Working with schools

Alongside all the usual activities happening in our classrooms and across our programmes (including our Year 3 students making plans for their upcoming Semester Abroad…), our outreach work centred on language learning in schools has also started up again.

On the European Day of Languages, a team of our Language Ambassadors were invited along to Wallace High to talk to the pupils there about the benefits of language learning. For Patrick, who is in his 2^nd year studying French and Spanish with us, this was his first in-person school visit and a really positive experience: ‘The afternoon was a great success, pupils were engaging with the activities we had set out for them and have asked to be included in the future planning of similar events. From my point of view, it was an invaluable piece of my time used to hopefully persuade young pupils to continue to study languages.’ Feedback from the S3 pupils at the school was equally positive and huge thanks to Modern Languages teacher, Michelle McCaffery, for inviting us. We’re delighted our Ambassadors helped to convey the fact that, in the words of one pupil, ‘languages can take you places you would not expect!’

Despite some pretty atrocious weather, many of the Ambassadors got together at the end of that week, too, for a training and information session about the Ambassador scheme over the coming year. And while we were talking about that on campus at Stirling, some of the Ambassadors from our Strathclyde partners were out at St John Ogilvie High School, meeting with pupils and teachers there, including our own graduate Sam Evans! We’ll be joining forces for more school visits over the weeks ahead, working with Cédric Moreau from Strathclyde and Emma McLean from SCILT so watch this space…

And on Saturday 1^st October, Cristina Johnston, Pete Baker, Fiona Noble and Elizabeth Ezra ran an online workshop for senior phase secondary school pupils, focusing on the multiple benefits that can come from using films as part of the ways we study languages. The event was part of a series of workshops organised by SCILT and was supported on the day by Sheena Bell, Suzanne Ritchie and Alice Lister. We were also really pleased that three of our current students, Dagmara, Alex and Helena, were able to join us on the day to talk about their experiences learning languages and, in particular, the ways in which film and visual culture have formed part of their own language learning. And we’re especially grateful, of course, to all the pupils who attended, from across Scotland, students of French, Spanish, German and Italian. They asked brilliant questions and worked hard on listening exercises involving songs from Encanto, as well as thinking about the wide range of topics that might emerge through the study of that kind of film.

Thank you, merci, Danke, grazie, gracias… to all the pupils at our SCILT workshop and to everyone who has been involved with our outreach activities so far.

Africa in Motion 2021

Today marks the opening of the 2021 Africa in Motion film festival and, as ever, the festival’s programme is filled with fantastic screenings and films, all online this year, and accessible to viewers across the UK. Their ticket prices operate on a sliding scale and there are festival passes that give you access to more films. Among the festival strands this year are ‘Craft Insights’ which includes masterclasses and pre-recorded Q&A sessions, ‘Imaginarium’ focusing on the embodied experience of blackness and the environment including work in response to COP26, and ‘Premieres’ which, as the name suggests, includes dozens (66 in total…) of premieres of films from across Africa and Black diasporas. As ever, lots to choose from and so many brilliant films to watch! Check out the full programme here.

Africa in Motion 2020: Online!

As regular blog readers will know, just over a decade ago, our then PhD student, Lizelle Bisschoff (now Senior Lecturer at Glasgow University) founded the Africa in Motion film festival which normally takes place around this time every year in cinemas and other venues across Edinburgh and Glasgow, and elsewhere. This year, the festival has gone online and we wanted to draw your attention to it and to the fantastic programme of films it has on offer, from animation to horror, all accessible online via bookings on the festival website.

The festival is operating staggered ticket prices (from £2-8 per ticket), as well as offering festival passes (£15 concession) and many of their screenings are also accompanied by Q&A sessions and discussions. Films will be screening throughout November and there’s plenty of great stuff to watch so do check it out!

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!

