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Pedagogy 4.1 (2004) 43-64



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From the Edges to the Center:
Pedagogy's Role in Redefining English Departments

M. Kilian McCurrie


In the early nineteenth century, before the development of the modern university, the focus in colleges and seminaries was on general notions of reading, speaking, and writing; but this emphasis began to change as the college population grew and more complex concerns over texts and meaning emerged. In the last twenty-five years of the century, the rapidly developing research university eclipsed the small liberal arts college. As Laurence Veysey makes clear in The Emergence of the American University (1970), by joining science and pragmatism to a new elective educational system, educational and civic leaders created the research university and the institution of academic departments. In the emerging English department of the nineteenth century, historians and philologists employed a strict scientific methodology to establish the correlation between the origin of a text and its meaning and significance. By the end of the nineteenth century, other faculty, dismayed by the domination of scientism, established the importance of critics who employed different methods but nevertheless objectified meaning. In both cases, a positivist view of knowledge produced specialization and a binary between content and method. This epistemological system cooperated with the broader hierarchy within the university, in which English departments have struggled for legitimacy, influence, and academic turf.

More recently, with the advent of cultural studies, literary studies has struggled to maintain a coherent position on what knowledge is and what [End Page 43] English departments should do. This crisis is made evident in a recent issue of PMLA in which various scholars are asked to respond to the question "Why Major in Literature—What Do We Tell Our Students?" (Bell et al. 2002). All of them acknowledge in some way that the lack of consensus on the object of literary study makes justifying the work of the department difficult. Many of the twelve contributors argue their work promotes a critical literacy essential to a democracy, while others describe the passion and pleasure to be found in the study of language. All of them attempt to connect their teaching and their scholarship. By doing so, these authors respond to this "identity crisis" by beginning the critical move to refigure the English department.

Key to this revision is the question of pedagogy. As Mariolina Salvatori (1996) argues, the reshaping of disciplinary identity should focus on the context and the means through which knowledge is produced. Pedagogy is opposed to the epistemology that assumes knowledge is already made and that the teacher's task is its transmission. Instead, pedagogy is best understood as the "transformation that takes place at the intersection of three agencies—the teacher, the learner and the knowledge produced" (David Lusted; quoted in Salvatori 1996: 3). The move from disciplinarity to pedagogy, according to Salvatori, must begin with a passionate interest in how students think and how representations of their thinking could be examples of knowledge formation. By focusing on the faculty's commitment to teach in ways that realize their theories of reading, writing, and thinking, the department demonstrates to the university and the larger community its commitment to connect theory and practice (1). However, despite the individual efforts represented in PMLA and the institutional reform called for by scholars like Stephen North (2000) and Robert Scholes (1998), the English department continues to enforce the content/method and theory/praxis binaries. This construct needlessly fragments departments, marginalizing fields with a strong pedagogical focus like English education and composition, while at the same time effectively discouraging engagement with the larger institution and society.

Whether English departments have a viable future depends on the willingness of faculty to dismantle the hierarchies currently defining the field, and in doing so energize an engagement with questions of teaching and the teaching of teachers. However, as Salvatori (1996: 6, 7) argues, the English department's return to pedagogy as an alternative focus for institutional identity can only be accomplished with a full, comprehensive sense of the department's own history. By...

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