There has been a good bit of discussion lately about the recent piece in CCC about revamping first year composition as an introduction to writing studies, but I’ve actually been thinking about another piece in the same issue takes up the question, What are English majors for? The question comes at a good time for me, as we’ve been working on the revision our undergraduate curriculum for the last year or so, and it’s time to concretize the plans.

Much of our curriuclum revision stems from the experience of asking graduating English majors what they thought of the program and having them list a number of disconnected classes—“I took Shakespeare, Af-Am literature, a poetry class, etc.” There is little coherency and no sense of a trajectory that one takes through the program. To give the program more of a narrative arc we want to implement two seminar courses, one at the sophomore level and the second at the senior level—the idea is to create on- and off-ramps to the curriculum, an introduction to the major and a capstone experience.

Clearly, though, revising a curriculum in any significant way requires more than adding a couple of courses. In “What are English Majors For?” Thomas P. Miller and Brenda Jackson ask departments to transition from literary studies to literacy studies, opening paths for departments to focus on education, creative non fiction, media and other areas more relevant to students’ lives and the contemporary communications landscape. This makes good sense, and I hope that some of the changes we implement can move in these directions. Of course, local context is everything and the “let’s turn English into Communication Studies” approach is likely surely to be a non-starter here. In fact, one of my biggest concerns is that we will rearrange deck chairs and not do much to transform what it means to be an English major.

You can see some of the reshuffling in the goals behind the new curriculum. Roughly, we’re thinking students should

• develop a sense of the historicity of literary studies (old school),
  
• practice writing and revision of print essays and other forms of expression (new school),
  
• have in-depth exposure to several exemplary authors (old school),
  
• have a sense of major literary genres (with some emphasis on narrative and poetry) and a strong grasp of one or more specific genres (old school),
  
• understand a number of approaches to literary texts and representation (old and new school),
  
• understand the relationships between texts and historical and cultural situations (old and new school), and
  
• recognize aesthetic dimensions of works under study and identify connections between literature and their personal lives (old and new school).

Ideally, the on- and off-ramp courses would be developed around these goals. The tricky part in thinking through a revision, though, is figuring out what to do with the courses one takes in the middle of the English major. Right now, requirements essentially spread courses out chronologically and geographically, so students must take at least one pre sixteenth-century British literature course, one twentieth-century course, and so on. It looks like we will loosen some of these requirements but keep the general focus on time and place as an organizing principle. The challenge, then, is to layer over these requirements some additional criteria that can create a sense of narrative and coherency while opening avenues for pursuing the larger curricular goals and arriving at more significant transformations.

My response is to think about ways that tagging might possibly be used to reshape some of the offerings and the help students create connections within the array of courses that meet their needs. So, a course might be tagged British, Poetry, Theory, and Gender, to name some possibilities. The hope is that this might add more flexibility to the traditional ways of organizing the middle areas of the curriculum—not just time and place. Ultimately, though, I’d like the tags to do more in terms of transforming the curriculum. Faculty could extend their course designs by layering new categories over the existing, and admittedly constraining, containers. I’m imagining tags like Composition, Media, Education, Studio, and so on that would indicate different learning emphases and teaching models.

The challenge would be to limit the number of tags/categories so that a coherency can derive among related courses. What number of tags would allow connections to form among six or eight courses taken during a career? How many tags would be too many? What tags are essential for conserving the traditional values of an English major? What tags are likely to open avenues for transformation of the curriculum?

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