When I was asked to contribute this essay, the economic crisis was just beginning to cast its shadow over U.S. higher education. Since then, my thinking about the current status of pedagogy in our discipline has not altered substantially, but I believe there is now an even greater need for faculty to address changing realities in our profession and in the situations of our students. Even in the best of times, teaching is often less valued than research. As a partial result, despite increased numbers of pedagogical workshops and other improvements in our teaching landscape, we still largely resist fundamental changes in how we approach pedagogical training and delivery. Through the burgeoning fields of cognitive science and educational psychology, there is a wealth of new information available about how people learn and how best to encourage the kind of education we ostensibly support. Nevertheless, relatively few graduate programs in the humanities have made congruent shifts in the training of future faculty and only limited numbers of teachers have adjusted their instructional methodologies in order to take advantage of this new research. As scholars, we purport to value research and innovation, but English professors as a group inadequately demonstrate that commitment in our classroom practices or in our efforts to prepare our successors. 1 As a consequence, we are losing an invaluable opportunity to answer the always present but now growing number of critics who question the relevance of a liberal arts education -particularly during a period of diminished Pedagogy
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.