Some Notes on a Project: Democracy and Authority in the Production of a Discipline

The Production of University English: A Project and Its Background This essay describes the parameters, the methodology, and some of the initial findings of a collaborative research project, begun in September 2006, involving colleagues in English and education departments in five different British universities. Our project, funded by the English Subject Centre, investigates how English (understood as a form of knowledge socially constructed through disciplinary tradition, institutional context, and immediate exchanges in the teaching room) is “produced” in the context of the teaching space, a site less formal than, but as significant as, the scholarly articles and books produced by academics working in a field, or the scholarly histories of a subject qua subject. How do university teachers and their students “produce” their subjects, we ask, moment to moment, in situations and with sets of resources and constraints that are not fully — and, some would argue, ever less — under their control? In what communicational practices do students and teachers engage in their discussions of material in the classroom, and how might we “read” those practices once we have identified them? How might multimodal theories — theories that attend to forms of meaning making that involve gesture, posture, gaze, and movement as well as the spoken and written word — help to describe and interrogate what actually happens when a discipline is taught and learned? And how do broad patterns of institutional