Month: March 2018

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Reflections on the Imagine! Festival of Ideas and Politics, Belfast, 12-18 March 2018

Patricia Ferguson

I have four days in Belfast and a whirlwind of events, and those are only a dozen chosen from more than eighty on offer, and of those dozen, space available here to discuss only four or five. First of all ‘Belfast as a Restorative City’, a title which expresses the theme of the whole festival. ‘“Imagine!” What does that word bring to mind?’ asked the presenter. ‘John Lennon’s song, of course’, we said. So then, let us imagine Belfast – Belfast of the Troubles – as a place where the police don’t stop and search, they stop and chat, where schools don’t have a discipline policy, they have a relationship policy. A relationship policy? This is something rich and strange to me who has painful memories of the ‘tawse’, an all too common punishment in Scottish schools until the 1980s. These good things are beginning to happen although, as we were reminded at another event (‘Equality: A Question of Attitude?’), the tribal divide with its two completely different worldviews is centuries deep, and political parties thrive on conflict. The students from Liverpool who interviewed residents on the Shankill Road found not one respondent who favoured the idea of a Restorative City, but their interviewees were all of an older generation, and the project for Integrated Schools continues to thrive. As Koulla Yiasouma, the Children’s Commissioner, pointed out (‘Ask the BreXpert’), Northern Ireland now has a whole generation of young people who have no personal memory of the Troubles, and they say to that older generation: please, don’t let Brexit bring them back.

How do you change a punitive mindset into a restorative one? Can the answer to this question be something as simple as, for example, establishing Friendship Clubs (there’s one on the Crumlin Road) with language groups, walks, board games, food? – Ah! Food! Imagine! is a festival of hospitality as much as of ‘ideas and politics’. I heard a woman mutter, ‘You don’t get this where I come from’, as we tucked into ‘The People’s Breakfast’ on Democracy Day. The Belfast Friendship Club certainly thinks so. It meets every Thursday at the Common Grounds Café: ‘fifty people, twenty-five nationalities, one vision’, according to the Café’s website. The answer, in a word, is the craic, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as that ‘enjoyable time spent with other people, especially when the conversation is entertaining and funny’, which is part of the Irish psyche. The café is a remarkable place, carrying the conversation through an intricate network of barriers. It’s run by City Church Belfast, staffed largely by volunteers, many of whom are refugees or asylum seekers, and gives all its profits to charity. ‘Can Belfast Become a City of Sanctuary?’ was held there; its participants much encouraged by Nuala McAllister, the current Lord Mayor, and her vision of the city as ‘Global Belfast’.

It’s important to remember that underneath all this progress with the twenty-five nationalities lies that hitherto intractable tribal divide. Has it become possible, in these days, to bridge a chasm as profound as this? Perhaps it has: as part of its Oral History Project, The Open University gave us the event called ‘Books that bend bars’, in which three former political prisoners spoke about the books and the Open University courses that had inspired them and given them hope. The reasons for their imprisonment were not trivial: Billy Hutchinson had murdered two Catholics, Jennifer McCann had shot a police officer, Séanna Walsh had been caught making bombs; yet here they were, Loyalist and Republicans sharing the same platform, telling such similar stories of understanding, as they read and studied, that the conflict must cease from violence and become political. All three are graduates of The Open University, and are now prominent in public life. They read authors such as Karl Marx, Thomas Paine, and J. S. Mill. Jennifer read Margaret Ward’s Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism, and has become a fierce defender of women’s rights. Séanna read Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, that burning exposé of the trauma of colonisation; he would have read in Sartre’s Preface that: ‘if this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves. In order to free themselves they even massacre each other’.1  And so it proved. Musing about this, I realise the inadequacy of using that old metaphor about bridging chasms. Billy Hutchinson is on record as saying that he does not regret his violent past because it ‘contributed to preventing a united Ireland’, while to Séanna Walsh of Sinn Féin, the Westminster government represents a colonial power to which no allegiance is due.2  Sooner or later the bridge will break, because no matter how heartfelt their desire for peace, neither will give way on that one fundamental point which would secure it.

