The activities of Subject Centres develop in dialogue with the communities they serve. Even those things that we ourselves initiate rapidly change shape and direction once exposed to the ideas and experience of teachers in the field.This newsletter itself bears witness to the range of activities with which the English Subject Centre is involved, and acts in some ways as a snapshot (or a section through) current pre-occupations. Several core themes are represented here, encompassing student journeys into and out of the space we teachers temporarily share with them, the experiences students bring with them, and the hopes and ambitions they form. Topics which travel under the flags of transition and employability are therefore very much in the foreground. At the same time, to understand the meaning of our own interventions we have also to acknowledge how oblique and unpredictable are the ways in which as a community we touch students’ lives. So another theme here, as for the Centre generally, is the need for a scholarship of teaching at once rigorous and suggestive: the development of genres and registers in which to reflect upon, write about, and then develop what we do.
This is a newsletter and some items of news are in order. The Higher Education Academy (into which the former LTSN and ILTHE have merged) is now active, and will be formally launched around the time this Newsletter reaches you. Paul Ramsden – known to many as the author of the popular Learning to Teach in Higher Education (revised edition, Routledge 2003) – returned from Australia to become Chief Executive in August. He wants the Academy to develop a forthright and independent voice on HE policy. It will resist compulsory regulation or pressures towards conforming to competency-based standards. Although the formal review of the Subject Centre network is not yet complete, it is understood that its conclusions are likely to be positive.Yet, in the short term, it is worth noting that the network still only has a contractual existence until December 2005.This represents something of a contrast with the Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) whose five year funding will be announced early in the new year. As many of you will be well aware, 106 teams made it into the second round, and submitted their final bids in late October. It is likely that from 70 – 80 awards will be made. Several of the proposed CETLs involve English departments, and the Centre has been engaged on working with the bidding teams on their revised proposals. We wish our colleagues success, and look forward to working with the Centres when they achieve their funding.
Within this fluid institutional context the Subject Centre occupies an increasingly vital catalytic role.We are not here to help bring about an educational utopia by cascading the melioristic procedures of Quality Enhancement.We may at times need to speak back to the funders and policy makers in the terms which our very subject matter presses on the attention of teachers. If our subject can be said to be ‘about’ anything, it is ‘about’ the risks and ambiguities of the processes of learning, the need to confront worthy abstractions with the obduracy of the concrete instance. But as a Centre our relation to our community cannot be solely passive or reactive.We may also need to confront our own community with some serious, even fundamental, questions.To ask, for example, whether the communities of HE English are really prepared for the age of ‘variable’ fees; whether our trusted repertoire of teaching and assessment methods (refreshed as it is from various sources) is any longer adequate; to insist upon the implications of the choices made as the English community juggles its multiple and potentially contradictory obligations. How, in short,we as a community can continue to act responsibly towards knowledge (the care and maintenance of our diverse subject matters); towards students and their legitimate expectations; towards each other as colleagues; or towards a longer term vision of what we could be doing.Through all these run the tensions (felt more strongly in some departments than others) between the RAE and the commitment to teaching as those tensions are lived out in the professional lives of departments and individuals. As, once again, this Newsletter bears witness, the Centre will continue to struggle against a destructive split between research and teaching.While exciting, the tasks ahead are enormous.We shall need all the goodwill and support which our subject community is willing to lend us.
