A Top-Heavy Field

It is difficult to generalize about the current “state of the field” in terms of teaching, but we want to highlight some recent data that gives shape to our unease. The deprioritization of teaching faculty's needs is visible in the lineup of NAVSA. Studying the conference programs from March and September 2022, we found that 74 percent of a total of 560 listed attendees were affiliated with R1 or R2 research institutions (i.e., institutions with “very high” or “high” research activity), with an additional 2.5 percent affiliated with Doctoral/Professional Universities.Footnote ¹¹ Only 10.5 percent of attendees were located at baccalaureate colleges, including small liberal arts colleges and associate's colleges. Moreover, 12 percent of all attendees were full professors at R1 institutions, 13 percent were associate professors at R1 institutions, and 4.5 percent were assistant professors at R1 institutions. A whopping 26 percent of attendees—145 people—were graduate students, and almost all had their home departments at R1 institutions. Three percent of attendees were in postdoctoral roles, which is just as many as attendees who were independent scholars without a university affiliation. Finally, 11 percent of attendees were in non-tenure-track positions, be they visiting assistant professors, lecturers, or teaching professors.

This data, anecdotal as it may be, suggests that Victorianists’ leading field conference is quite top-heavy: 43 percent of its attendees were established scholars at the associate or full professor level (all school types); and almost 25 percent of attendees are established, mid-career or late-career scholars affiliated with R1 institutions. While the conference caters to research-track faculty, it has an obvious problem recruiting and retaining talent at the assistant professor level, simply because the field has been shrinking for the past decades, with tenure lines becoming increasingly rare. There are few full-time jobs available for which graduate students can realistically compete. It is statistically impossible that each of the 145 graduate students listed in these programs will land a tenure-track—or any full-time—faculty job. To put this differently, there were just as many assistant professors in the conference programs as there were non-tenure-track faculty—12 percent each across all institutions. In a perfect world, all of the latter would find themselves in assistant professor roles, which would mean parity between the three tenure-track ranks. As things stand, the associate and full professors outnumber assistant professors by almost 400 percent.

Fig. 1.

Overview of 2022 NAVSA attendees by institutional affiliation and job type/rank.

This problem will worsen as it plays out over time: the associate professors will be promoted to full; the full professors will retire; their tenure lines will likely not be renewed; and there will come a time when the field will be even more sharply divided into academic “haves” and “have-nots.”Footnote ¹² We suspect that British literature generalists hired in both tenure-track and non-tenure-track positions will eventually constitute an increasingly large proportion of NAVSA's membership. Still, only between 20 to 30 percent of NAVSA's attendees in 2022 were affiliated with institutions that require teaching loads above the usual 2/2 at R1 institutions, despite the fact that these institutions house the vast majority of faculty positions.

The R1 Effect: Passing Failures in Teacher Preparation

If teaching is so devalued in Victorian studies, then how do scholars learn to teach the period's literature? Victorian studies and pedagogy should be a natural fit. The period itself was generally preoccupied with education. Questions about whether private tutors, boarding schools, or public schools were best for facilitating student learning were discussed openly and at length.Footnote ¹³ While scholars such as Catherine Robson have shown that practices like recitation were common methods in the Victorian teacher's repertoire,Footnote ¹⁴ Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, “a man of facts and calculations” in Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854), encapsulates the nineteenth-century pedagogical approach best. In Dickens's opening scene, learning is framed as a process of acquisition, with “little vessels [i.e., students] . . . ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.”Footnote ¹⁵ Are facts alone enough to cultivate lifelong learners or engaged pedagogical methods in the Victorian classroom—then or now?

Perhaps we fail to associate pedagogy with academic inquiry because, although education has long been a productive site of study for Victorianists, “bad teaching” flourishes in nineteenth-century literature. Charlotte Brontë's works criticize bad teaching with Miss Scatcherd's “bunch of twigs” for inflicting “strokes” in Jane Eyre (1847) or Lucy Snowe's display of classroom despotism in Villette (1853).Footnote ¹⁶ But we need only think of Dickens's David Copperfield (1850) and the titular boy's placard of punishment (“Take care of him. He bites!”), or Mr. Stelling in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) and his beaverlike tenacity for teaching “one regimen for all minds,” to realize that bad teaching is everywhere in the Victorian novel.Footnote ¹⁷ Even if we are inclined to celebrate nineteenth-century educational reforms that led to state-funded schools and increased literacy rates, we might be forgiven for failing to associate Victorian studies with teaching or for imagining that teaching is a solitary activity, pursued by regulatory zealots in the mold of Mr. Gradgrind.

