Decanonizing the curriculum: English degree requirements in Canadian universities today,and the promise of a method-focused degree

Abstract

This paper proposes that a curricular shift we call “decanonization” is shaping contemporary English Major degrees at Canadian universities. We believe it is a response to a complex set of challenges currently facing departments as they program their undergraduate degrees in English, and, in a qualified way, we endorse it as a positive change: it can be seen as a step toward decolonization. But we argue that some forms of decanonized degree have unfortunate implications. While we affirm that our colleagues across the country are doing everything they can to sustain robust, current degrees in challenging circumstances, those circumstances have resulted in some cases in what appears to be a hollowed-out, underdefined degree. We propose an alternate curriculum, based on method, that seems to us particularly promising in the current context.

Article

Among the many challenges facing Canadian English degrees today are two that will be internationally recognizable, although their local inflections are significant. Dwindling government funding and public interest in Humanities programs is one. When we began this study, the government of Alberta, the Canadian province where we were respectively working and studying, had recently announced a funding plan for post-secondary education called Building Skills for Jobs, which illuminated the government’s disinterest in anything other than utilitarian, skills-based degrees. Colleagues at universities in Alberta and in the rest of Canada report pressure on their degrees as universities suffer funding cuts, faculty retire without replacement, administrators warn about weak enrollments, and graduating students express fears about their career futures. Meanwhile, the other major challenge is the urgent imperative that English degrees reconsider their structures and pedagogies in light of how, in Canada as in other former British colonies, these degrees—which are offered on Indigenous territories, to an increasingly diverse population of students—were historically explicitly colonial in design (Cleary, 2021; Fee, 1992; Martin, 2013; Reddon, 2022; Viswanathan, 2014). As Martin (2013) puts it, “The early history of English studies in Canada is marked by [an] agenda to ensure that the citizens of Canada would recognize and help to further the greatness of the British tradition” (7), although this agenda was driven more forcefully by anglophone settler Canadians and their goal of fostering a settler Canadian literature than by imperial England (Fee, 1992; Martin, 2013: 7). More fundamentally, though, universities based on European models, operating in European languages and instructing students in Western epistemic traditions, are settler-colonial imports in Canada; they largely remain institutions that practice what Kuokkanen calls “epistemic ignorance” of Indigenous ways of knowing (2007: 160). These two challenges—the public pressure to produce employment-ready students and the moral imperatives of decolonization and inclusion—are certainly distinct. But both call the traditional English degree into question.

English faculty are clearly thinking about these challenges in Canada, as elsewhere. And the degree appears to be undergoing a long, uneven, locally differentiated process of change, in response to this complicated array of concerns. How substantially it will dismantle its colonial inheritance, and how radically it will ultimately change in hopes of attracting greater public support, is hard to say. What our study investigates is the current balance being struck between tradition and change by contemporary English degrees in Canada—as that balance may be gauged by examining degree requirements. Students perhaps experience their degrees primarily as a kaleidoscope of coursework, but it seems to us that degree requirements indicate what faculty administering the program consider essential enough to insist on, and they hence offer a significant snapshot of a degree in transition.

We examined degree requirements for the English Major (or equivalent) at twenty-two universities, as published on department websites, advising checklists, and academic calendars in early 2022. The twenty-two universities studied represent roughly one quarter of all Canadian institutions offering a version of the degree. They were selected from each region, though not from every province, in a proportion that very roughly corresponds to population numbers in each region. And they range from undergraduate-only to PhD-granting universities, in a mix designed to include both older, tradition-observant institutions such as the University of Toronto (founded as King’s College in 1827) and younger, reputedly innovative institutions such as Simon Fraser University (1963) or Toronto Metropolitan University (founded as Ryerson Institute of Technology in 1948). ¹