There do exist, however, some who will give way, and it seems to me that the ultimate hope rests with them. I am thinking of people like Tony Macaulay, whose book Paperboy featured in another Open University event called ‘Reading in Conflict’. For this occasion we gathered in Waterstone’s excellent café (more food and drink!) where we discussed extracts from the works of writers who had lived through the death and destruction wrought by conflict. Paperboy describes, in the most engaging way, Macaulay’s life as a child growing up in West Belfast at the start of the Troubles. He too in adult life, became active in the peace process, and what he chose to do is truly remarkable: in 1985 he and his wife, Protestants from the Shankill Road, moved to New Lodge, a nationalist area nicknamed the Murder Mile, and set up a youth club. Their adventures are told in his new book Little House on the Peace Line: Living and Working as a Pacifist on Belfast’s Murder Mile.

‘Imagine there’s no countries’, wrote John Lennon, ‘It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ and no religion too’. Macaulay is a religiously minded person, as am I, but I don’t think he would be disconcerted by those words. Lennon himself said in an interview that what he meant was ‘no denominations of religion – not without religion but without this my God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing’, and then one could indeed ‘imagine all the people living life in peace’.3  A hard sell, but essential I think, and the theme underpinning the whole festival. I shall certainly be back next year, and back to Belfast long before that. I am just beginning a PhD study on the reading experiences of Belfast’s own C.S. Lewis, who would have loved this festival and never forgot that he was from Ireland, and so I finish this post with words that he wrote to his friend Don Giovanni Calabria in August 1953: ‘Tomorrow I am crossing over (if God so have pleased) to Ireland my birthplace and dearest refuge so far as charm of landscape goes, and temperate climate, although most dreadful because of the strife, hatred and often civil war between dissenting faiths. [ … ] Let us, however, with mutual prayers pray with all our power for that charity which “covers a multitude of sins”’.4  And to that, let us all say, ‘Amen’.

Notes:

1    Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 17.
2    Sam McBride, Belfast News Letter, 19 March 2014 <https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/my-murder-of-two-catholics-helped-prevent-united-ireland-pup-leader-billy-hutchinson-1-5945099> [accessed 27 March 2018]
3    David Sheff, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, ed. by G. Barry Golson, new edn (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2000), p. 212.
4    Clive Staples Lewis, Collected Letters, ed. by Walter Hooper, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000-06), iii, p. 358.

 

Patricia Ferguson is about to start a PhD in English with The Open University. She is researching the reading habits of C. S. Lewis and his brother, Warren Lewis. She is a longstanding volunteer on the UK Reading Experience Database project.

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Digital Habitus and Institutional Responsibility

Suman Gupta

Pedagogic Context

I continue here with the argument of the earlier posting on Direct and Mediated Contact in Literary Pedagogy. I do so at a similar level of generality, without as yet nuancing the argument along the lines of Richard’s Response (for which I am grateful).

Effective teaching and learning of literature – and of other Humanities areas – depend upon a shared awareness of the pedagogic context among teachers and students. In other words, teachers and students need common reference points for the cultural context within and with reference to which pedagogy is undertaken. Conventionally this has been ensured by direct contact, grounded in the culture of the classroom or peer group, of a university, of a geopolitical location, and so on. When pedagogy is undertaken through mediated contact, typically through digital means, those conventional markers of the pedagogic context are dispersed. Each student and teacher meeting on a forum may be located in vastly different cultural and linguistic contexts, without the conventionally shared reference points to inform their pedagogic engagement. Hence a question: in mediated-contact literary pedagogy then, what features of a shared culture could inform teaching and learning? It is necessary to pause on this question instead of rushing into ‘strategic transformations’ from direct- to mediated-contact pedagogy. That was the gist of the argument made earlier.

The obvious answer to that question is: literary pedagogy would need to draw upon the shared culture afforded by the internet, the online forum, the digital form themselves – that is, the culture that has developed around the means via which mediated-contact pedagogy is conducted. Let’s call this the culture of a digital habitus. There are complex negotiations of linguistic, regional and social difference involved in the digital habitus. Numerous scholarly publications have explored these, and research is ongoing. There is, however, comparatively little research into the particular sort of digital habitus of interest here: the digital pedagogic habitus, within which mediated-contact teaching and learning is done. As observed in the previous posting, the drivers for scholarship have focused on how to do it (hurriedly and cheaply) rather than on what it involves for disciplinary practices (thinkingly). Scholarship into the digital pedagogic habitus wherein literary teaching and learning might be effectively done is very thin indeed. That could be a meaningful dimension of the otherwise nebulous buzzwords ‘digital humanities’ so beloved of university managers, research funders and HE policy makers.