Articles, Books and Conferences

As well as launching language websites and giving introductions to films, French at Stirling colleagues and students have been up to all sorts of French-related activities over recent weeks. More on some of these will doubtless follow in due course but, by way of a quick overview…

Anyone with an interest in contemporary French politics and society should look out for Fiona Barclay’s article ‘French citizenship campaigners may find acceptance depends on far more than official papers’ published online in The Conversation in early October. Fiona also gave a talk at the Alliance française in Glasgow on 5^th November about the French settlers of Algeria which included a local pied-noir amongst the attendees.

Fiona and Beatrice’s Ivey’s MOOC ‘Remembering Empire’ is coming to the end of its first run with around 350 people registered at the last count. The MOOC will be left open for new participants to join and will remain live until April so it’s not too late to sign up!

Next week will see a fine Stirling contingent giving papers on a wide range of topics at the annual Society for French Postcolonial Studies conference in London. This year’s conference theme is ‘Postcolonial Realms of Memory in the Francophone World.’ Fiona and Beatrice are both giving papers as part of a panel on ‘Memories of Algeria’, along with Susan Ireland of Grinnell College. Fiona’s paper is on ‘Fraternity in French Algeria: (post-)colonial conceptions of republican citizenry’, while Beatrice will be talking about ‘Ahmed Kalouaz, Childhood and Colonial Memory in Ecriture Jeunesse.’ Fraser McQueen is the third member of the Stirling cohort, with his paper on ‘Memories of Empire in France’s Literary Grands Remplacements.’

Hannah Grayson has two co-edited volumes that have come out over the past few months: Rwanda since 1994: Stories of Change published by Liverpool University Press and After the Genocide in Rwanda: Testimonies of Violence, Change and Reconciliation with IB Tauris. And to return to the online publication The Conversation, our French and Translation colleague, Aedín ní Loingsigh is one of the co-authors of this fantastic article on bilingualism and dementia: ‘Bilingualism and dementia: how some patients lose their second language and rediscover their first.’ Aedín’s co-authors are Ingeborg Birnie (Strathclyde), Thomas Bak (Edinburgh) and our former Stirling colleague, David Murphy (Strathclyde).

More news to follow!

‘Studying at Stirling inspired me to do translation’

It has been a hectic first half of semester so there’s been a bit of a lull on the blog but we’re now halfway through our mid-semester break and there’s a little bit more time to catch up with the backlog so, with apologies to the very kind and patient contributors, let’s go! First up, we have a post by Laura, who graduated in French and Spanish in 2015 and who has just completed a Masters at Glasgow, focusing on Translation Studies:

‘Well, it’s been an intense and really quick year, and I think studying for a Masters in Translation Studies has had something to do with it. As I have the chance to stop and look back at everything that’s just happened, I realise I wouldn’t have been doing all this if it wasn’t for the amazing experiences I had during my undergraduate course at Stirling. After all, it was thanks to my time there that I was encouraged to keep learning and practising languages. Here are the different things that inspired me…

Classes

The speaking practice I had in Langage Parlé encouraged me to want to keep practising. And if grammar hadn’t been made so interesting in classes, I would probably remember a lot less today. In the final year, we did a fair bit of translating, including newspaper articles – I always did quite well at it, so it made me realise I could take this area of language study further. Then, after having positive experiences of learning French and Spanish, I thought I would try my hand at something new for my postgraduate, and ended up doing Beginners Chinese as an option module. Tricky, but definitely worth it!

Adventures

My semester abroad in Aix-en-Provence, France and year as a language assistant at a primary school in Spain also played a huge part in my decisions. This was where I really got to put language skills to use beyond the classroom (despite often being in classrooms), and have the chance to live everyday life in other countries. I met lovely people from all over the world and had lots of fun visiting new places, and going to many a cultural event. How could I not want to keep using different languages?

Friends

I have lots of great memories with friends I made while studying at Stirling, and it’s always nice to catch up and reminisce with those I still keep in touch with. We’re all doing different things, ranging from teaching to working with animals, but our studies and time spent at Stirling led us to the paths we’re on, whether the influence is obvious or not. Two of my friends at Glasgow had actually studied at Stirling as well, but had been in a different year from me before, so that was a nice surprise and something extra in common.

