From the Editor

Jazz legend Miles Davis once declared,  "Do not fear mistakes. There are none."  He was concerned with the creative life and the necessary changes that have free play in achieving that life.  Davis was obsessed with the spaces in between things -- "Don't play what's there. Play what's not there."  Ergo, play even the things that some might call mistakes.  "Bebop was about change," said Davis, "about evolution.  It wasn't about standing still and becoming safe.  If anybody wants to keep creating, they have to be about change."  This is the necessary talk of Jazz, of all art, and if we can assume that Teaching and Writing also have that art thing going, the traditions of the past are suitable for improvisation, for the spaces in between, for that something living in the now.

The Profession of English relies on tradition according to language, to literary form, to cultural history, according to "not change," and certainly the idea of a mistake within that tradition immediately translates into fear of lower test scores, grades, bars, and hoops (flaming or otherwise), and, of course, to make a mistake of fact or date or quote is heresy.  At first glance, it seems the coming of Distance Education to English Studies is a necessary evolution trying to catch up with internet affluence and demands of students raised in chat rooms.  By itself, DE (Distance Education) expands the teaching process to include a wider, more diverse "clientele" -- the word now used without raised eyebrows, without having to say "non-traditional students."  The numerous DE programs emerging on many university campuses appear to be meeting this new educational scenario of clientele demand or need.  The knee-jerk, rock-bottom query -- "Is this type of educational delivery comparable or better than traditional classroom methods?" -- centers the DE debate.  For many, the gut reaction to teaching the quadrivium (the higher division of the liberal arts -- geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music) and the trivium (the lower division, sorry folks, -- grammar, logic, and rhetoric) is: "Play me something I can recognize. Don't give me that Bebop."

Of course, the present day university curricula, oriented to 21st century professions that could care less about Pythagoras, Aristotle, or the mythology of the stars, bears little resemblance to the Medieval menu.  So who could claim such anti-DE arguments have feet?  DE is 21st century -- it is new, evolutionary, about change, and, at times, even creative.  Teachers who like DE claim they have never been better prepared or focused.  Yet what is problematic about the DE revolution (like all formal pedagogies) is its justification that relies on the measurement of instructional effectiveness and its emphasis on perfecting the show, rather than challenging its dynamic.  By dynamic, I mean, the things that happen between the spaces, of playing what's not there, of making mistakes that aren't mistakes but just learning a new way, of the inspiration that occurs in the present, live, human moment between teacher and student, between students, the words spoken in the living now.  Like Jazz, the art of teaching and writing insists on never playing the same song twice in the same way.