Contemplating literary studies apropos of the digital pedagogic habitus necessarily calls for some grasp of the architecture of that habitus. That is, teachers and students need a shared sense of this habitus’ underpinning technological and sociological principles, the various agencies involved in it, its economic arrangements, the legal regimes governing it, the distinctive communicative practices it has engendered, etc. These are yet to be inculcated within literary pedagogy to any significant degree. But emerging scholarly frameworks could be productively recruited for the purpose, especially from analyses of ‘the posthuman’ and of e-literature ….

… I had intended to set forth tentatively in that direction for this posting. But I took a break and went for a leisurely chat instead with a former student in the university café. Several years of direct-contact pedagogy preceded these regular meetings, liberated now from pedagogic aims and objectives. These meetings are rituals of friendship now, and I look forward to them. So, I put the above thoughts to my former student, and he raised a few posers, and I mulled them, and he dissected my mullings, and a bee was set buzzing in my bonnet. The idiomatic bee hovers before the project of exploring the digital pedagogic habitus, and this posting is addressed to its buzzing.

Data Matters

The exchanges involved in direct-contact teaching allow for necessary transience and forgetting, much as in everyday exchanges – as in friendly conversations in a café. The detritus of irate remarks, inadvertent and misjudged comments, ill-expressed sentiments, lapses of memory, errors, talk at cross purposes, incomprehension and so on are largely negotiated out of existence through communicative exchanges to leave teachers and learners with a mutual crystallization of what is relevant. Space is made for these mishaps to be accommodated and to be forgotten gradually in the process of direct-contact pedagogy. There is an agreement between teachers and students and the institutions providing the pedagogic space that those mishaps are inevitable, and overcoming them is what teaching and learning consist in. It is also understood that pre-agreed junctures will be appointed wherein a record of performance will be knowingly obtained – that’s the assessment juncture. The periods, contents and rules of assessment are clear to all parties. Performance is evaluated at the pre-agreed junctures. The rest of the learning process, with its inevitable mishaps, remain unrecorded. In brief, a ‘right to forget’ some parts of the process of direct-contact pedagogy is built into educational programmes – that is, a right for students and teachers. Those unrecorded parts are left, as everyday conversations are, to the vagaries of living memory. This foreknowledge gives both students and teachers confidence in the integrity of the programme they engage in.

Mediated-contact pedagogy through digital interfaces necessarily comes with the possibility that nothing will be forgotten, that all exchanges will be recorded. Digitization is for recording and is in itself a formation of record. It is a mode of disposing all information that passes into its form such that it can be easily stored, retrieved, and transferred. Thus every text that is digitized, every exchange on a digital forum, anything that is input or uploaded in any programme (whether networked or in-house, publicly accessible or secured) is immediately a record, already recorded and retrievable. Mediated-contact pedagogy takes place, then, in an environment of potentially total recall and absolute accountability. The only kind of forgetting and transience that is possible is by the voluntary act of deletion; and it is also possible that any part of that record can be modified by a voluntary act. However, in mediated-contact pedagogy the ability to delete or modify the record of exchanges is largely not in the hands of the main digital interlocutors, the students and teachers. It is usually in the hands of the institutions that administer pedagogic programmes: university managers and those who maintain the university’s servers. The digital record of what teachers and students say and write is not owned by them, it is owned by universities – and it is a total record that the university, as an institution, can use in various ways. It is exploitable data.

From a student’s perspective, two kinds of data can be elicited by the university from the record that accrues through mediated-contact pedagogy. On the one hand, data to profile each student individually can be obtained. This data may potentially incorporate information which the student didn’t intend for recording or would prefer to be forgotten. On the other hand, data to profile cohorts of students collectively in relation to various factors may be obtained. This sort of data appears to be of little concern to students since individuals are anonymized or lost in aggregates. However, such data may be used in ways which do concern all students. For instance, such data may be used to design or engineer the performance of cohorts in ways which are not obvious in the ostensible rules and mutual agreements of assessment. Such data may also be used to structure public perceptions, design entry and learning pathways, massage the student experience, and attract investments in various ways which neither students nor teachers may be aware of – may not consent to if they were.

