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THE undergraduate and graduate curricula in foreign language departments are, in many institutions, overdue for redefinition. Since the canon wars starting in the late 1970s, language requirements have gone through at least two rounds of cuts; literature courses in foreign languages and English alike have moved away from various traditional canons or great-books lists toward courses of theoretical or popular interest; linguistics has gone into abeyance or migrated into anthropology and speech communication.
This shift has led us to a mood of embattlement and to a pattern of reaction about curricular change rather than to a substantive rethinking and retrenchment of our professions. Our present rhetoric about the embattled position of our disciplines seems all too often to be what Jay Haley called “the power tactics of Jesus Christ,” a way of asserting individual interests and upholding traditions for their own sake, and doing both at the expense of developing alternate futures for our departments and our disciplines. Nonetheless, I believe that it is indeed possible to rethink curricula within a framework that reaffirms the strengths of a curriculum in foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics—as well as in the humanities in general.1
Such an active and affirmative framework is necessary if our fields are to grow along with the requirements placed on them by scholars, teachers, and administrators. As I argue below, a department or program taking such a framework seriously can create not only new curricula but also new professionals who can actively cultivate the new gardens needed—professionals who can restore the credibility of study of foreign languages, literatures, and cultures.
Various factors have been adduced as causing the deterioration of the humanities’ traditional role in the college and university curriculum: inadequate high schools, multiculturalism, corporate administrators, or the mass media. Within individual departments, age, attrition, and institutional demographics or focus have forced many departments to change as the World War II generation retires and the Vietnam generation rises to senior ranks under conditions considerably more challenging than any earlier ones.
It is all too human to consider change negative in such situations, where various ill-defined parties—the they—pick on the us. Such attitudes about the humanities’ situation, however, are nothing new, given that we are in our second quarter century of whining that the barbarians are at the gate. The fact of existence for all postsecondary education is that students are older, less predominantly white, less predominantly male, less European-oriented, and more media savvy than ever before. In this sense, we are not in a dilemma; we are simply in a new situation.
In the same vein, it is time to implement a reality check about the loss of traditional identities. We have, for example, largely forgotten that our cherished traditions of literary studies are to a large part artifacts of two world wars, forced migrations, and assimilationist tendencies of the mass media—our own mental celebration of national literatures from elite cultures, normative literacy, Académie Française grammaticality, and an almost total disregard for the mechanisms through which these cultures are produced, guaranteed, and distributed. If the Harvard curriculum defined the educated person for the first half of the twentieth century, the Norton anthologies (or the Legard et Michaud anthologies or the Reclams Universalbibliothek or the Péliade) did the same for the second half, defining the great literature (note, not the “great books” that were the older classical curriculum), often to oppose objectionable bloc politics. Thus American Germanists and Slavists preserved a vision of German and Slavic cultures that the Nazi barbarians had almost eradicated (if, indeed, these cultures had ever existed); francicité posited various definitions of French identity that kept Paris as a central reference point; students of Chinese literature preserved classical Chinese in the face of the ongoing Cultural Revolution.
The traditions of great literature favored in such initiatives do indeed include well-crafted and sometimes politically significant masterpieces, but to deny that these choices are artifacts of specific social and political currents, by no means eternal, is simple folly. In turn, the tools evolved to deal with this normative great literature (a specific set of tools for approaching texts, textuality, intertextuality, culture, values, and communication) seem considerably less than compelling once canons of texts drawn up to support other values began to be accepted. Today, it takes an effort of will to affirm the tools of the older generation (e.g., close readings, phonological analysis, prosody) within the constraints of new literary studies (e.g., poststructuralist or postcolonial studies, identity politics, the pedagogy of the oppressed). The result of these unassimilated changes is often disarray from within and a loss of face without. To the public, the Lionel Trillings, Erich Hellers, or Ernst Cassirers of the earlier generations, eager to tend their gardens and invite others in, have yielded to Harold Bloom, railing that Shakespeare is still relevant (while ignoring all the films). Within the academy, there are small bright spots of curricular rethinking,2 but few steps have been taken as healthy renovation rather than as reaction.
