From Provider to Stager: The Future of Teaching English in HE

Summary

Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;

Nought may endure but Mutability.

With the rise of the gig economy, pop-up experiences and ‘espresso learning’, change has become a constant condition of life in ‘liquid modernity’. Higher Education in the UK has experienced seismic shifts over the last three decades that have had a significant impact on our understanding of the Humanities more broadly and English specifically as a discipline. From the now familiar narratives of crisis conceived in Widdowson's Re-Reading English (1982), Guy and Small's Politics and Values in English Studies: A Discipline in Crisis? (1993) and Scholes's The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (1998), English has for some time been enmeshed in a debate about the condition of the subject – literally and figuratively – as the so-called ‘theory wars’ called into question not only the purpose of the study of English, but also how it should be taught in university and beyond. English in all its forms, including English Studies, English Language, English Literature or Literature in English and Creative Writing, is defined conceivably as homogenous in its heterogeneity, as different institutions and courses prioritise diverse critical and thematic inflections, genres, cultural contexts and historical periods. At the same time, the demands of the skills economy in the UK have, up to this point, deflected attention away from the Humanities towards STEM and/or STEAM. These intrinsic and extrinsic forces in play have exerted pressure on the subject to confront its historic limitations and to open up, not only the canon, but also the curriculum or syllabus – to use Raymond Williams's modulation of that term – to global interventions that have redefined English in a university setting.

As I contest in this essay, the war of words that defines the history of the study and teaching of English in HE is the lifeblood of innovation and adaptability that, in what only can be conceived as a metonymic twist of fate, does not just feed its future evolution, but also supports the graduate competencies and emotional intelligence that are so highly valued by employers. In other words, the interrogative stance of English as a discipline – the criticality that it fosters – is an asset to be celebrated in a ‘posttruth’ world, rather than the nub of an ongoing crisis that perennially tolls its death and the death of the Humanities more broadly.