Nothing particularly interesting

 First blog of the year.  Although, let's be honest I have been somewhat lacking in blogging commitment over the last few months - something for which I am sure you have been extremely grateful. Of course the stimulus to start up again is - as is so often the case - marking.  When faced with a seemingly insurmountable pile of work, frankly any kind of displacement activity will do. There is another motivation though.  One of the reasons marking work can be such an arduous activity is that a great deal of effort tends to be exerted into finding the best way to provide summative feedback to students.  The feedback on essays has to serve three main functions: 1)   Justifying the grade to students: A grade should never be arbitrary. Often a marker might spend quite a lot of time determining what the most accurate grade is - distinguishing carefully down to the last %. The feedback is, in one sense, a record of that decision-making proc...

In preparation for a class, I am here posting my lecture presentation and notes.  All comments welcome... as long as they are nice ones...

Here we are again with another assessment to post.  So far I have not had any bad feedback on the various draft things I have been planning to inflict on my students - which either means that they are not so bad after all, or that people are simply too polite to say anything. This one is for a final year module on Cultural Studies.  The aim of the module is to encourage students to apply the methods of textual and critical analysis used in the study of literature, to a broader range of 'texts' drawn from culture and society. This element of the assessment is an assessed discussion.  It has always seemed to me that a discussion is a more effective way of measuring a students' capacity to synthesise and evaluate ideas than a mere presentation.  It demands that students engage with a less fixed or planned set of ideas, and means that there is a focus placed on the interactive skills which students are encouraged to practice during normal seminar discussions. Here ...

Once again I have been wrestling with the difficulties of a module designed to introduce students to critical theory.  This is particularly difficult on the degree course I teach, because English only constitutes 50% of the course - so however I try to fit critical theory in, it needs to be done effectively enough so that students have a confident grasp of it before they hit their final year, where an understanding of the relationships between text and theory become pre-supposed. I have been trying to grapple with this challenge for many years now, and have variously gone through phases of: questioning the value of critical theory altogether, and asking whether we really need it? (I eventually came to the conclusion that we do ). embedding critical theory in modules, rather than having a dedicated standalone module (but this led to repetition and confusion).   trying to crow-bar critical thinking into Research Methods modules , as a research method (a nice ide...

For me, the first English module of the course is always the most difficult.  Introductory modules are often given the near-impossible task of providing students with everything they need in order to continue studying the subject at a higher level - but particularly in literature this seems to be an increasingly difficult task. There are two reasons for this.  Firstly, while there are countless Study Skills guides now available for students to use, there is very little in terms of clear guidelines and support for how to do English literature .  In particular, the idea of 'textual analysis' remains on the whole largely undefined.  I have posted about this issue a couple of times already , so won't go into it again here . The other issue relates to what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as ' cultural capital ' or 'habitas'.  This notion relates to the extent to which there are often broad assumptions made about the basic levels of education people have - and I ...

The most basic core of a dissertation plan hinges on three main questions: What do you want to know? How are you going to find out? What will you do with the answers? The answer to the questions will hinge on your initial narrowing of a research area.   The range of research or project areas can be varied, but a very generic approach might suggest that for a literature project the answers could include: What do you want to know? How or whether a text, or texts within a particular period demonstrate a particular characteristic, or reflect a historical or sociological context. Whether concrete evidence can be identified which adds to our understanding of a particular text, or whether a group of evidences can be analysed in ways which allow for different conclusions How different critical approaches to a text or texts can add to our appreciation / understanding of it. How are you going to find out? Through primary research and close ana...

English Dissertation: Structure of your topic Your literary dissertation might be one of the following: • An argument for or against an existing critic (or critical position) in relation to the author or group of works you are studying • An argument about the importance of a particular influence of a writer, or influence exerted by him or her • An argument for the importance of some particular piece of evidence to the discussion of the work of some author or group of authors • An argument about the value of a theoretical approach to a text or set of texts • An argument about the significance of a particular authors work • An argument about some historical or literary-historical aspect of literature • An argument about existing scholarly texts on a particular work • An argument showing how a particular theme or concept may be related to a group of texts