Our department has been discussing a retreat, and though it will be difficult, I think it will be “for the best.” We face the basic disciplinary conflicts you might expect in a department with traditional literary stuies, rhetoric, and teacher education faculty. Traditional literary studies have been in decline here with an increasing number of preservice teachers and the inception of our professional writing major. It all came to a head this semester when two of our literary studies faculty retired and we elected to replace them with faculty in teacher education with a writing focus.

The switch was necessitated by an increasing demand for courses in writing and grammar. However, it is not quite that simple. The necessity was/is a product of a particular interpretation of NCATE requirements for teacher education. Now, I agree that it is important for preservice teachers to receive education in writing, and the requirement for this is fairly straightforward. But the type and number of writing/language courses that we require is another matter. In addition, we have technology courses for these students, but we could eliminate those course if technology was infused into the curriculum.

Ultimately, it is a lame excuse for a department to pawn off its responsibility for curriculum development on external requirements, especially when those requirements largely become a source of complaint for the faculty.

So our department needs to figure out where it is going and how it understands its relationship to the discipline at large (an understanding that needs to be inclusive of all our curriculum and faculty). Here’s my (relatively) succinct definition of English Studies: the investigation of writing (as both practice and artifact) with an emphasis on aesthetic (literary), rhetorical, peagogical, and cultural (political, ethical, etc.) concerns. English Studies employs a range of interdisciplinary methods including Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. It’s fundamental, paradigmatic question might be phrased as how/why does writing shape (and get shaped by) subjectivity and communal relations?

In literary studies this question might take the form of asking how a particular poem affected students in a class or examining what Shakespeare can tell us about the conception of gender in the early Modern period. In rhetoric it might be commenting on a student essay during workshop or an analysis of economic class in contemporary political discourse. In education it might mean learning to respond to student writing or critiquing the values behind different pedagogical approaches.

Anyway, I think some definition similar to this will be necessary for us to stop seeing one another as enemies and seeing one another as friends or at least friendly rivals.