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Opening up medieval literature through blogging

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ChaucerPortraitEllesmereMs (1) ‘Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille’: the challenge of teaching Middle English poetics to a varied audience

Dr Jenni Nuttall set up her research and teaching blog, stylisticienne.com, on WordPress in January 2014. She was motivated by a desire to communicate her research interests and findings more widely and in a more publicly accessible way. She also wanted to share expertise in the teaching of Middle English commentary, which is a key component of the Final Honours School for this period of literature in the Faculty of English.

To succeed in commentary writing, students need to able to close-read Middle English poetry using appropriate strategies and skills. School pupils taking English Literature at A Level in the UK are marked in terms of how well they ‘demonstrate detailed critical understanding in analysing the ways in which structure, form and language shape meanings in literary texts.’ In order to meet this assessment objective, pupils often learn lots of close-reading strategies and are given checklists of elements of poetic form to pick out and comment upon.  Some of these don’t work quite so straightforwardly for Middle English, and hence need adaptation and re-consideration. Jenni wanted to share some observations from her own teaching practice.

Rather than simply communicating her ideas to the small groups of students she teaches in college, she wanted to share her strategies for commentary teaching and writing with the larger academic community.  She realised that what was formerly a class handout for eight students could more usefully be a blog post for anyone who was interested in those skills, both at Oxford and beyond.

‘Lo here, the forme of olde clerkes speche in poetrye’: close-reading skills demonstrated online

Jenni posts about interesting aspects of her teaching and research and provides open access resources for teaching via her blog.  Her blog posts share interesting examples of Middle English poetry, specifically chosen to appeal to a wider audience, with thoughts drawn from her research about the importance of form in poetry (with all technical terms explained and exemplified).  She publicises the blog and her research and teaching via a Twitter feed (@Stylisticienne).  In September and October 2014, she posted a series of seven blog posts on how to deal with different aspects of reading and commenting upon Middle English poetry.  This ‘Poetics Primer’ is designed to show students how to close-read Middle English poetry and how to adapt the close-reading skills which they have been taught during their time at school.

‘And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche’: students respond with enthusiasm

stanza1Jenni’s ‘Poetics Primer’ blog posts are widely used by second- and third- year English students at Oxford.  They are recommended by tutors at other Oxford colleges and also by teaching staff at other universities including Cambridge, Royal Holloway University of London and Queen Mary University of London.

194One comment on her blog reads: ‘I’m a second year English undergraduate at Oxford, just starting to analyse Troilus and Criseyde and I just want to say thank you so much for your incredibly helpful posts about approaching the text, much appreciated!’

Twitter users have also been enthusiastic about the content:

@Tamarajatkin: ‘ESH110 students @QMULsed check out @Stylisticienne’s excellent blog for top tips about how to write Enjambment-1about ME poetry’

@CharmingHostess: ;Tools for reading Middle English poetry are handy beyond original context: http://stylisticienne.com/poetics-primer/   Tx @Stylisticienne’

Jenni’s blog posts on medieval poetry have also been popular, given their relatively niche subject matter. From January 2014 to May 2015 the blog received 15,060 page views from 5,662 users worldwide. Her Twitter feed earns on average around 50,000 impressions per month (in April 2015 this figure topped 107,000, in part as a result of a retweet by the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood). Members of the public often respond to the poems on Twitter; indeed, a recent post on a medieval poem describing a migraine prompted lots of interest, especially because the medieval poem evoked the symptoms of the condition in very familiar ways to those who suffer themselves.

‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne’: handy hints on blog writing

Jenni offers the following advice on writing blogs for students, both undergraduate and school-age:

  • Write in a more informal personal voice than when writing traditional research articles, textbooks, or handouts.
  •  Think about research findings can be converted into posts that are useful for many different types of reader (student, fellow researcher, school teachers, colleagues in different fields, enthusiasts): ‘how to’ posts or listicle posts are often very popular.
  • Remember that blogs need to have visual appeal: use great pictures, short paragraphs, bold type, different colours, lots of spacing.
  • Make use of Twitter to publicise blog posts. Since Twitter is a collaborative medium, the more you engage with other users, the more they will retweet your work.

Further Information

  • The IT Learning programme in IT Services provides training courses in writing for the Web and building a WordPress site.
  • IT Services offers Engage, an annual programme of talks, courses, and workshops on using digital technologies for public engagement, outreach, and knowledge exchange.

oxtalent badgeHonourable Mention, OxTALENT 2015 award for Open Practices. This covers initiatives relating to openness in teaching, research and outreach: initiatives should be discoverable through a general-purposes search engine and freely available with an open licence permitting reuse. The text and images in this case study have been adapted from Dr Jenni Nuttall’s entry for the OxTALENT competition.


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