Any discussion of teaching is necessarily closely related to the constraints and freedoms offered by the system and community in which one teaches, so it is probably useful to begin this reflection on teaching with a brief description of my current position. I do not wish to suggest that my position is in any way unusual, quite the opposite; I offer what follows in the belief that many will see much they recognize here and in the hope that some may find it useful. My university, the University of Liverpool, is a large civic university in the north-west of England. We offer three-year BA honours programmes, a variety of MA programmes and have roughly forty doctoral students on the books at any one time, researching a wide range of subjects from medieval to contemporary literature, from historical or linguistic language work to the theory and practice of teaching English as a foreign language. While our BA is available for full-time study only, many of our postgraduates study on a part-time basis. We have a noticeable constituency of local students, ‘local’ meaning those whose permanent home address lies within Merseyside or Cheshire (an area which, pleasingly for lovers of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, includes the Wirral). These students could commute from home to the main campus on a daily basis with journey times of around an hour, although many of the younger ones prefer to live in student houses with their peers rather than at home with their parents.

Students taking modules in English may be following single honours degree programmes, or joint (a 50/50 split of English and another subject) or combined (three subjects in the first year, two thereafter). We operate a modular system and do not distinguish between these three types of student in this modular provision, which means that any given seminar group is likely to contain students from all three types of degree programme.