To return to the opening question, then, how do scholars learn to teach Victorian literature? Our collective experiences suggest that Victorianists’ graduate school experiences fill them with facts supposed to translate into well-developed pedagogical approaches. This process contradicts long-standing critical pedagogy strategies for which feminist and antiracist scholars advocate. bell hooks's concept of “engaged pedagogy” is not about education as acquisition and regurgitation of facts but conceptual connection, active participation, and application: “To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. . . . To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.”Footnote ¹⁸ What spaces within the field of Victorian studies exist to facilitate conversations about what those “conditions” look like?

The unfortunate truth is, there aren't many. Thoughtful approaches to pedagogy are not institutionally rewarded—neither for graduate advisers, nor for graduate students, nor even for undergraduate instructors. Even the moniker “teaching college” designates the separation of teaching from research rather than emphasizing the high quality expected of classroom instruction. The messages conveyed by such labels for full-time faculty positions are similar to those conveyed in graduate school: that a teaching assistantship is enough preparation for running a literature class. While teaching assistants may learn grading strategies or methods of facilitating discussion sections, it is rarer that supervising faculty teach graduate students how to develop rubrics, create lesson plans, determine which texts belong in a syllabus, or develop classroom management strategies.Footnote ¹⁹ Graduate advisers are much more active in sharing and modeling how to network, write, and research. As Jonathan Zimmerman writes, “[T]alking about our teaching isn't usually a part of our job. . . . Our scholarship is a professional enterprise, resting on peer review and other long-standing collective practices. But when it comes to teaching, we're solo operators. . . . We're amateurs. That doesn't mean we teach badly, because amateurs can sometimes be really good.”Footnote ²⁰ What it does mean is that, for well over a century, there has been “little formal training” or “systemic preparation” for college teaching; the majority of college instructors learn “on the job.”Footnote ²¹

Most doctoral curricula in literature reinforce the idea that teaching is less valuable by requiring the completion of only one (if any) pedagogy class, which often centers pedagogical theory, privileging genealogies of scholarly debates over classroom application. Others concentrate on teaching writing through composition pedagogy and are often hosted by writing programs, not English departments. Literature pedagogy is rarely a prominent part of graduate coursework, where seminars privilege mastering the genres of the conference paper and journal article. Few such classes ask students to translate what they are reading into syllabi, assignments, or lesson plans for various levels of undergraduate teaching or a standard survey of British literature—a staple course for those hired into tenure-track positions.

If, historically, graduate programs have not privileged pedagogy, what message does that convey to future teacher-scholars about the value of pedagogy as a facet of research to a discipline like Victorian studies? Ignoring literature pedagogy prevents important conversations about how it applies to a distinctly Victorian text or classroom, especially given that such materials come with unique challenges associated with length, language, and historical period.

Pedagogy as Decolonizing Force

Prioritizing pedagogy in Victorian studies would also offer crucial political affordances. The last decade has seen myriad efforts by Victorian studies scholars to widen the scope of the field, not only with temporal lengthening (i.e., the establishment of “the long nineteenth-century”), but also by transcending Victorian literary canonicity through contemplating Victorian studies globally, with transatlantic literary and media relations engendered by imperialism.Footnote ²² Another way is to challenge the preeminence of anglophone literature in Victorian transatlantic studies with a multilingual conceptualization of the nineteenth-century Atlantic region.Footnote ²³ Several journals have welcomed interventions focused on diversifying Victorian studies.Footnote ²⁴