Degree requirements must be interpreted with caution: considered in isolation, as a synchronic snapshot of current degree structures, they do not reveal the complex histories of their development. We believe that requirements can often be understood as artifacts of departments’ piecemeal and triage efforts, over time, to balance gradually-shifting intellectual commitments with pragmatic necessities. This seems clear from the anecdotal accounts of curricular decision-making shared at a recent nation-wide workshop, “English and the Humanities Here, Now: The English Major in 2022” (e.g. Ivison, 2022; Johnston, 2022; Manarin, 2022), as well as by one author of this article’s 11 years of experience as a tenure-stream faculty member at a university not included in the study. It is probably rare that degree requirements are substantially overhauled all at once. ² In another respect, too, degree requirements do not reveal much. It is significant—not only for our study but for students’ experience of the English degree—that academic calendars and even department websites typically give no rationale for a degree’s requirements: students are simply informed that certain courses are currently considered essential. This official silence about why students must take (only) certain courses is a problem, we will argue.

Our study indicates that Canadian English degrees are decanonizing. In our use of the term, to “decanonize” means to choose degree structures that do not take shape around a “canon,” a particular set of literatures held to represent some measure of expert consensus about what English students must read. Our usage is slightly unusual, for what we are referring to, with “canon,” is not precisely a list of texts but a list of sets of texts—sets named for historical period and/or national provenance—that a degree structure requires students to read. In this manner of speaking, a canonized degree requires students to take courses that, together, are likely to expose them to a substantial sample of the literary canon. The structure and course-naming of a canonized degree emphasizes that exposure, making exposure to important texts—via coverage of certain literary eras and areas—precisely its point.

Twentieth-century debates about the literary canon, as summarized by Guillory (1995), Kolbas (2001), or Murray (1996), acknowledge the plurality and shifting quality of “the” literary canon—indeed its status as imaginary (Gallagher, 2001: 53). We acknowledge this too. Like the canon of texts, the “traditional” degree structure is an ever-shifting, imagined composite of many disparate, local acts of expert selection (or many different local instantiations of the English degree); those selections may tend to reproduce a certain recognizable structure, but it is neither universal nor unchanging. Our point is not that a given curricular tradition has not shifted over time, or that it is suddenly shifting after years of stagnancy. Neither of these is the case. Rather, we want to emphasize two things: one, that the traditional English degree structure in Canada centers on a particular canon (historical British literatures plus whatever additional national literatures, topics, or theories are deemed necessary extras at any given time) that is under scrutiny for reproducing colonial values. (See Cleary, 2021: 154-156; and Martin, 2013: 27-28, 42-47 on how the British canon, and canonized degree structures, have remained the durable core of English degrees internationally, even as other literatures have been gradually added on to its list.) A move away from the traditional structure tends to decenter that very canon. And two: that decanonization entails moving away from focusing on which works students must read, towards a focus instead on other defining aspects of English studies, such as focal themes, motivating questions, or methods—or, indeed, towards dropping all requirements in favour of offering students their choice among tempting options. We endorse a shift away from degree requirements that name what students must read. We thus echo Graff’s (1986) critique of “coverage” models, although we ultimately propose a different alternative. But we advocate that the English degree remain defined—that it continue to have requirements, to the extent that administrative challenges allow.

The study of historical British literatures is the most obvious—though certainly not the only—aspect of the English Major inherited from colonial efforts to teach the “greatness of the British tradition.” (Meanwhile, the study of literature per se—as opposed to the practice of creative or professional writing, for example—also seems to be vulnerable in a utilitarian era.) Hence this paper details how current degree requirements weight, describe, and explain the place of British literary history in the curriculum. Our study finds that a redesign of the overall degree to de-emphasize British literary history as such, and especially as a great tradition, is now in effect underway—if not already completed—at most Canadian universities, though perhaps fairly superficially. We would argue that such a de-emphasis is appropriate and necessary, with some important caveats. But how this redesign has played out, given the practical difficulties of curricular shift and the pressure to attract and retain students, has some unfortunate effects. The problem we see with decanonization in its current iterations is that contemporary challenges seem to have induced a more general fragmentation and hollowing-out of the degree: a de-naming of requirements, in some cases, or a removal of requirements altogether, in others. Though it may be a pragmatic necessity in some cases, removing requirements entirely is an unfortunate move.

