Like many of us, I’ve been mulling over the question of how
we might increase the number of majors in our programs as well as the
non-majors in our classrooms. Our departmental discussions have followed paths
similar to what characterizes many current national discussions, as well, which
have further raised the question, why major in English at all? Or, for that
matter, why major in any of the humanities? More immediately, my experience
introducing ePortfolios into my own courses has sharpened such questions even
further for me: How might we increase the number of students using ePortfolios?
Or, for that matter, why introduce ePortfolios into any of our literature
courses?
I explain the benefits of ePortfolios to my students in
terms of how they will eventually be able to showcase their skills and their
accomplishments more effectively. In developing strategies to that end, we
focus on two aspects of the showcase: students can improve the ways in which
they present their work, and they can also improve the actual work itself. These
are not mutually exclusive, of course. We can improve the ways in which we tell
our story at the same time as we can also improve the story that we have to
tell. An ePortfolio that does only one without the other will not be as
effective as it otherwise might.
As some voices within the national conversations make clear,
one significant attraction of the major in English is the classroom experience
itself, the opportunity to read and talk about literature. The enduring
popularity of reading groups and book clubs illustrates the lure that such
opportunities offer, whether to prospective majors or to people long after they
have left their undergraduate literature courses behind. But of course
participating in a reading group is not a career path, and so our majors also
wish to know: what has the program in Literature and Cultural Studies prepared
me to do after graduation?
While my work with our majors tends to focus on those in the
LCS program, I suspect that our undergraduates in the other two tracks have
similar concerns. And a complete answer to those concerns needs to consider not
just our individual courses but also our whole curricula. Our emphasis has
tended to be on the courses themselves, on the quality of the learning
experience within those individual courses. In similar fashion,
pedagogy-oriented faculty-development efforts have tended – here at UC as well
as in teaching/learning centers nationally – to focus on the individual course,
the extent to which the classroom approach, the assignments, and the evaluation
of those assignments are all aligned towards the learning outcomes for that
course. This alignment provides a crucial structure towards the quality of the
undergraduate experience, and that quality, in turn, plays a large role in our
ability to recruit new students, whether majors or non-majors. We can improve
the ways in which we tell our story by focusing on such highlights and
strengths.
If we are to improve the story that we have to tell,
however, we also need to put more emphasis on our curricula by designing
individual courses so that, in purposeful and integrated ways, they build upon
earlier courses and also build towards later courses. There is, obviously, a
trade-off here: we would no longer enjoy the same level of autonomy in
designing and teaching our courses as is currently the case. In return,
however, we would gain significantly more than any individual course, or
collection of courses, can accomplish in isolation. If the curriculum helps
students to integrate their academic experiences from one individual course and
classroom to the next, they also have a better chance to develop higher-order
intellectual skills. Those will be the skills that serve our students well once
they move on into their various career paths, but they will also put
better-prepared students into our classrooms while those students are still
moving through our programs.
In mentioning ePortfolios, then, I’m not suggesting that we
should all be integrating them into our courses. (I am, after all, retiring at
the end of this current semester.) Rather, and in a number of frustrating and
humbling ways, my experience with ePortfolios has brought home to me the very
limited and transitory nature of the work that I do within my own courses.
Those of my students who create ePortfolios, with very few exceptions, tend not
to continue maintaining them after the course is over. And the exceptions tend
to be the students in the RPW track who are also developing ePortfolios in
their other courses here.
My experience here corresponds with what I’m hearing from
national conversations, as well, and has implications for our departmental
discussions: unless we integrate our courses throughout our curricula more
thoroughly and purposefully, we will continue to limit the story that we have
to tell about our programs, the enrollment levels in our programs and our
courses, and our own level of satisfaction with students who don’t seem to have
the academic preparedness to do as well in our classes as we would wish.
-Wayne Hall
-Wayne Hall
