for English being produced by a coalition of working groups of CEA, MLA, NCTE, and other professional organizations as was envisioned, in 1996 Standards for the English Language Arts: A Project of International Reading Association & National Council of Teachers of English was published.

In Ohio, we no longer license English teachers. They are now teachers of language arts. While no traditionalist, I am concerned that there may indeed be very much in a name—that the lack of leadership by those of us who have traditionally focused on composition and literature may have led to a dilution of content in the curriculum our future teachers of English take. For example, in Ohio all early childhood (PK–4) majors must take a course in phonics but do not have to study the development of language and the history of so-called “good English.” They most certainly don’t have to take a course in American literature, and only a nationally recognized program in children’s literature and years of including an American language course among the English department’s offerings in language and linguistics saved those courses in the revisions of the elementary certification program, revisions that grew out of what these teachers were going to be held accountable for teaching under the new standards.

The situation in the sciences and in mathematics is different. Contributing factors to that difference are the inclusiveness of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, publishers of Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (1989) and Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics (1991), the Mathematics Association of America as a powerful voice for the undergraduate teaching in the discipline, and the emphasis given by national leaders in science to the reform of teaching in the science, technology, and mathematics.

While we might like to believe that the success of our colleagues is due to the value society places upon the sciences and mathematics, we must accept responsibility for not having made a successful argument for the social value of the study of literature. We should consider the possibility that if students in our classrooms found literature speaking meaningfully in and to their lives, then surely they would spread the message about the value of its study. We need to ask ourselves what we can do to inform others in our discipline and the public of the successful reforms in the teaching of humanities in our undergraduate programs. We need to read and get others to read studies such as Nussbaum’s philosophical argument for liberal studies that examines 15 institutions and their programs of reform.

We have identified ourselves as the organization whose purpose is to further the study of the college teaching of English. If we take this purpose seriously, establishing a national dialog on the role of the study of literature and writing in the liberal arts curriculum would become a priority. Another priority would be to establish a scholarship of the teaching of literature, working with others such as those from English who are participating in the Pew Teaching Scholars Program.

The vision for our organization should grow out of our vision for the English classroom of the twenty-first century. To help shape what that classroom will be, wedding content with pedagogy should be the goal that sets the course for our organization. If we have a worthwhile purpose, we will find we can attract the numbers that are needed to fulfill that vision.

¹This essay is an elaboration upon the remarks I made at the Philadelphia National CEA Convention: A Backward Glance: The Century’s Contributions to Literature, Composition and Literary Pedagogy, and English Studies. I selected Martha Nussbuam’s Cultivating Humanity as my award from the book drawing. It is a book I highly recommend.

Works Cited

Angelo, Thomas A. “Doing Assessment as if Learning Matters Most.”  AAHE Bulletin 51.9 (1999): 3-6.
Barr, Robert B., and John Tagg.  “From Teaching to Learning—A New Paradigm for Undergraduate
    Education.” Change 27.6:12-25
Gopnik, Alison. “Small Wonders: The Disciplined Mind:  What All Students Should Understand.” New
    York Review of Books 46.8: 33-35.
Nussbaum, Martha C.  Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.
    Cambridge, Mass., & London, England: Harvard UP, 1997.
Showalter, Elaine. “The Risks of Good Teaching: How 1 Professor and 9 T.A.’s Plunged into Pedagogy.”
    The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 July 1999: B4-B6.