Our snapshot of the contemporary Canadian degree in English cannot justifiably be interpreted as evidence of a deliberate collective trajectory—a widespread if non-uniform shift away from emphasizing canonical British literary history, or away from nation as organizing principle for literary study, or from required courses at all. But when we view our snapshot in the light of antecedent studies, such as Murray’s 1996 history of Canadian English studies, Martin’s 2013 examination of early twenty-first-century Canadian university curricula, or even, more remotely, reports on the U.S. English major published by the Association of Departments of English (2018), we believe we can reasonably speculate that it does indeed suggest such a shift. Martin (2013) found that “the British tradition” was “still the clear foundation for the literature program” in universities across Canada in 2007-2008 (73). This is no longer so plainly evident.

Decanonizing by de-emphasizing Britain

The most widespread decanonizing move we observe is an emphasis on literary history, on the age of texts to be studied, that does not, in the naming of degree requirements, specify Britain as the cultural and geographical location of that history. This move designates historical literatures in English as significant because of their age, rather than their relationship to the history and cultures of Britain. It tends to imply that layers of literary history relate meaningfully to each other and contribute to an overall understanding of literature, although how the requirements operate in practice may undermine this implication. (When an array of historical depths is available for study, but students are only required to select one or two courses from among them, students’ resulting sense of literary history is likely quite fragmented.) Because this move does designate requirements, it retains for the degree a sense that there is substantial content to be studied, and that faculty in the program insist on its importance. It also signals that faculty at those institutions continue to engage with historical literatures themselves.

Our study makes clear that most Canadian English degrees continue to designate historical literatures as significant. Seventeen of twenty-two, or 77%, of the degrees we examined post at least one historical literatures requirement, and on average those seventeen degrees require between three and four (3.76) courses in literary history. All but four of the seventeen require more historical literatures courses than any one of the other common course categories (e.g. national literatures; methods or theory; or global literatures, including transnational, postcolonial, or Indigenous literatures). Significantly, only six universities’ naming systems appear to still specify British literary periods, the most explicit being University of Toronto, which requires two courses in “Pre-1800 British Literature” (University of Toronto, 2022). The other five in this group use names that imply Britain, at least when we read the full calendar entry: at Dalhousie University, for example, requirements in “Medieval” or “Renaissance” literatures imply British cultural and literary periods when read in sequence with the explicitly English period names “Restoration” and “Victorian ” (Dalhousie University, 2022). The remaining twelve of these seventeen degrees do not foreground Britain at all when they require literary history—but this set must be bifurcated yet further, because the difference in how they de-center Britain has significant implications.

Seven degrees, or a third of those which do require historical literatures, simply foreground historical depth. University of Ottawa’s degree exemplifies this pattern, requiring one course selection from each of “List A (Literature before 1700),” “List B (Literature 1700-1900),” and “List C (Literature 1900 to the present)” (University of Ottawa, 2021). While the date ranges defining these three lists may be loosely influenced by British literary periodization, their naming references periods of time specifically. By contrast, a smaller set of degrees—four of them—do require students to take courses in literary history, but their calendar descriptions de-emphasize British literary culture (and, indeed, even history) simply by not naming the requirement. These descriptions indicate that students must select courses from certain lists, but the lists have no title or name, so the content and rationale of those requirements is unspecified. Queen’s University’s calendar listing for the English major, for example, simply indicates that students must take two courses’ worth of credits from each of five lists. As it happens, three of those lists contain courses in historical literatures, although we needed to look elsewhere in the calendar to discover that. List “D. ENGL 305-339,” as it is named, comprises courses in early medieval to early modern literatures, almost all of them British; list “E. ENG 340-359,” courses in nineteenth-century literatures, some of which are British, others transatlantic or American; and list “F. ENG 360-389,” courses in modern and contemporary literatures from a variety of geographic areas (Queen’s University, 2022). These cryptically named lists foreground only the fact that the degree is structured—that certain arrays of courses are important.

