Dr Pamela Knights

National Teaching Fellow 2002 Dr Pamela Knights is a Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. She teaches across a wide range of courses in the department and, over the years, has held particular responsibility for American Fiction and for Children's Fiction. Having begun her career in secondary schools and sixth form colleges, and having also worked with PGCE students at both primary and secondary levels, she brings to her teaching a range of approaches garnered from over thirty years of experience across different sectors. She has been involved in a variety of pedagogical projects, all of them involving opening up the traditional seminar format to wider currents of learning and practical activities. She led the departmental development duologue project, funded by the English Subject Centre (report on the ESC web-site), exploring the impact and uses of introducing a VLE in traditional Arts and Humanities contexts; her NTFS project (TRAC: Textual Reflection: from Adult to Child) linked children's literature students in discussions and joint activities with younger readers in schools; and, as the Durham Co-ordinator on the FDTL5 MEDAL project, she contributed many further case-studies and resources for active approaches in childhood studies (MEDAL: Making a Difference. Educational Development to enhance Academic Literacy. http://medal.unn.ac.uk/casebook.htm). She has recently become interested, through her work as editor on the new journal, International Research in Children's Literature (Edinburgh University Press), in practical issues arising from different cultural styles and in how to help developing writers make their research as accessible as possible across these differences. She remains keen on exploring ways of extending the range of approaches, within less flexible, traditional, teaching and learning structures and spaces.