From student to tutor: Experiencing French at Stirling

One of the new faces among our Teaching Assistants this year is a former MSc student at Stirling, Brigitte Depret. After studying and graduating in English and Literature and also completing a BEd in France, Brigitte moved to Scotland in 2009 and, in 2012-13, completed our MSc in Translation and TESOL. For her final dissertation project, for which she obtained a First, Brigitte worked on ‘Keeper’, a journal by Andrea Gillies.

She has been teaching English and French for 28 years and has continued to build her teaching skills and responsibilities since Autumn 2013 by working as a Teaching Assistant on our undergraduate modules in French, as well as continuing to work as a free-lance translator and interpreter.

Here’s what she has to say about life in French at Stirling: “A teacher is always in the process of learning, (I’m still learning from my students!) and if we want to help them make it to the top, we have to get them from where they come from and encourage them onto stepping stones together. What I know for sure is that not only can I talk with no bias about my experience as a student at Stirling but I can, now, as a member of the teaching team, have a very accurate picture of our French department from the inside. And, most importantly, the view from the inside remains faithful to the one I had from the outside – one that allows me to belong to a place of openness, culture and language discovery with dedicated people working with enthusiastic students.

Photo credit: Heather Moya

Why Stirling?
You may think that, because I’m French, I’m biased and you expect me to try convince you how it would be great for you to embark on a degree in French at Stirling…

But, first things first: I have studied in various universities in the course of my life. Some were just like mere factories set in the heart of a city, in a dull and concrete environment where I dealt with a generation of academics, who, for the most part were as rough and dull as the concrete of the buildings, brandishing their wand of knowledge, charging against us, making us feel how small us, poor freshers, were. Somehow, despite their obvious academic skills, the magic of creating the sparkle amongst us, of quenching our thirst for the know-how and know more, was hampered for most of us. As a result, about 70% of the students dropped out of language classes, and their future was doomed. (By comparison, I still have 80% of the beginners who started last semester. So, do you think I’m still biased?)

Stirling is also recognised as one of the most beautiful campuses in Europe making it the ideal place in which to study. The University’s beautiful, unique, enticing settings are grassy, leafy, ‘golfy’, hilly, watery (not only thanks to the occasional rain… but, more importantly, thanks to the lovely loch with its swans and mallards… but I digress!).

Photo credit: Heather Moya

What you will get with us

At Stirling, I’ve been on either side of the road. First, as a student and now as a teacher. What I’ve found at Stirling, and especially within the language department, is a community where teachers and students work in concert. What you will find at Stirling are lecturers/teachers/language assistants who do not necessarily want to promote France or Frenchness (we are way beyond these stereotypes). We, as a team, want to help you to get the skills, the interest to speak and understand how the French-speaking world works. We want to expand your mind, whether it be through the very initiation of French, its history, its society or its literature. Bear in mind that in our department, our post-colonial specialists will invite you to embrace French as a world language, because ‘French’ literature isn’t only the prerogative of the natives of metropolitan France, but far beyond (Senegal, Morocco, Quebec…), while our film studies dynamic and specialists will open your horizons with their passion for the French-language cinema.

We will give you all the necessary feedback to improve yourself, to help you progress along the road and maybe have the pleasure to welcome you as a post-graduate student! So follow the signs… and we will guide you.”

Photo credit: Sarah Fryett

Thanks to Brigitte for sharing her experiences of French at Stirling. If you’re interested in coming to study with us, you’ll find plenty of information about our undergraduate courses here and our postgraduate course information can be found by following the links here.

European Cinema Resarch Forum

It’s Summer conference season once again and I’ve just spent a chunk of the start of this week at the annual European Cinema Research Forum conference which was organised this year by Leanne Dawson at the University of Edinburgh. Since attending the first ever ECRF conference as a PhD student back in 2001 at Bangor University, it’s one I always try to get back to and is always a good opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues and to learn about new films I should try and see. This year was no different!

For a start, it was a chance for me to catch up with the ECRF’s founders Owen Evans and Graeme Harper who also happen to be my co-editors on the Journal of European Popular Culture (always happy to accept submissions…). Unfortunately, I had to leave before Owen gave his paper but I thoroughly enjoyed Graeme’s paper on the onscreen European landscape.

Graeme was speaking as part of the first panel I attended on the theme of ‘Film and Ethics’ along with co-panelists Martin O’Shaughnessy and Carmen Herrero. Martin’s paper was examining the representation of shame in the work of French director Laurent Cantet, particularly in his earlier works, and in relation to class, gender and employment status, among other factors. Carmen shifted the focus of the panel to contemporary Spanish cultural practices. In particular, she was examining the impact of the current economic crisis on practices and processes of film-making in Spain, from the use of crowdfunding to changes in patterns of distribution.

After ‘Film and Ethics’, I went along to a panel on ‘Changing Bodies’ which covered blockbuster French cinema and contemporary German film. Ann-Marie Condron was the first speaker with a paper examining the representation of the body in the recent French box office hit Les Intouchables, analysing its parallel depiction of the disabled body and able-bodied black masculinity. Ann-Marie’s fellow panelist was Rebecca Harper whose paper centred on female masculinity in contemporary German cinema and its relationship to the concept of Heimat, broadly understood as ‘home’.

Tuesday morning was time for two back-to-back panels, kicking off with three papers by a group of colleagues from the University of Manchester who are working together on an AHRC-funded project analysing Transnational Desires. Their project is particularly interested in a consideration of the role of the audience and audience reception and they have been carrying out research at a range of film festivals in Spain, France and the UK, analysing audience questionnaires and conducting focus groups. Darren Waldron started proceedings with a paper on ageing in French and Spanish queer cinema, and two recent works in particular: Les Invisibles and 80 Egunean. Chris Perriam followed up with an examination of the ways in which Spanish queer culture engages with, and draws on, aspects of French film which he illustrated by way of Gaël Morel’s film Notre Paradis. Their panel was rounded off by an extremely interesting paper by Ros Murray on trans activist documentary from France and Spain.

The second morning panel was also my last, unfortunately, as I had to leave before the afternoon activities started, but it did give me an opportunity to learn about Bulgarian box office hits and internet marketing, 1980s UK cinema and trends in onscreen representations of lesbians in contemporary Spanish and Swedish film – not bad going for 90 minutes! Working backwards from the last paper, Francesca Middleton was responsible for the paper on 1980s UK film by way of an analysis of Neil Jordan’s use of storytelling (and lacunae, in particular) in Mona Lisa. My second taste of Bulgarian cinema – the first came via a brilliant short film screened at the Locarno Film Festival a few years back – was thanks to Maya Nedyalkova who gave a paper on the Bulgarian blockbuster Love.net and its interactions with the internet, whether onscreen through the narrative or in terms of its marketing and distribution strategies. And Spanish and Swedish cinema were at the heart of Jacky Collins’s paper which set out three key trends in the onscreen representation of lesbians, pointing out that, despite new developments, a tendency towards heterocentrism and androcentrism still prevails.

The 2014 conference looks set to take us to the other side of the Atlantic, to Oakland University in Michigan and will, I’ve no doubt, provide just as much cinema-related food for thought as this year did.