Insofar as a student may exercise some prerogative on data relating to herself individually, the prerogative is usually legally enjoined by requirements of ‘information disclosure’, erasure upon request, or consent for use, and a promise of maintaining the security of such data. This calls for considerable awareness of what sort of individual data may be generated and held, and anticipation of how it may be used. Active intervention from the student is necessary to find out what individual data is held and seek its removal, akin to actively unticking an option which has been ticked in advance by a service provider.

Insofar as collective data are held there are no significant legal provisions to enable students – or teachers – to be informed. It is considered that such data are the university’s business and property.

In all cases, much depends on students trusting the integrity of the university apropos of the use of such data, in the absence of any proprietor-like control on their own part. However, universities are now necessarily rival institutions in many respects, competing with each other to meet targets in the ‘student market’ and vying for limited resources from funders. Some sceptical students might feel that competitive interests could possibly supersede responsibilities to students or teachers.

Similar considerations apply regarding such data from the teacher’s perspective.

These are significant considerations since the integrity of any educational programme depends upon mutual understanding between students and teachers, clarity regarding the assessment process, and conviction in transparent institutional support. Students need to feel they are in possession of their learning to be able to engage in the pedagogic process with conviction. It is critically important to institute procedures for ensuring that the integrity of the pedagogic process is unquestionable at the commencement of any programme with mediated-contact pedagogy. That involves giving comprehensive advance information for students and teachers on data generation and usage, and making robust arrangements for protecting students’ (and teachers’) interests. External regulation, audits and open-to-public reports on how institutions gather and use data – both individual and collective – would help garner the confidence of students in mediated-contact pedagogy. Such regulation is also necessary for quality assurance of educational programmes in the digital habitus.

Insofar as mediated-contact literary teaching and learning goes, wherein the digital pedagogic habitus needs to be explicitly in view, understanding the ins and outs of data elicitation and usage is as much a scholarly obligation as a practical necessity. That’s where engagement with the culture of the digital pedagogic habitus could begin.

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Opening the Curriculum: A brief personal history

Dennis Walder, Emeritus Professor of Literature

It was the mid 1970s, I’d left South Africa, and was a Research Fellow at Edinburgh University, doing a PhD on Dickens and teaching there to supplement my income.  I had heard about a radical new university offering degrees for mature, unqualified students, and when my friend the historian Angus Calder offered to let me sit in on one of his tutorials, I jumped at the chance.

I was amazed by the enthusiasm and motivation, as well as life experience, of Angus’s students, compared with my Edinburgh University first years.  Conventional university teaching seemed just that – conventional; and, what’s more, it served a very limited section of the population.  At the time, only 4% of school leavers were admitted to university, and almost everyone seemed well satisfied with that. But I was not.

So I applied for and became a tutor on the 19th century Novel course, which, unlike elsewhere at the time, assumed that you should study the novel as a European phenomenon, including texts in translation. After being appointed Arts Staff Tutor in Scotland and meeting the course team led by Arnold Kettle, I began to contribute more and more, since I was a Nineteenth Century Novel specialist.

I was seconded to Walton Hall to help revise and rewrite the (already hugely popular) course, and when a post fell vacant, I applied for and was appointed Lecturer and became chair of the new novel course team which, in those days (the 1970s-80s), included central academics, staff tutors, editors, production advisors, administrators, BBC colleagues and external assessors, all of whom would vigorously contribute to discussion and debate, with the result that our course materials – published booklets, radio and TV programs and summer schools – were of the highest quality.

The course team was and still is even in its slimmed-down versions the key, and I remain suspicious of attempts by other universities (increasingly nowadays) to offer distance material without this kind of input.  My own former Edinburgh PhD supervisor once confessed that he took our materials with him when preparing to teach in the USA; it was a common experience to find well-thumbed copies of our texts in other university libraries and on their lecturers’ shelves.