In total, then, only six (27%) of the twenty-two degrees we studied do more or less explicitly foreground British literary history as a centerpiece of the degree. Our snapshot thus suggests a fairly decanonized degree in Canada, in the sense that more often than not the names of degree requirements do not indicate a particular literary and cultural tradition. Importantly, course names tell a deeper and more complex story. They reveal that even those historical-literatures requirements that nominally emphasize historical depth over the literary history of a particular nation tend to steer students to take at least one course in early English literature. Even so, periods of England’s literary history may well be studied from a globally-conscious perspective, as is illustrated by University of British Columbia’s “Victorian Period Literature” course, which is described as covering “British and Global literature, 1832-1901, with an emphasis on genre or special topics” (University of British Columbia, 2021, italics added). We imagine, in fact, that such a global consciousness inflects many courses currently being offered, even in degrees with a nominally canonized structure.

What is clear is that literary history, simply understood as the study of texts from various times past, remains prevalent in Canadian degree structures—although it is not a universal core, and it is not always explicitly owned as a value in degree descriptions. The decision, made by the majority of universities we studied, not to foreground British history specifically reads, to us, as decanonizing—not only because it de-emphasizes a particular cultural inheritance, but also because it does less to specify which literatures will be read in a given required course. A canon of texts is not explicitly upheld by a requirement of Pre-1750 literatures—courses fulfilling that requirement could nominally include any early global literature in English—and hence the emphasis falls more on the importance, simply, of the exercise of engaging with historical literatures.

Decanonizing by re-imagining the traditional degree

Importantly, our portrait so far of a fairly decanonized degree is rounded out by those three universities (14% of our sample) which specify very few, if any, requirements—and by the additional three (a further 14%) which require sets of courses that differ substantially in name or proportional weight from the traditional degree structure. At these six universities, the degree structure is anything but superficially decanonized. We would emphasize, however, that the significant difference between these two groups of very decanonized degrees is whether they have reimagined the English Major as having a definite core or not. In one group, the degree becomes an undefined course of elective studies in literature; in the other, it has a defined core that has little to do with determining what students must read.

At University of Alberta students are directed to take a certain number of credits at each of the 200-, 300-, and 400- levels, but otherwise, their English course choices are not constrained by degree requirements. At University of Winnipeg, the General English degree is only specified as a certain number of courses above the first-year level, with caps on the maximum number of courses that may be taken in theatre and film studies or rhetoric and writing. In principle, then, the content of an English degree is largely represented as customizable at these universities, rather than as dictated in any way by tradition or current scholarly consensus; it is a dispersed (if not incoherent) landscape that a student may wander through, pursuing their own interests. The existence of the degree seems to promise that the student will accumulate a meaningful body of experience through this elective wandering. And while those universities which un-define the degree, specifying the content of three or fewer semester-long course requirements after the first year level, are in the minority among the universities we studied, it is noteworthy that, in general, Canadian degrees may collectively specify fewer requirements than American ones. Across the twenty-two degrees we studied, the average number of required courses was 7.6, including up to two introductory courses, and only three degrees specified more than ten required courses. By comparison, a study by the U.S.-based Association of Departments of English (ADE) found a higher average across American colleges and universities in 2016-2017. They found that “departments at PhD- and MA-granting institutions typically require ten to twelve courses for the major; in BA programs, eleven courses was the minimum” (Association of Departments of English, 2018: 7).

