Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

This article brings together reflections on the impact agenda from two separate sources: a conference at the University of Warwick in August 2009, and a speech given at the University of Leeds some weeks before. It develops these reflections with particular reference to Modern Languages, reviewing how the Humanities probe other value systems, deal with the singular and provisional, and take discourse as their product and process in ways that offer both theoretical and pragmatic benefits. The article suggests that, rather than simply jumping on the bandwagon of ‘measurement’ and the market where impact is concerned, the Humanities should explore ways of rethinking the outdated, simplistic ‘marketmimicry’ that Michael Sandel critiqued in his 2009 Reith lectures.

This article introduces a forum of response articles to the edited volume Masculinities in Text and Teaching. The forum features two scholars of English in a transatlantic conversation and then a response by the editor of the volume. The forum develops, from the edited collection, the theme of pedagogical uncertainty in studies of masculinity and the ways those conversations can be used to help students develop their own humanistic ethics in the classroom. Employing two styles of doing work on teaching from the perspective of textual scholars, the author of one article reads her own experience and classroom moments to build an argument about the high stakes of doing work around gender for students and the profession. The other author reads from both classroom experience and from a text she teaches to open up new pedagogical possibilities. These techniques are echoed in the collected volume. A key argument throughout is that classroom struggles around texts and identities — which often provoke feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty for both teachers and students — can be deployed in conversations that enable students to learn about both the humanities subject and themselves.

This reflective article interrogates the role of masculinity studies in the women’s and gender studies’ classroom by looking at the work of American film icon Marlon Brando. Brando and his risky masculinity in the film represents a locale of ‘dangerous desires’ which reveal deep conflict in student perceptions of men, women, and gender.

This article addresses the silences and anxieties provoked by the gendering of English Studies as a subject taught by men to women. I reflect on my own experience as a female student and lecturer within a subject that has been ‘professionalized’ by males. The geographical and social context within which I teach — the South Wales Valleys, a post-industrial, post-Devolution area with high male unemployment — offers particular challenges in relation to the teaching of women’s writing. The few male students who take such modules often find their gender made ‘visible’ in ways which can provoke a range of behaviours suggesting anxieties about gender and class in relation to ‘English’.

This response to the articles by Diana Wallace and Samantha Pinto seeks to locate the negotiation of gendered identities in the classroom within the larger study of the dialogic relations between texts, teachers, and students. Teaching, it proposes, is not a second-order derivative of scholarship, but a cultural form in its own right. The article suggests the continuing cultural and ethical importance of the study of masculinities within textual subjects, and argues the need to complement research on the experience of teachers with paying detailed attention to student writing and the student experience.

This article reviews the development of integrative learning and argues that it has an important role to play in broader conceptions of the undergraduate curriculum recently advanced in the UK. It suggests that such a focus might also provide arts and humanities educators with a hopeful prospect in difficult times: a means by which the distinctive value and potential of these subjects might be articulated and promoted. Interviews with humanities students and lecturer case-studies from a UK initiative in integrative learning are used to ground the argument advanced and provide illustrative examples of practice.

American writing center director Kathleen Shine Cain analyzes the transformative experience of spending a year in a Belfast writing centre, resulting in a renewed appreciation of cross-national and cross-cultural partnerships. Although American writing center theory and pedagogy have informed the development of centers in Europe, Asia, and Africa, those centers have developed practices reflective of their unique academic and national cultures. Perhaps even more significantly, dialogue among centers throughout the world has resulted in an opportunity for writing centers in the United States to reinvigorate themselves, to interrogate both their practices and the theories underpinning those practices — and to appreciate more fully their responsibility in dismantling oppressive institutional practices.

Many readers dismiss James Joyce’s final novel as impossible to wade through, with its multilingual puns, songs, jokes, portmanteau words, allusions, scientific references, myths and legends. Given the kinetic elements of any reading experience, features particularly evident in Finnegans Wake, reading inevitably becomes synonymous with interpretation. To that end, this article focuses on the use of Enquiry-Based Learning, or EBL, by one upper-division English literature module, as an opportune methodology with which to encourage students to explore the myriad possible readings which the Wake could support. Joyce created by invention, by collection, and by accident, all of which underscore the value of working together. Particularly because EBL moves away from traditional styles of lecturing and into the realm of deeper, autonomous learning, fostered by collaboration above individual ownership, and motivation above accumulation, it works well with the fluid and amazingly complex and associative constructs inherent in Joyce’s text.

This review of the 5th International Conference held by the University of the Arts London’s Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design, 12 and 13 April 2010 at the Novotel, Tiergarten, Berlin, briefly summarizes the contributions of three keynote speakers, and considers some of the issues they raised.

This article is both an argument for and an example of portraiture, a methodology for conducting and presenting qualitative research which, though familiar to many social scientists and educational researchers, remains relatively unknown within the humanities. The author details one kind of practice within the scholarship of teaching and learning — a study of a transformational learning experience — that calls for the framework of the research portrait, and suggests further possibilities for this framework, particularly within area studies, cultural studies, and world languages and literatures. Numerous advantages of portraiture are demonstrated and discussed, including the de-marginalization of the research subject, the facilitation of interdisciplinary practice, and the further integration of the teacher—researcher’s professional responsibilities and identities.