Acceptance of academic quality was more formally assured by being part of the national external examining system: we examined elsewhere and, more importantly, colleagues from other universities examined with us.  I recall one external exclaiming at a Board: ‘I agree this should be a first, but . . . perhaps not a transcendental first!’ Yet our classifications were increasingly accepted by other universities as well as by employers, irrefutable evidence that the OU was a ‘proper’ university, our graduates as good as any, often indeed – given their motivation and hard work over many years – better.

The Arts Foundation courses (for which I wrote) and which were repeatedly revised, seemed our most radical departure from the traditional curriculum, truly inter- rather than simply multidisciplinary, and a key to all the other Arts courses. The Literature curriculum was relatively traditional, perhaps to ensure its status, perhaps because of the orthodox backgrounds of the teaching staff (although Kettle had taught in East Africa).

I had long been impressed by the writings of former Anglophone colonies, and had begun publishing on South African drama, especially Athol Fugard (I wrote the first book on his work), and I proposed including a play by him and two black actors on a new Modern European Drama course. It did not strictly fill the bill, but after much debate the team agreed to include it as ‘political drama’, beside Brecht and John Arden, and in 1977 Sizwe Bansi is Dead became the first of the ‘New Writings’ to enter the curriculum. The student response, especially to the TV version, was tremendous.

This strengthened my resolve to propose other ‘post-colonial’ (as they were starting to be called) texts for the curriculum.  Our new third-level ‘Literature in the Modern World’ course offered the opportunity. With Angus Calder, Dinah Birch and Richard Allen, we wrote ‘blocks’ of teaching material on poetry, prose and drama from West Africa, the Caribbean and India, adopting the phrase ‘literatures in English’ instead of English Literature, to encourage an awareness of growing debates about the origin and nature of contemporary literary studies, and to prevent writings from abroad being ghettoised. We developed a related summer school at York, and I edited a reader of critical essays and documents, widely used outside the OU and revised for a second edition which remains in print with sales of over 60,000.

‘Literature in the Modern World’ was four years in the making and served some 10,000 students before being replaced by another Twentieth Century Literature course, chaired by Suman Gupta, which continued to highlight current debates, while incorporating texts dealing with contemporary society, now inevitably including writings from beyond as well as within the UK, by migrants as well as by long-established citizens.  In terms of quality as well as relevance, the work of authors as diverse as Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer, Grace Nichols and Abdulrazak Gurnah was always going to have an impact.

At the same time, I joined History colleagues to set up a ‘project’-based ‘fourth-level’ course, with several lines involving minimal teaching material but substantial reading and set texts, aimed at bridging undergraduate and postgraduate levels (the MA was still in its infancy) through more independent student work. We taught the courses we were creating, believing it had always been a blunder to allow fulltime OU academics to create courses and appoint and monitor tutors (ALs) without teaching face-to-face themselves, and not only at occasional day and summer schools. The result was hugely rewarding for all concerned, producing students who did go on to postgraduate work, although numbers were inevitably limited by the nature of the provision.

Yet with the Department personnel expanding under my headship to include fellow experts like Robert Fraser, David Johnson and Susheila Nasta, it had become possible for a wider range of texts, voices and countries to be included on my project course (‘Post-Colonial Literatures in English’).  At the same time, while involved in setting up a Singapore version of the Arts program, I engaged with Ban Kah Choon of the National University there to write a Singapore version of the course focusing on local authors and texts to ensure their voices were dominant, not just ours from the UK. Without a course team, the results were uneven: it was difficult to replicate the depth and accessibility of the UK-based course.

University teaching material should always be informed by research, and it seemed natural to set up a research group while developing these initiatives – although as one colleague remarked at the time, mine was at first a group of one.  I was not fazed, and the Postcolonial Research Group has now survived for many years, organizing seminars, raising substantial funds from UK research bodies, and creating a Departmental culture in touch with developments in this still vital area of present-day literary study, whatever it is called – ‘world literatures’ is a recent favourite. The skills involved in critical reading are transferable, and the point remains to highlight the issues raised by any study of literature with texts suggestive of experiences beyond narrowly-defined European national cultures, through teaching that recognizes the claims of history and politics as well as aesthetics.  Or so I believe.