‘Perced to the Roote’: Challenges in Teaching Chaucer at UK Universities

Abstract

This paper attempts to present the challenges facing medievalists in the UK when they are confronted with undergraduates with little or no experience of working with Chaucer and medieval studies. Through exploring the current A and AS level criteria for assessment, and understanding what approaches are being used at secondary level, it is hoped that medievalists will be able to adapt practice to encourage more students to make their field a study area of rewarding choice.196 Challenges in Teaching Chaucer at UK Universities

Asking the Right Question: Some Aspects of the Assessment of English Literature

“…Metaphors such as 'conveyor-belt' (Benton 2000) and 'flat-pack' (Dymoke 2007) have been used to describe a soulless, instrumentalist regime of teaching and assessment, part of an epistemological shift towards the formulaic (Marshall 2003) and even the fundamentalist (Hilton 2002). There have been similar concerns about the impact of the modularized and assessment objective-driven AS/A2 on literature teaching post-16 (see, for example, Rayner (2008)). …”