It is, I believe, time to replan and replant our gardens, to look at the set of strategies that can facilitate evolutionary change—positive action that furthers our causes. My assertion stems from my own experience. Coming from private undergraduate and graduate institutions as a student, I am a faculty member at the archetypal mega-university with students on the undergraduate level who have enjoyed various types of preparation to achieve their top percentile ranking. I have participated in two undergraduate and two graduate curricular reforms, each of which has taught me something about how a department can restructure its curriculum for the benefit of its faculty members and students alike and with full respect for the opportunities of the home institution.
The most important lesson is that global reform may be desirable but that it can best be achieved in a series of local reforms that can take us across barriers of generations and demographic groups. The reforms that the younger generation needs, however, require a new mind-set, which begins with a blank slate and casts away all those little voices that prescribe what a program should be doing or should be teaching, if only the barbarians were not at the doors. But in committing to building, almost any faculty or student body can become elite in its own way—if it is willing to look hard at itself.
Most change is, however, taken on without anybody’s really thinking through the consequences. I have, for example, heard from another institution the story of a colleague in a less commonly taught language, specializing in an older period of literature not very popular in the bigger picture of things. In that colleague’s home setting, the natural public for offerings in that area is one undergraduate course a year and one group of graduate student conscripts every second or third year. To fill the gap between those expectations and an employment contract, that colleague has proudly taken on the business section of his foreign language and now is going around the nation telling younger colleagues in the research area to do something similar to “make yourselves indispensable.” At first glance that solution sounds noble; then one discovers that this instructor has never read any of the literature or attended a workshop on teaching language for special purposes, doesn’t like modern culture or business, and has little sympathy for corporations. All in all, he has presented his department with a weak suit, no matter what the claims of providing service might be, to say nothing of the dampening effect on the profession as a whole when a field with a noble heritage has been surrendered to the barbarians because of the corporate university. Yes, the business section needs to be taught, but not by somebody with that attitude or with that lack of respect for what the choice might mean for the rest of the department—damage to scholarship and to the department alike.
A better solution is to rethink where an older literature can fit in a particular institutional climate. Here at the University of Texas, our medievalists and philologists have created an environment of support for their areas, designing popular courses on the Celts, the Vikings, medieval saints, the Arthurian materials, and the Sami—courses that all fill university writing and distribution requirements. Students in these courses sometimes go back to take course work in the individual languages involved; those who want to specialize can engage in trailer courses. What is crucial for the future of medieval studies is that such lower- and upper-division courses introduce philology, mythology, courtly literature, and the work involved in this particular kind of textual archaeology. Virtually all these courses are twists on great-books courses, with cultural and linguistic studies added to more traditional aesthetic ones. Our undergraduate students are introduced to the existence of medieval studies, our beginning graduate students have more introductory-level content courses that they, too, can take, and our faculty gets to constantly reengage with its favorite texts.
If medievalists are in a smaller faculty that requires them to stay engaged with the language program rather than offer electives for the college, why not put a modern French rendition of a troubadour song into the curriculum where the first-year textbook takes you to Provence? Such choices create a positive climate for learning and teaching, offering chances early on to catch the minds and hearts of students, not just their enrollment numbers. It is probably true that the average student entering college doesn’t realize that the Middle Ages happened before 1800—but most students have seen The Lord of the Rings and so are conceptually ready to accept what Tolkien based his world on.
These innovations, however, can create problems for others in the programs if they are not undertaken in the spirit of cowork, in a definite series of stages.
Stage 1: Create a situation of enlightened self-interest. The first step in designing a curriculum requires what is commonly referred to as “identifying resources.” That is, a group must think speculatively about the next decade and then agree to ask and answer questions like the following:
So in providing answers to that list of questions, I am asking faculty members to interrogate their own likes and dislikes to uncover what skill bundles, research and writing abilities, and commitment are available to base a curriculum on—a base to replace more traditional inventories stressing field coverage or other arbitrary norms. Keep in mind at all points in your thinking and deliberations that Renaissance literature or border culture or resistance literature is not in itself valuable, just as generative grammar, fluent Russian, or any other of our cherished research specialties is not. This kind of honesty about what a field contributes to the overall educational experience of a program or an institution will involve the faculty’s willingness to rethink the boundaries of what a particular field means and to open up its definitions of its common intellectual property. Such honesty can allow a healthy curriculum to result, one allowing for growth, change, and flexibility in materials and for the faculty members involved.