However, such efforts in diversifying the field have remained primarily confined to methodologies in research, although an increasing number of Victorian studies scholars are currently affiliated with teaching-intensive institutions. This issue is compounded for minority scholars and scholars affiliated with minority-serving institutions, who routinely encounter systemic challenges in securing support for research.Footnote ²⁵ Recent special issues on undisciplining the field include “calls for those who read and study Atlantic slavery to ‘become undisciplined’” and advocate for the decolonization of the university through scholars’ “pedagogies, their classrooms, their students, and themselves.”Footnote ²⁶

Following both appeals, we contend that the decolonization of Victorian studies would be remiss if it failed to incorporate the pedagogical labor of Victorian studies scholars at teaching-intensive and/or minority-serving institutions, such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities, none of which presently holds R1 status.Footnote ²⁷ In R2-classified HBCUs, with which one of us is currently affiliated, rigorous pedagogy aimed to support an underserved student population remains a major part of faculty labor alongside scholarship. Therefore, the push to decolonize colleges and universities, including minority-serving institutions, and the call to undiscipline Victorian studies can be answered simultaneously only when pedagogy is considered one of the field's key elements.

The increased appearance of generalist positions in British and global anglophone literature, as well as generalist positions in subfields like gender and sexuality studies, paired with dwindling employment opportunities in R1 institutions for experts in a specific subfield, has led Victorianists to widen the scope of their scholarship. All of us have conducted research beyond our respective areas of specialization in Victorian studies to develop courses in world/transatlantic literature, humanities, gender, sexuality, environmental literature, and composition. Notably, the very ability of Victorian studies to widen its scope with neo-Victorianism, transnationalism, and multilingualism—all of which have been identified in calls for undisciplining the field—is what renders Victorianists attractive generalists capable of innovative pedagogy. For example, one of us utilized her bilingual knowledge of nineteenth-century literature to teach poetry by Rabindranath Tagore and Alfred, Lord Tennyson in a British literature survey.Footnote ²⁸ Another embedded nineteenth-century nature poetry in an interinstitutional course on climate change.Footnote ²⁹

Pedagogy, therefore, is not merely an important function of Victorian studies but fertile ground for decolonizing the field. We call for a more comprehensive inclusion of pedagogy as a central term and form of research, without which a significant number of scholars’ efforts in widening Victorian studies are effectively excluded. In other words, we argue for widening the field to represent Victorianists’ academic labor of both scholarship and pedagogy as equal in import and for bridging the perceived gap between research and pedagogy since, in praxis, they work in tandem for a majority of Victorianists.

Pedagogy as Women's Work and a Site of Collective Action

A greater focus on pedagogy not only contributes to efforts to decolonize the field but also invites Victorianists to deliberately interrogate its gendered labor politics. A less flattering explanation for the marginalization of pedagogical research and praxis in the field of Victorian studies is that teaching, particularly non-tenure-track or teaching-intensive positions, skews female. Although the number of women faculty has grown over the past several decades, the types of positions they hold demonstrate ongoing gender imbalances that shape the pedagogical landscape. According to a 2018 survey by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), women make up 53.8 percent of part-time faculty members and 53.9 percent of full-time contingent faculty members, but they represent just 42.5 percent of full-time tenured or tenure-track professors. Additionally, “the percentage of full-time women faculty members varies by institutional category, ranging from 54.7 percent among associate's institutions to 42.3 percent among doctoral institutions.” When filtering for tenured and tenure-track positions, only 36.3 percent of faculty at doctoral institutions identify as women.Footnote ³⁰ Women are grossly underrepresented at R1 schools in research-dominant tenured and tenure-track positions; instead, they are siloed into teaching roles. In other words, students at teaching-intensive schools, like associate's institutions, are more likely to take a class with a female faculty member than their peers at R1 schools, unless the course is taught by a contingent or non-tenure-track faculty member or graduate student.Footnote ³¹

Surveying these figures, the overrepresentation of tenured and tenure-track faculty at R1 institutions and the underrepresentation of panels and plenaries addressing pedagogical strategies at leading field conferences is especially troubling from a gender perspective. Although anecdotal, the only attending members of the Teaching Universities Caucus at NAVSA 2022 self-identified as women, and there was notable overlap between the members of this caucus and the Gender and Sexuality Caucus, which sponsored our 2022 panel. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that there is a corresponding overlap between feminist scholars and scholars who write about teaching, be it bell hooks or Victorian studies’ own Elaine Showalter.Footnote ³² Lest we assume that pedagogically grounded research is somehow less rigorous than archival research or theorizing, one might recall that Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) resulted from a co-taught course on Victorian women writers. Granting equal weight to co-authored research and writing, like this very article, is a key strategy for addressing gendered labor inequities. Given that women and BIPOC scholars are more likely to carry heavier teaching and service loads,Footnote ³³ creating dedicated space for collaborative, pedagogically focused research in scholarly journals and leading field conferences supports efforts to redress underrepresentation.

