A #PresentingACCUTE Interview

With the upcoming 2025 ACCUTE Conference at George Brown College from 30th May- June 2nd, we have been having interviews with some of the presenters in conversation with Gladwell Pamba, ACCUTE’s Coordination and Communications Assistant. Next up on the interview series of #PresentingACCUTE is Sarah Banting, an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University in Calgary, where she teaches academic writing, writing about literature, editing, and disciplinarity. She studies the rhetoric of literary criticism and English literary curricula and pedagogies.

Tell us a little bit about what you’ll be focusing on in your presentation

The Modern Language Association (MLA) publishes a series of volumes, which are a collection of essays about teaching. I’ve collected a set of three of those recent issues within that series: approaches to teaching Jane Austen; approaches to teaching A Thousand and One Nights & teaching North American Asian literature. I’m analyzing those essays to see how all of them are written by literary scholars and people who teach in the same discipline. In that dialogue between people writing to others who do the same work, I’m interested to see how they describe and talk about teaching the subject and in the way they talk about that. I’m interested in analyzing the connection between what they say about what they do in the classroom with students and the larger things that we claim are the values of literary study in total. We make all these claims about what students get out of an English degree. I’m interested to see these volumes – which are like teachers talking to other teachers – map to that bigger picture.

How did you come to work on that?

It comes out of the two parts of who I am as a scholar and a teacher. All of my graduate training was in literary studies and my first teaching was in literary studies. I’m shaped by the discipline of English in its study of literature. Now I teach writing and I’m an expert in the theory and practice of writing. I spend most of my time talking to people who teach writing and by extension, who think a lot about teaching and who talk about pedagogy and how to teach writing as a specific skill. I grew up in literary studies and I still believe that something magic happens in the literature classroom and that it does all of the amazing things we claim for it. I will continue to make those claims. But the people that I talk to are people who think about pedagogy and how to build certain skills. What English does is kind of weird, as is literary studies. It point to a lot of gaps between what we do in the classroom, what we expect students to do in their assignments, and what we say the English degree does for people. I hear these questions and see my colleagues point to gaps and then still have the belief that it’s all awesome. This project is partly to help me answer the questions raised about this thing that I’m a little bit outside of now.

What have you been reading or watching lately that you can recommend to your ACCUTE colleagues?

I recommend Christina Bruns’s book, Why Literature? It’s connected to the project I’m doing, but it’s an investigation of what good it does to a person or for a person to read literature. The final chapters are about what it means for, how we teach it or how we should teach it.

What do you love to do when you’re not researching, teaching, studying literature?

I live in Calgary and the cliché is to go to the mountains, get out of the city, go out in nature. I find myself just always wanting to be outside, go by the water, by the river. I’m always trying to drag my kids out for a run in the forest too!

You can submit your proposal here: https://accute.ca/2025-call-for-papers/