One Year On

This time a year ago, we were welcoming our new colleague, Nina Parish, to French at Stirling. A tremendous amount has happened in the intervening twelve months and Nina has been kind enough to send us her thoughts on her first year working at Stirling:

‘Last week I completed my first year of working in the Division of Literature and Languages at the University of Stirling and what a year it’s been!

The year started with floods and a very washed out graduation ceremony (I still can’t quite believe that it took place – kudos to those who made this happen!) and a considerable amount of damage to the Pathfoot Building where I have my office and do some teaching. The Pathfoot also houses and exhibits the University’s wonderful art collection – what an absolute headache for the curators! But by the start of the semester the vast majority of us had access to our offices and the teaching rooms were ready to be used again!

And so Semester 1 started – earlier than what I was used to in England – and I began to get to know my wonderful colleagues and my new, mostly Scottish, students. I was struck by how pleasant these students are and it made me think a lot about how high tuition fees have changed the student-teacher relationship south of the border. There were also a couple of students from the EU in most of my classes and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed teaching a class with this diversity of experiences. I’m sad that this is likely to change in the future.

Just as I was getting into my stride (and beginning to know my way around the Cottrell Building!), we went on strike. It is always tough to stop teaching in this context and to not have the contact with students that you did previously but it is also important to fight the good fight and there was a lot on the line here from casual contracts to pensions. Looking on the bright side, you also get to know colleagues better on the picket line.

There had been talk about the Covid-19 virus from the beginning of the year but I had managed to ignore it quite successfully and was all set to travel to Warsaw for a research meeting mid-March, to give papers in St Andrews and Aberdeen, to go to a conference in Rome and then travel on to Armenia for a month-long research secondment as part of the EU funded DisTerrMem project in May and June. All this was obviously cancelled and my world shrank to the tremendous city of Edinburgh where I live. Getting to know this city has been the high point of the lockdown and in the last weeks getting out into the glorious Scottish countryside to go walking again has been such a relief. I was appointed Director of Research at the beginning of the year and having the time to be able to talk to my brilliant colleagues about their research trajectories and future plans has been a delight.

I sometimes wonder what my second year at Stirling will bring (I was due to go to Lebanon and Pakistan for the Memories from the Margins and DisTerrMem research projects), but I’ve decided to focus on enjoying the summer and preparing online classes for September for now.

Bilan de l’année: des évènements inattendus (c’est le moins qu’on puisse dire!) mais j’aime vivre et travailler en Ecosse.’

Many, many thanks to Nina for the great post (and for the pictures of Scottish views) and we’re delighted to have you as a colleague at Stirling, and look forward to pestering you for more blog posts in the months and years ahead!

Congratulations to our prize-winners!

Following on from our congratulations to all of this year’s graduating students a couple of weeks back, we’d like to offer particular félicitations to this year’s French at Stirling prize-winners whose performance really does stand out as exceptional this year. The recipient of this year’s Simone de Beauvoir Prize, awarded to the student with the strongest performance across their French modules, is Laura, who has just completed a BA Hons in English Studies and French with us. And the recipient of this year’s Faculty Research Prize for the highest dissertation grade in French is Evelyn who has just finished her BA Hons in French. Many, many congratulations to Laura and Evelyn on their achievements and we wish you all the very best for the future!

Saying goodbye to colleagues

The blog is about to go quiet for a couple of weeks as everyone takes a little time to catch their breath after a hectic semester but there are a couple of posts we wanted to add before that happens. The first of these is a belated farewell to Emeline Morin, who has now taken up a post at the University of Liverpool. Emeline was part of French at Stirling for two years, a fantastic colleague and a good friend who will be sorely missed by staff and students alike. It was particularly strange to say goodbye virtually while we were all still in lockdown but we wish her all the very best in her new role at Liverpool and we look forward to keeping in touch over the years ahead. Bonne continuation!

Final instalment of our Bridging Materials: Culture

[Updated on 25 February 2021: To enable us to update the Bridging Materials for our incoming Year 1 students for later this year, you’ll notice that the links to the materials via these blog posts have stopped working. We’re delighted these materials have been helpful over the past months and look forward to using them with our new Year 1 students in 6 months!]

Following on from the resources we’ve posted looking at Written Language and those that cover Oral/Aural Language, clicking here should lead you to the final instalment of our Bridging Materials on ‘Culture’ which we refer to as ‘Matière’ in our Stirling classes. Students on all our Advanced French modules in Years 1 and 2 will have a matière seminar each week, alongside their Written Language and Langage parlé classes. There is also a lecture most weeks to help contextualise the film, novels, short stories and other works we study in matière.

Students in our Year 1 Beginners’ modules don’t have matière seminars as their classes centre intensively on language learning to bring their written and spoken skills up to a level that means those who want to continue with French as part of their degree can join our Advanced strand by halfway through Year 2. They do, however, start their matière seminars in Year 2 to ensure that they can build the same analytical, comprehension and essay-writing skills as those in the Advanced module.

Of course, in our classes, students would be expected to watch the films, read the novels, and so on, but for these resources, we’ve used shorter publicly accessible texts and extracts, including a short story by the excellent contemporary French poet and novelist, Lou Sarabadzic.

We hope you find this final selection of resources helpful and would encourage you, over the course of the Summer, to look over these again, in conjunction with the Written and Oral/Aural materials to see how they fit together. And, whether you’re coming to study with us at Stirling or elsewhere, or looking at these posts and resources as a means of refreshing your French, we wish you all the very best! Bonne continuation!