Major changes in English requirements

By Phyllis Brown

Beginning next year, the English Department major requirements will be modified to better suit the needs and goals of the 21st century student.

The decision to revise these requirements is the result of more than five years of information-gathering and discussion by the English Department faculty.

In the last few years there has been concern about the declining number of English majors at Santa Clara. One way of interpreting the decrease is to infer that the major isn't meeting the needs of the students as well as it has in the past. The decline is part of a national trend affecting English departments and other departments in the humanities; however, the numbers began their descent well before the the current economic downturn.

The process began with a self-study between 1997 and 1999, which concluded that the English Department should consider reducing the number of required lower-division courses. It also judged that discussion of the interrelationship between lower- and upper-division requirements should continue, and that more courses focusing on underrepresented cultural and ethnic groups and on multicultural concerns should be offered.

Two years ago, we began a systematic evaluation of the appropriateness of our requirements in light of Department and University mission and goals. We set out to discover whether our current major requirements still met the needs of students in the context of SCU's educational mission and goals as well as they have in the past.

We concluded that our majors would benefit from a decreased number of required courses (from 17 to 15) and an increased variety of courses satisfying particular requirements.

The evaluation began with the comparison of our major requirements to the requirements of other Arts and Sciences majors at Santa Clara and with other English Departments throughout the country. Department Chair Professor Richard Osberg then asked faculty to participate in an exploration of four different models of the ways a major might be conceptualized.

Because discussion resulted in a strong consensus that students would benefit from a change in requirements, last year a task force took on the responsibility of designing a possible revision of our major. The task force drew on what faculty had perceived as the strengths of each model we explored and on information gathered with faculty surveys and student focus groups.

A list of outcomes for English Majors published by the Association of Departments of English (ADE, a subsidiary of the Modern Language Association) was also drawn upon, with the goal of bringing our major requirements into better conformity with the best national practices.

We discussed at considerable length whether faculty and majors would benefit or be hurt if we no longer required all students to take particular courses.

The courses under consideration included the lower-division surveys of English and American literature and the upper-division Shakespeare course. The conclusion was drawn that great authors such as Shakespeare do not need special protection - many English majors will want to select a Shakespeare course because of a desire to study his plays.

Our revision reflects our belief that majors will benefit from greater freedom to select from a variety of courses meeting requirements defined by their attention to particular learning outcomes.

Thus, the new major requires students to complete five historically-grounded courses. These share the outcome of achieving "an understanding of critical and historical principles behind the construction of literary and cultural histories," knowledge of specialized terminology, and awareness of "controversies about establishing distinctions between periods," as included in the ADE Outcomes for English Majors.

Students may choose to take lower-division English and American survey courses to satisfy three of these requirements, but the new major also allows them to take upper-division courses such as Medieval Literature, Renaissance Literature, or American Poetry as historically-grounded courses. At the same time, we require chronological distribution of historically-grounded courses because we know such requirements can generate interest in authors and works students may not even know they will be interested in. We hope that the change will result in better distribution of enrollment in lower- and upper-division classes.

The new major continues to require students to take Introduction to Literary Study and Introduction to Poetry, three courses in a selected area of specialization, a senior seminar, and two electives, as does the old major. We have introduced two new upper-division requirements: one writing/rhetoric/language course, and one theory/methodology course.

The new major also responds to Santa Clara's progressive plan by requiring students to include among the required 15 courses at least one with an emphasis on gender and/or sexuality and at least one with an ethnic/global emphasis.

These requirements reflect a sense of the importance of the ADE outcome that "English majors should have the experience of reading texts drawn from the full diversity of literary periods and genres, written by authors representing the full range of social, ethnic, and national origins that have shaped English literature." Many of the courses that fulfill the historically-grounded requirements also satisfy this outcome.

Students will be able to meet the requirements of the new major without the addition of any new courses. While we do plan to design new courses to satisfy the new requirements the new requirements allow English Department faculty to continue doing what they already do very well while at the same time better meeting the needs of students in today's world.