Our three, fifteen-minute presentations take different tacks through this complex conversation. We then extend our title’s question to the audience, inviting them into discussion.
In “Shifting from Coverage to Practice,” Sarah Banting (presenter and presider) proposes a way forward. She reviews scholarship advocating a focus on student performances (Smith; Corrigan; Chick; Linkon) rather than on literatures-read, and examines degree requirements in Canada, commenting on what is—and is not—explicitly required.
Much of enduring value would be retained, Banting argues, if we shifted how requirements identify the core of our degrees—and much would be gained. Such a shift would displace British and American historical periods and canons from their position as the degree’s apparent core. But it would not prevent us teaching Milton, Austen, or the Western. Rather, this shift would allow us to identify, instead, our actual, contemporary reasons for teaching such histories and texts—the opportunities these texts offer students to perform highly-valued practices, i.e. researching historical contexts, interpreting texts in those contexts, participating in longstanding conversations, analyzing literary responses to genre, and critiquing represented ideological, social, and material formations (see Wilder; Wolfe and Wilder). Finally, Banting indicates how the same shift might prompt more substantial responses to anti-racist (Young, Inoue), decolonizing, and Indigenous critiques of our curriculum (Episkenew; Hanson; Justice).
In “The Degree of English,” Myles Chilton (presenter) takes up James English’s call for us “to begin paying more attention to the forms our discipline is taking” beyond its “traditional Anglophone and European base” (English 191). From his own base in Japan, Chilton thinks through how the movement of teachers and pedagogies across borders and away from the Anglosphere reframes discussions about what constitutes an English degree.
Chilton explores crucial questions prompted by these movements. To what extent are Anglo-American disciplinary conceptions challenged by their import/export to regions where not only linguistic difference, but also social, political and cultural histories impact institutions, teachers and students? How can the need for language instruction be blended with the goal of teaching literature? What can faculty trained in non-Anglophone countries contribute to English pedagogy for the Anglosphere’s increasingly polyglot student body? To what degree can Indigenous modes or genres of writing be decoupled from English academic writing conventions in a global academic context? And, finally, is there a case to be made for the importance of an English canon in these contexts, where it retains status, or is it better to speak of a multiplicity of localized canons that arise in response to situated concerns about culture, curriculum and politics?
In “Imagining (Trans)pacific Turns,” Guy Beauregard (presenter) asks how the emerging field of transpacific studies (Nguyen and Hoskins; Yoneyama; Suzuki and Bahng; Suzuki) could help us to rethink what an English degree should teach. Beauregard draws on the work of scholar, poet, and educator Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, whose Sweat and Salt Water (2021) offers a range of writerly approaches to teaching, program building, and thinking with and across Pacific spaces. Beauregard’s paper foregrounds the need to imagine and teach (trans)pacific turns now. Doing so should not involve simply seeking an elusive form of “coverage” (impossible, as Teaiwa notes, in a space with an estimated 1200 Indigenous languages and a vast range of colonial, settler colonial, and neocolonial encounters). Instead, Beauregard argues, we might foreground what Erin Suzuki evocatively calls “ocean passages” which encompass both “movement[s] through, in addition to travel across, the ocean” and—drawing on our disciplinary strengths in English—engagement with textual passages that have emerged from “a range of cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts.” Doing so may enable us to better understand how “This ocean/ Still/ Has much to teach [us]” (Teaiwa).