We are particularly interested in University of Alberta’s customizable degree, since University of Alberta is ranked among Canada’s top five anglophone universities (Times Higher Education, 2022) and has been seen as a curriculum leader: in his study of Canadian degrees in literature, Martin (2013) remarked on what he considered an “innovative” new curriculum launched at University of Alberta in 2005 (45). Martin was impressed with the department’s moves, first, to allow first-year students a choice among “markedly different” introductory courses (45)—one of which was titled “Aboriginal Literature and Culture”—and, second, to focus students’ second-year coursework on “methods and paradigms central to the discipline” (University of Alberta calendar qtd. in Martin, 2013: 46), before requiring more traditional coursework in the senior years (Martin, 2013: 46). While University of Alberta now stipulates no specific requirements at all, its academic calendar does note that “the Department of English and Film studies strongly recommends that students take a broad range of courses … including courses in Indigenous literatures and cultures, Canadian literature and culture, and Pre-1900 literature and culture” (University of Alberta, 2022). The department’s advising worksheet again encourages breadth of study; it then urges students, “follow your interests” (University of Alberta, 2019). Encouraging students to explore the field based on their own interests strikes us as a pragmatic—potentially quite effective—move to sustain enrollments. Or perhaps, to the contrary, University of Alberta’s customizable degree signals faculty members’ deliberately decanonizing conviction that the field of English studies is, in contemporary professional practice, precisely an undefined territory. While we acknowledge the attractions (and the philosophical point) of an undefined degree, we would point to evidence that English studies is defined, in professional practice, by patterns of argument (Fahnestock and Secor, 1991; Wilder, 2012), methods and motivations (Banting, 2023; Linkon, 2011; Thieme, 2017), and threshold concepts (Corrigan, 2019) that structure not only what professors do in their research but how they expect students to perform (Wilder, 2012). There is structure to English studies, even in the absence of a canon. Un-defined degrees seem to us to convey a hollowed-out discipline, a curriculum that caters to the pre-formed interests of the incoming student rather than undertaking to guide the development of those interests.

An intellectual commitment to decanonizing the English Major is most clearly evident in those three degrees which have set aside the traditional structure but introduced an alternate, defined core for the degree, by emphasizing either themes or methods in literary studies. Simon Fraser University (SFU), for example, revised its degree structure in 2019-2020 for reasons that correspond to both of the primary pressures on Canadian English degrees that we outlined in our introduction, according to the presentation by department chair Carolyn Lesjak at the “English and the Humanities Here, Now” workshop: pragmatic survival in a tough climate, specifically expressed at SFU as a need to attract more students (Lesjak, 2022), and philosophical, political concerns. The department had heard that students felt their degree “was not the place for students of colour… ‘English is so white’ was the common refrain” (Lesjak, 2022). The department felt that neither this perceived whiteness, nor the existing curriculum structure, reflected in fact the kind of work faculty members were actually doing in their research and teaching. “Anglophilic in its orientation, our progression of our courses … was almost all period-based and gave the impression that we were, for the most part, marching through British literary history soup to nuts” (Lesjak, 2022)

Setting aside the traditional degree structure, the department retitled courses and rewrote requirements. Senior students are now simply required to take one course in either Indigenous or Canadian literatures. Second-year requirements are even more radically transformed, since these are no longer expressed in terms of either historical period or even area. Some of these courses are now named to emphasize thematic focus (e.g. “The Environmental Imagination”). Others, the focal activity or performance students will undertake, such as, for example, “Reading and Writing Identities” (Simon Fraser University, 2022). Historical literatures—by white, British authors or otherwise—might plausibly be studied in any of these courses, if faculty so choose, but the British literary canon is no longer a core structure of this degree. Even the one course title that indicates literary history, “The Place of the Past,” chooses not to emphasize it directly, promising either an examination of place and setting in historical texts or, perhaps, a consideration of what “place” history should occupy in contemporary attention. Canons of rhetoric and criticism are on offer, while a literary canon is not. But SFU’s rewritten degree replaces a canon of texts with a different kind of expert consensus. SFU’s intent was in part to introduce students to the discipline as practiced by professionals—in Lesjak’s words, to “the kind of work faculty members were actually doing in their research and teaching.”