All plans will change, to be sure, but we must develop a core curriculum by making reasonable demands on ourselves as professionals and teachers alike—by accommodating what we want and need to do while working toward a structured educational experience for students. What comes next in a curricular reform? Several stages, each aimed at building coherency out of the resources identified in stage 1:
Stage 2: Identify whom you are working with. Situate your intended reforms within your institution’s mission and known student bodies. For an example: the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas changed the study of Dutch, Yiddish, and the Scandinavian languages into one-year intensive programs instead of more conventional two-year sequences. A student survey confirmed what we thought we knew: students taking those languages had special motivation or were taking them as second foreign languages, that is, they were not the conventional students taking foreign languages to satisfy their two-year language requirements. Allowing them a one-year intensive program worked out positively: students finished their requirements early, which enabled them to undertake study abroad more easily, and faculty members were freed up to teach content courses instead of an underenrolled second-year course. Identifying our public instead of relying on our assumptions led us to an elegant solution.
Stage 3: Define appropriate outcomes for your program, institution, faculty, and students. Define the set of content areas, language, writing, and research skills that your degree programs can reasonably be expected to fill, in terms of available resources. That is, create strategic compromises that take into account your ideals, what you are able and willing to teach, and what you can require of students. The idea is to make the most of resources and opportunities for all concerned.
Stages 4 and 5: Resequence learning and optimalize curricular sequences. Break the outcomes specified in stage 3 into levels and then see what kinds of exercises or readings can be inserted into existing course frameworks to make the expectations placed on students lead up to those outcomes. Also identify what courses need to be rethought in terms of skills levels and contents. This means that some favorite habits will be given up, but every exclusion must be seen as preparing an inclusion that will make teaching and learning more coherent. Note, too, that such a template for an initiative that restructures courses coherently can easily be presented to deans for support or rewards. With coherent plans for revisions of individual courses and sequences in place, coherent plans for work and assistance can be evolved--from course release, library holdings, or computers to help by work-study students in photocopying and the like.
Stage 6, the sine qua non: Test outcomes and publicize them. Novelty brings energy and students to any course sequence over the short run, but innovation needs to be benchmarked and assessed over the long haul if it is to be judged effective. Markers for success can be found in student achievement and satisfaction, faculty satisfaction and training, and alumni surveys. If your institution values publishing or professional activity as much as it does teaching, document the stages in your revision and its outcomes, and have faculty members write up outcomes for professional journals, talk to local professional organizations, give workshops on how these things are done, or make presentations to student or alumni groups. Such activities will bring more traditional rewards to faculty members, but, even more important, those who participate will share what is learned beyond the confines of a single campus. We cannot afford to do less—anecdotal successes and failures do not show us to be accountable to our students, our professions, and our institutions.
In outlining these stages for curricular reform, I am requiring a different kind of professional accountability of my colleagues in the professions and suggesting that even the undergraduate curriculum needs to be responsible to the research discipline, the scholar-teacher, the institution, and the students alike.
In this sense, faculty members and administrators must both recognize and portray a curricular reform as the professional activity par excellence, in which professional skills are applied in a developmental, diachronic context. In engaging in curricular reform, faculty members cannot see themselves as simply doing grunt work for corporate America. It is too easy to remain a victim and to consider curricular reform as “more busywork that I’m not getting paid for.” Instead, they must see themselves as behaving as impeccable professionals, taking on new professional responsibilities, accepting the challenge of the new generation, and acting responsibly toward all parties involved. To give one example of such a change of heart and mind: if the peer-reviewed article is the criterion for raise and promotion, then a peer-reviewed article on curriculum ought to accrue equivalent rewards. Individuals who believe they are doing imposed hard labor will be hangdog and resentful; those who believe they are exercising professional muscle and realizing cherished goals will create communities and new serendipitous moments in teaching, learning, and research.