French at Stirling

I previously wrote a review on a Celtic Connections concert for French at Stirling. Then after graduating, I ended up e-mailing the festival to see if there were any opportunities to use language skills. As a result, I volunteered there and got to do Spanish speaking for a band from Galicia. Also, as part of my Masters dissertation (which I was delighted to hand in!) I translated articles from a Spanish music magazine, so was able to use my passion for music when translating. I think writing the review made me think a bit more about how I could combine languages with music, and I’m so pleased that I’ve been able to achieve that.

It’s been an amazing and worthwhile experience doing a Masters at Glasgow, providing me with an ideal mix of theory and practice. But my time at Stirling will always be special to me, from the scenery and the loch, to the super language department. Now, enough nostalgia – it’s time to look to the future and see what lies ahead … I would love to keep translating, and I am considering working freelance as well as part-time in a wonderful library. My dream would be to keep mixing languages with music, and do translation for events or media. I’ve helped out with Havana/Glasgow Film Festival for a few years, so I know that I enjoy working with festivals. And finally, even though I focussed on Spanish to English translation, I’d love to keep up my French (bien sûr!) and translate out of that too.

Merci beaucoup!’

And merci to Laura, too, for this great post and all our good wishes for the future – keep us posted!

Africa in Motion 2014 Programme Launch

Africa in Motion 2014

The programme for this year’s fantastic Africa in Motion film festival (founded by Lizelle Bisschoff, one of our former PhD students) has just been launched and looks as diverse and interesting as ever.

This year, there’s a programme of films in both Edinburgh and in Glasgow, and Stirling will be hosting a masterclass by Rwandan film-maker Eric Kabera at the MacRobert on Wed 5 November. As well as films from Senegal, South Africa, Angola, Burkina Faso and many other countries, the festival’s programme includes an exhibition of classic African film posters, an African storytelling event (both at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse), and an exhibition of posters and graphic art by South African designer/illustrator/photographer/art director, Modise BlackDice at Summerhall in Edinburgh. Check out the programme here.

You might also be interested in David Murphy and Lizelle Bisschoff’s edited collection Africa’s Lost Classics which will get its official launch at the festival and which our honorary graduate Mark Cousins has described as ‘a winning product of the centrifugal imagination’.

Africa’s Lost Classics, edited by Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy

Professor Tom Conley to give guest lectures at Stirling

Cartographic Cinema by Tom Conley

Tom Conley, Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, will be visiting Stirling in Spring 2015 as the Inaugural Visiting Fellow of the Society for French Studies. He will first give the annual Malcolm Bowie Lecture at the IMLR in London before giving a guest SFS lecture at the University Stirling where he will also lead a postgraduate workshop.

Professor Conley’s work engages with literary and visual culture from the early modern to the contemporary period and his many publications include Cartographic Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). His workshops during the Fellowship will focus in particular on cartography and translation.

More details of dates and venues for his Prof. Conley’s lectures and workshops closer to the time.

Welcome to French at Stirling

Bonjour! Hello! And welcome to French at Stirling!

This blog aims to create a space for news about life and events on the French programme at Stirling University, as well as to give those of us who teach on the programme a chance to say a bit more about our own research and teaching.

French sits within the Division of Literature and Languages, alongside Spanish and Latin American Studies, Religion, Global Cinema, English Studies, Publishing Studies and Creative Writing. At undergraduate level, our students can either opt for Single Honours French or can combine French with a range of other subjects from History to Management via Education, Politics, Philosophy and much more besides. We also contribute to a variety of postgraduate teaching on our MRes Humanities, MLitt in Film Studies, taught MRes in Translation Studies and MSc in Translation with TESOL, and we have PhD students working on topics as diverse as the sociolinguistics of French and Belgian rap music and Moroccan urban cinema.

The blog is very much a ‘work in progress’ and any questions or suggestions for items we might include can be sent to Cristina Johnston (cristina.johnston@stir.ac.uk).