A clear emphasis on method, on students’ activity or performance, distinguishes two other degrees among the twenty-two we studied. At University of Guelph, three of six required courses are titled to emphasize method: introductory courses are subtitled “Reading the Past” and “Finding a Critical Voice,” and a second-year seminar is titled “Critical Practices.” Some of the other required seminar titles at Guelph are thematic, rather than method-focused—“Literature and Social Change” is an example. But, like SFU’s second-year offerings, the names of these required courses are decidedly decanonized. At Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), a decanonical emphasis on method shows even more clearly in degree requirements; this perhaps befits an institution which, once known as an “Institute of Technology,” was originally focused on technical training. Second-year requirements imply a discipline that is structured by professional methods that faculty insist students must learn; required courses include “Academic Writing and Research,” “Approaches to English Research,” and “Research Design and Qualitative Methods.” Students must also take one traditional period course in each of second and third year, and a third-year course in “Literary and Cultural Theory,” but a focus on practice and research-engaged activity clearly predominates at TMU. From our perspective—feeling the complex mixture of contemporary pressures, located in a province governed by those who insist on education’s instrumentality (and worse), influenced by research on the defining core methods and habits of mind of English studies—this route to decanonization seems promising.

Toward a deeply decanonized degree

To sum up, then, we observed partial, rather muffled, and probably fairly superficial decanonization in all but a few Canadian universities: in the remainder, we saw substantially decanonized degree structures. What we posited as the traditional structure, one centered on thoroughly covering the canon of British historical literature plus necessary extras, may still be glimpsed in some calendar descriptions. But typically, even those degrees finally require only that students select from among literary periods. Calendars are more likely to emphasize the study of historical literatures as historical literatures than as subsets of a canon. And some of them muffle their commitment even to historical literary study per se by not naming the requirements.

Our study allows only occasional, anecdotal glimpses of the reasons why departments have arrived at a decanonized degree. While we cannot draw any conclusions about their reasoning, we sense that their degrees exhibit a tacit preference to avoid privileging British literatures now. We endorse such a preference. We believe that decanonizing in our specific sense, by displacing British literatures as such from their traditional position as the core of the degree, is entirely appropriate. Studying historical literatures in their complex, national and globe-wide social contexts remains a core practice of English students and scholars (see Wilder, 2012; Wolfe and Wilder, 2016), and canonical British works by white authors remain vital and valuable texts. (There are also simply more historical works in English by British authors than by other world authors, of course, though the apportioning of total literary works shifts in more recent years as global Englishes boom [Cleary, 2021].) But we must dismantle degree structures that imply the centrality and essential value of British literatures and the otherness—the tacked-on, additional, and hence marginal character—of all other literatures in English. Many English professors hold anti-racist, decolonial values, and these values have no doubt firmly guided discussion and student writing in innumerable Elizabethan or Victorian English courses for decades. It is time, as Lesjak and her colleagues decided at SFU, for our degree structures to reflect our actual practice and interests. It is also demonstrably possible to offer an English degree that does.

We have contended that simply removing all requirements is not desirable, though in effect it is a decanonizing move. We presume that those departments which have opted to do so have removed them largely out of a sense of pragmatic necessity: it was perhaps no longer possible to sustain enrollments or guarantee staffing for required courses in certain subject areas. But like official silence about why certain courses are required, a lack of requirements seems to convey to students either a vacuous reflection of their own preferences or a refusal to reveal meaning—as if the department declined to explain to students why any course might show up, or not, in a given year’s offerings. In our experience, even regular course rotation in a fairly structured degree causes students stress, since in our department the rotation is administered internally and quietly. To students, it is mysterious and unpredictable.