For this to be possible, the curricular logic that an individual department group designs has to carry itself forward with its own professional rationale, it must be transparent to faculty members and to students, and it must reflect the mission statements for the institution and the program. When, in turn, the logic of a new course sequence design is transparent and when the outcomes are proof of best practices, then the plan will only gain in flexibility over time. New courses can be added without detracting from the cohesion of the whole; innovations and refinements will be compatible with the rest of the curriculum; faculty members can go on leave and temporary replacements can fill in with clear expectations; coherent expectations placed on students will lead more straightforwardly to achievement.
Evolving a curricular logic following such stages can improve graduate and undergraduate sequences; majors, minors, and double majors; sequences that have to feed into study-abroad programs for the general student with reasonable language skills and those that try to turn out full bilinguals. Sometimes, the result of a self-study will affirm that you are, indeed, serving yourselves, the profession, and your students; at other times, you will see that a simple minor change of texts or reorientation of assignments will turn a class around into a success within the curriculum. There will be still other times when a course sequence will have to be rebuilt from the ground up, its mission rethought. But no matter what answers you get, the department will have taken an unquestioned tradition and turned it into a professional rationale that brings research, teaching, and learning together—a narrative that self-justifies credibly. You as a group will be seen as professionals, active, coherent, and responsible.
Using our best literary close reading or linguistic skills, we can easily see why these activities cannot be thought of as “making space” in the curriculum or “accommodating generational change,” since the tone of both phrases is negative and whiny, stressing only what one is giving up or leaving behind. To take that rhetoric as the hallmark of a curricular revision will not so much introduce a curricular reform as offer a recipe for disaster over the long run, unless you have an incredibly benevolent administration. One must project forward, not look back.
From the other side, if we simply believe that curricular innovation requires novelty rather than systematic change, we will be guilty of exploiting our profession and our institutions, since we will not think to ask what a new course actually does for the teaching and learning sequences that our students engage in. If we do not take the trouble to assess and validate our efforts at novelty, we will be adding compartments to our departments, rooms to our mansions, beds in our gardens--but we will not necessarily be making substantive changes in teaching or learning practices. Unfortunately, those compartments often act like cabooses on trains: arguably the most identifiable cars but now abolished because they weren’t doing much in relation to the weight they required the engine to pull.
The work done to expand the canon has heretofore created mostly chaos--can(n)on fodder, as the joke has it—not the vision of a new generation of professionals. We have, instead, the images of academic terminators, tearing down and demanding. Hasn’t the moment come to integrate, consolidate, and rebuild, figuring out a more classic ecological approach? Remember that gardens engaging in companion planting are much healthier than monocultures or stands of hybrids. And they require fewer pesticides, less weeding, less investment of time and money, and fewer drastic measures to keep them alive. Which garden is ours?
2Georgetown University’s German program is the poster child for how a department can work together to make a new undergraduate curriculum: the faculty members rethought their procedures within the needs of an institution with a very discrete student body and mission statement. They rethought how to teach language and gained the opportunity to teach more literature than they had for a long time, at the price of planning and a willingness to reconsider what it actually means to teach literature. See www.georgetown.edu/departments/german/curriculum.
Byrnes, Heidi. “Constructing Curricula in Collegiate Foreign Language Departments.” Learning Foreign and Second Languages. Ed. Byrnes. New York: MLA, 1998. 262–95.
———. “Faculty Assessment and Evaluation.” ADFL Bulletin 25.3 (1994): 16–22. [Show Article]
———. “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally in the (Foreign) Language Profession.” ADFL Bulletin, 29.3 (1998): 46–50. [Show Article]
Haley, Jay. “The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ” and Other Essays. 2nd ed. Rockville: Triangle, 1986.
Swaffar, Janet. “The Case for Foreign Languages as a Discipline.” ADFL Bulletin 30.3 (1999): 6–12. [Show Article] Rpt. in Profession 1999. New York: MLA, 1999. 155–67.
———. “German Studies as Studies of Cultural Discourses.” Teaching German in America: Shaping Forces in the Twentieth Century. Ed. David P. Benseler, Craig W. Niekisch, and Cora Lee Nollendorfs. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2001. 230–46.
———. “Major Changes: The Standards Project and the New Foreign Language Curriculum.” ADFL Bulletin 30.1 (1998): 34–37. [Show Article]
Swaffar, Janet, Katherine Arens, and Heidi Byrnes. Reading for Meaning: An Integrated Approach to Language Learning. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1991.
© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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