Best of luck with this project. The unfortunate curricular revisions I've witnessed have usually operated by departments splitting or faculty leaving or untenured faculty being driven out. Those would have been at places like Albany and Georgia Tech. Here at Cortland we have revised the curriculum by essentially agreeing to not speak with one another. I wish you better luck.

I like the idea of tagging, especially since tags can be embody a range of dissensual meanings. For example, tagging a course "composition" might mean a focus on grammar or on the writing process or discourse analysis and so on.

You ask the question "What is English?" I don't have an answer, but I know we're not a discipline. That is, we do not, in my view, share any common paradigm that would link English folks together but distinguish us from philosophy or history or communications or others in the humanities. As such, if we are going to operate as if we are a discipline, I think it must be through dissensus. The trick then would be to help students understand dissensus, as well as why it is valuable to learn literacy in such a context.