Removing all requirements implies that any one course may stand in for the whole learning experience expected of an English Major—or at least that, having taken any handful of eighteen or twenty English courses, one is sure to have experienced the gamut. This metonymic relationship of the course to the degree may in fact reflect current pedagogical practice, to the extent that we frequently expect similar performances of first-year students as of fourth-year students (the same sorts of essays, just shorter); or that feminist critiques, for example, have purchase in relation to any set of assigned readings; or that the governing assumptions and threshold concepts of literary studies (Banting, 2023; Corrigan, 2019; Heinert and Chick, 2017; Linkon, 2011; Wilder, 2012) are latent but typically unexpressed in every course (see also Banting, 2014). What a canonized structure did for the English degree was assert that there was a substantial body of material to be covered and that department experts agreed on it to some imagined extent. But decanonizing the degree need not entail obscuring for students how experts understand and practice the field of study. It need not require that every course teach everything, and it need not suggest to students that we have nowhere to lead them but back to their own pre-formed interests.

Our proposal is that English degrees robustly decanonize—whenever pragmatically possible—by rewriting degree structures, course names, and even to some extent pedagogy to foreground method rather than canon. That means, as Manarin (2022) puts it, crafting degree descriptions that emphasize what students will learn to do, not what they must read. Course names such as those at University of Guelph and Toronto Metropolitan University illustrate that departments have found it useful to write such descriptions—particularly for a handful of courses that emphasize either fairly generic techniques of reading and writing or specifically formal research procedures. We suggest that this emphasis on doing might be taken much farther, to the full reaches of the degree, with a progression of courses named for their respective focus, for example, on analyzing texts in historical context or drawing on literature while arguing for social justice.

Such a shift has been proposed before, particularly by researchers and teachers, like Manarin, who are engaged in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. In Literary Learning: Teaching the English Major, for example, Linkon (2011) highlights the difference between designing courses with a focus on content—thus expecting students to learn unguided how to perform the skills of reading, analysis, research, and writing that are ultimately what we expect from them and assess—and designing courses that purposely foreground literary thinking skills. With their groundbreaking textbook, Digging in to Literature: Strategies for Reading, Analysis, and Writing, Wolfe and Wilder (2016) attempt to foreground and guide student activity, explicitly training students in the analytical and rhetorical strategies practiced by professional English scholars. But these works focus on the learning that may happen in a single course. We propose, as Manarin (2022), Chapman (2014), and Smith (2010) also do, that such foregrounding of activity, student learning and performance (performative “social action,” in Smith’s terms), or what we are calling method, might be among the most progressive approaches to decanonizing the English Major.

Besides simply its displacement of the canon, is the method-based degree’s explicitness about what students are expected to learn—and, in particular, about what they will have to do to succeed in the course—that makes it progressive, in our view. As Wilder (2012), Linkon (2011), and others have argued, naming and explaining disciplinary preferences, activities, and scholarly genres for and with our students is probably the best way to include and support students whose class and cultural background haven’t already helped them across the disciplinary threshold. There is a distance between a traditional course name (“The Victorian Novel”) and the performances students must undertake to do the work of that course, which often include reading and interpreting texts, acquiring historical information, locating and synthesizing scholarship about those texts, and defending contextualized arguments about them. (Let alone, in some innovative courses, creating entertaining and thoughtful podcasts about them.) We contend that deliberately and explicitly bridging that distance would help instructors stop treating English courses as, in Linkon’s (2011) words, “magical processes that work effortlessly for some teachers and some students” (102). We acknowledge, though, that the decanonizing approach we are suggesting is not an adequate one to achieve decolonization—or, indeed, a truly inclusive curriculum. ³

