English literature and work-based learning: a pedagogical case study

Abstract

This paper discusses a pilot project held at Middlesex University to enhance students’ writing skills through literature teaching. It argues that literature teaching can offer a profound contribution to work-based learning and lifelong education: first, by showing students how effective arguments are constructed; second, by inspiring students to use their reading to improve their writing; third, by offering an ethical guide in the workplace and, broadly speaking, in all areas of life. Moreover, literature teaching should help students become more energized by the challenges of argument, contradictions and complexity, as well as provide them with the means to formulate and then trust their aesthetic judgement. Using literature as a pedagogical tool, teachers can inspire ‘educational connoisseurship’ in their students by teaching them to become active and autonomous, evaluative and critical agents in their own education. This paper presents the results of the pilot, showing the substantive contribution the study of certain essayists and novelists made to the students’ perceptions of what makes good writing, how they might replicate it and how literature can offer an ethical guide throughout their working lives. As a reiterative study which builds on similar research carried out at the University of Kent in 2010, this paper should further the arguments for a work-based learning programme that includes the study of literature.

Notes

1. By ‘ethical lessons’, I do not mean Eagleton’s pejorative sense of ‘a particular set of techniques and practices for the instilling of specific kinds of value, discipline, behaviour, and response in human subjects’ (1985–6: 96–97). I appreciate his argument that the consumption of literature that teaches students to be ‘sensitive’ and ‘reflective’ about ‘nothing’ is based on an ideology which deludes itself that literature is the key to ‘creative exploration, richness of personal response, and the rest of the familiar jargon’ (p. 99). By ‘ethical lessons’, I mean more Scholes’ exhortation to pursue truth and his emphasis on how a powerful text can shape human experience and promote critical thinking. By getting students to look critically at the cultural past, we ‘can help [them] to understand their current cultural situation’ (1991, p. 771).

2. Guillory (1993: x) argues that literary study is threatened by marginalization and that the aesthetic is on the wane: in the latter part of the 20th century the only ‘meaningful cultural capital’ is professional/technological knowledge. Now in the 21st century, it is incumbent on us who value literature to find ways of revitalising its study.

3. This course has now been developed into a series of workshops for Professional Doctoral candidates at the Institute for Work Based Learning and will now be a course offered to students from a major high-street bank.

4. In a broader sense, Sartre’s notion that critical reflection must be accompanied by action has immense significance in education. This implied transformative action is precisely what we work-based learning practitioners are asking from our students.

5. Discussed in my paper ‘The use of English language in the context of work based learning – a pedagogical case study’, Higher Education, Skills and Work Based Learning, March 2013.

6. The parallels between the 1980s situation and the current loss of public faith in the banking sector caused by recent scandals are self evident.

7. We missed an opportunity by neglecting to direct the students to the sexism of the piece, but perhaps the fact that no one mentioned it is intriguing: even in the twenty-first century, have we been culturally inured to some types of sexist language?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Angela Eastman

Christine Eastman is a senior lecturer at Middlesex University, London. Her focus is the integration of literature into a work-based learning curriculum, and she works with a number of high profile companies in the UK to help their employees improve their professional practice and reflect more effectively on their working lives.