Graduate Curriculum Revision:

Mobilizing Faculty Communities

The Department of English at Texas A&M

When the graduate faculty came to realize that the graduate curriculum had ceased to reflect fully current faculty or student research interests, we decided to develop a process for curricular change that would help coalesce faculty working groups and would better define areas of concentration for graduate students. By getting faculty together to discuss their fields, we hoped to generate lasting intellectual communities and to better align graduate studies with faculty interests.

Challenges in the Revision Process

Over the past year of curriculum revision, forty courses were revised, cancelled, or developed. Several interest groups procured funding for speakers in the field, began holding works-in-progress seminars, and formed reading groups. Applicants to the program identify fields of study based on the website and are directed to appropriate faculty and courses.

Some problems remain. The interest groups that already had a strong faculty and graduate student representation prior to revision are still active, but smaller groups convened by curriculum revision are inactive. And although the project was initially conceived to benefit graduate students, but it has been difficult to inspire graduate student participation.

Some questions to consider as we continue our revision process are what these intellectual communities and their activities (lectures, colloquia, etc.) do for our department, and for individual members of our community, and why graduate students are hesitant to become involved.

Highlight: Discourse Studies

The Discourse Studies group pursues questions about the role of language in such issues as how individuals form social identities, how stereotypes get perpetuated, how writing influences thought, how rhetorical traditions accommodate change, how literary cultures account for nature, how stories advance arguments, and how poems embody diverse voices. The concentration in discourse studies at Texas A&M draws upon rhetoric and composition, linguistics, literacy studies, ethnography of communication, and literary scholarship for its methods and research topics.

Creating Intellectual Communities: Pathways to Revision

Our initial goals were to revise the graduate curriculum to better reflect current academic work in literary studies and the research of our faculty; to create concentrations for graduate students that would help them develop a field of specialization; and to link the intellectual work of the classroom with reading groups, works-in-progress seminars, and campus lectures.

Process Builds Community

Reverberating Effects: Graduate Student Involvement

Our initiative to build community includes expanding the role of graduate students in governing the department. This year the English Department is hiring four new faculty, and graduate students will serve on the search committee, review the files, attend all presentations, and submit a collective recommendation to the faculty.

Website by Amy Montz

Future (Re)Visions

Our theme for this year's work on the CID, "Building Inclusive Intellectual Communities," seeks to expand the curriculum revision project by fostering a stronger sense of collaboration between faculty and graduate students. One group is designing and implementing a colloquium on teaching specializations in English.

Another is working to expand the opportunities for graduate students to share their work with other department members.

Highlight: New Modern British Studies

The New Modern British Studies Group is an informal group of faculty and graduate students working in British, Irish, and Postcolonial literary, historical, and cultural studies from the eighteenth century to the present. Since the group began meeting in fall 2001, its members have organized an ongoing faculty colloquium series, held reading group discussions of work by scholars in modern British studies, brought visiting scholars to campus for public lectures, and supported a one-day symposium, Curious Things.