A method-focused degree promises, as well, to make better apparent to students—and to governments—how what students are learning to do in an English degree relates to practical skills. Or, at least, it takes a first step in articulating the relationship between disciplinary skills and practical ones. Take, for example, a course like SFU’s “Reading Sexuality and Gender,” which trains students, we presume, in reading complex representations to recognize, analyze, and comment in writing on “how sexuality and gender are articulated, understood, explored, and negotiated through literature and language” (SFU, 2023). What happens in the course certainly depends on how it is taught: whether instructors place more emphasis on how the texts under study articulate gender or, as we would hope, on what students are learning to do with those texts’ articulations of gender. But students could potentially emerge from such a course conscious of their newly-acquired ability to analyze representations of gender; detect bias and identify ideology; honour gender-fluid identities; research historical understandings of gender; advocate for safe and supportive approaches to gender and sexuality; and write and speak effectively about their analyses, research, and advocacy in pedagogical and scholarly genres employed by English studies.

The skills just listed—analyze, detect, honour, research, etc—are disciplinary skills: they are practiced by professional scholars, and they are cultivated in students through coursework and assignments. With guidance, students, administrators, governments, and faculty could also take subsequent steps in recognizing that students are acquiring job skills in the meantime. In other words, they could come to see that the work of doing course activities and assessments, while cultivating these disciplinary skills, has also given students abilities in reading and interpreting complex written information; asking probing questions; staking out positions on complicated social topics; making recommendations; problem-solving; decision-making; respectfully acknowledging multiple perspectives; and communicating effectively. They have thus prepared themselves to work effectively with others in a job or a community role.

In our view, there is no conflict between taking such steps—framing English study as methods-based and even pointing out the practical applicability of skills learned in English—and still focusing English pedagogy on the very non-instrumental practices that critics of neoliberalization argue must be upheld as the central purpose and value of Humanities education. These practices include those we commonly uphold as our disciplinary signatures: engaging with complex, unfamiliar, strange, challenging, moving, or even beautiful texts and ideas, and in so doing, coming to “a deeper understanding of the values that are the ingredients of worthwhile personal and social life” (Australian Academy of the Humanities, qtd. in Higgins, 2014, 149). They include what Willmott (2018) calls “reading for wonder,” with its potential to motivate “ethical and ecological perspectives” (219). And they include critiquing and resisting ideological and political systems as they penetrate the very classroom, demonstrating various kinds of “advanced critical literacy” (Noyes, 2020). We do not dispute the value to the individual student, to democracy, to society, of a Humanities education that affords a deep, critical understanding of the complexities of social life. With Higgins (2014), we affirm that Humanities degrees help students—and hence, ideally, their societies—“to recognize and understand the complex but constitutive ways that economies are always grounded in particular social orders” (175), that there is more to life than how their labour might be rewarded with capital. The primary difference our proposed shift would make is simply to insist that we name and foreground the process of gradually acquiring the critical literacy fostered by English studies, and the practices of reading, research, and writing that demonstrate it, as the point of the degree.

An important final note: the shift we are proposing does not discourage teaching historical literature, including internationally-renowned “great works” and the literatures of Great Britain. Indeed, such materials are rich sites for scholarly and pedagogical practice. Where there are experts on staff who specialize in Shakespeare or Austen or Smith, on Faulkner or Morrison, Achebe or Dangarembga, Atwood or Ondaatje, Justice or Maracle—or, indeed, experts in the literary eras, conversations, and communities those writers emerged from—those texts might readily be assigned for students to work with. That is the caveat we mentioned in our introduction: that canonical texts and British literary periods themselves remain valuable in Canadian English degrees, in our view, so long as the degree structure does not set them up as its defining core. Rather than prohibiting historical literatures, our proposal is to foreground teaching (among others) the skills involved in acquiring knowledge about historical contexts, reading texts in earlier Englishes, interpreting historical texts in their contexts, and drawing from historical study some connections to and insights about contemporary issues. These are skills we hope students are already acquiring in our degree. The canonized degree structure implies that what is important is the historical texts themselves and their origins in England; our proposed version of a decanonized structure implies, rather, that it is what we do with them that matters.