Reorienting ourselves toward pedagogy and pedagogical research is not only ethical but also a pragmatic and tactical shift. Higher education has slowly shifted its hiring practices so that the number of full-time, tenure-track positions continues to shrink and the number of contingent faculty—teachers without job security, fair pay, or employee benefits—grows.Footnote ³⁴ Fomented partly by the Great Recession, with its state budget cuts to public institutions and shifting political winds buffeting academic freedom and collective organizing, there is a growing divide between the academic “haves” and “have-nots,” centered largely on who can identify as a researcher and who is responsible for teaching. At the tail end of the Fall 2022 semester, 48,000 academic workers in the University of California system went on strike. Although 12,000 of the strikers, mostly postdoctoral scholars, reached an agreement to end their walkout on December 9, 2022, it took another two weeks for the approximately 36,000 teaching assistants and graduate student researchers to ratify an agreement over wages and benefits.Footnote ³⁵ During the record forty-day strike, UC system administrators lost sleep over how final grades would be posted as the end of the semester approached, and faculty members across the country were reminded that a university without teachers ceases to function. If we continue to tacitly treat teaching as a secondary task instead of a core responsibility that almost all of us undertake every semester for our entire careers, we may inadvertently support those who view teaching as valueless compared to lucrative research grants. This holds especially true in the humanities, where already-falling enrollments and a pending demographic decline in the number of college-aged Americans will more than likely force departments to justify their existence.Footnote ³⁶ It would be wise of us, as a field, to get ahead of this crisis by recognizing and vociferously defending the merits of pedagogy and the resources necessary to provide this crucial public service.

Call to Action

So, how, concretely, could Victorian studies center pedagogy, as it must, both practically and ethically? We argue that graduate programs, as well as faculty who mentor graduate students, need to take teaching more seriously—both as a skill that requires training and as an intellectually rigorous practice that is itself a form of scholarly production. Second, we suggest that the field's journals prioritize the publication of scholarship on or about teaching—and not just in special issues, which reinforce the assumption that teaching is of ancillary concern to Victorian studies proper. Third, we make a similar request to conference organizers, who could center pedagogy by flagging teaching and pedagogy as key topics in CFPs or by hosting teaching plenary or keynote sessions. As the screenshotted tweets from NAVSA 2022 suggest, these would be well-attended sessions.Footnote ³⁷

Fig. 2.

September 2022 tweet by Adrian Wisnicki calling for a “Pedagogy” theme for a future NAVSA conference.

Fig. 3.

September 2022 tweet by Amy Coté in response to the “Not Just Victorianists” NAVSA panel.

Fig. 4.

September 2022 tweet by Miranda Butler in response to the “Not Just Victorianists” NAVSA panel.

We would also like to see the field reckon with how its systems of prestige and recognition sideline teacher-scholars working at teaching-intensive institutions, minority-serving institutions, community colleges, and high schools. Book and article prizes, as well as plenary talks and keynotes, almost always reward tenured or tenure-line faculty at R1 institutions; for example, every NAVSA Book Prize since 2012 has gone to a tenured or tenure-line faculty member at a research-focused institution. Time for research is limited by teaching loads, service commitments, and other professional obligations that make scholarship appear different in other positions—not less serious, professional, or important, just different. By performing collaborative research, rethinking our approaches to publication timelines, and changing institutional norms about the kinds of scholarship that confer eligibility for employment and the granting of tenure, we can actively pursue practices that challenge the widespread ethos in our field that tacitly (and often not so tacitly) endorses a classist, racist, and sexist system of institutional prestige and professional belonging.