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English Department at NIU

Northern Illinois University

John V. Knapp
“Wandering between Two Worlds”: The MLA and English Department Follies
 
 

John V. Knapp, “‘Wandering between Two Worlds’: The MLA and English Department Follies”
A discussion reviewing a new book from the Modern Language Association, Preparing a Nation’s Teachers, with a focus on English department programs, interspersed with comments on a 1997 issue of PMLA (112.1) devoted to “The Teaching of Literature.” I argue that the traditional separation of literary study plus theory from its practical application in teaching at both the secondary-school and university levels is itself a theoretical model whose reconsideration is long overdue. This model has kept teaching, research, and the teaching of teachers separate, a triple boundary across which few professors of literature move both easily and frequently. Thus the effective separation of the English faculty and the Education faculty during (a) the methods class and (b) student teaching may be found to one degree or another in all of the English programs being surveyed by the MLA. Some departments try to relieve their guilt feelings about this state of affairs by pointing to the supposed “transfer” of skills learned in the college literature classroom to novice secondary teachers. None of the programs surveyed, however, specifies what those skills are or describes how such transference is made, in spite of major investigations of skill transferability in recent research on education. The MLA models confine their programmatic descriptions to courses taken and books taught. Further, no mention is made anywhere in Preparing of the personal qualities of the teacher-trainee, or of what a good English teacher-education program can do to select students appropriate for adolescent literary education. I then go on briefly to detail selected skills in reading poetry and teaching literature, and conclude by discussing some issues (TA training, textbook analysis, and others) that the MLA publications fail to address.
 
 

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