Preamble:
At many institutions, medievalists in English departments teach the History of the English Language as a senior-level or 400-level course, taken by students at the end of their careers as English majors. For many preservice teachers in English programs, HEL may be their very last non-education course, taken at the same time or even after their student teaching experience. At The College of New Jersey, the core faculty responsible for teaching HEL are all medievalists, both early and late; we have repositioned HEL, making it part of the first year sequence for English majors who intend to be secondary educators. In addition, the course has been repositioned so that it might serve as part of the general education or “Liberal Learning” curriculum at The College as a course that examines “Social Change in Historical Perspective.”
As a consequence, the course offers students an opportunity to see language as part of the foundation of their intellectual development as future middle school and high school teachers rather than as a “senior option.” It also requires and engages students in active learning and provides students with an opportunity to examine standard language ideologies in an interdisciplinary context. I contend that the History of the English language is uniquely positioned to reach across disciplinary boundaries just as medievalists must do in order to research and teach in our field. Faculty who teach HEL engage with history, geography, culture, ideology, and literature in ways that can capture the imagination of students otherwise reluctant to take English department courses, especially in literature written before 1800 or outside of the United States. Students in HEL courses must explore issues related to material culture and technology in ways that embrace interdisciplinarity and that engage multiple modes of learning. As a result, HEL is not just a niche course appropriate for seniors who will be teachers, who must take the course because of external certification requirements, but a course appropriate to students who seek a broad, interdisciplinary experience that allows them to explore the ways in which language can be impacted by technology, materiality, colonialism, migration, ideology, and art. As higher education across the country sees declining enrollments that result in the consolidation of departments and the shrinkage of majors, especially in the humanities, repositioning of HEL into the intellectual foundation rather the periphery will yield dividends for us, attracting students to medieval languages and literatures.
Presentation Materials:
Links:
Gazetteer of British Place Names
University of Nottingham: Institute for Name Studies
Caxton’s Eynedos:
Exploring Early Modern English
Diigo.com: Bookmarking and Annotation Site