Monthly Archives: August 2011

Could our students demand we teach courses we don't already?

book reviews, languages, learning, student protest

Student: I enjoyed your lecture today. I find Africa fascinating.

Lecturer: Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Student: I want to study for a degree in African Studies

Lecturer: Er we don’t offer a course in that here.

Student: But the University of Harrogate does

Lecturer: Umm, well, we don’t here…

Student: I think we should make the university set up an African Studies course.

Lecturer: Errrrr….

Student: If they didn’t listen we could have sit-ins and protest to the Vice-Chancellor and get the local papers in.

Lecturer: Mmmmm

As far as I know this never happens in the UK. Students here select their subject of study on their UCAS form prior to arrival. Some universities will allow students to change course during or at the end of the first year. Students will protest if a university attempts to close down a department or a programme, but a protest aimed at getting the university to offer courses it doesn’t already teach or have the staff for? No way!

But at the US universities in Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur’s book, Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education this is precisely what has happened as students have sort to pressure senior management to set up courses in Asian-American Studies, Women’s Studies and Queer Studies. When I began to read the book for review in Innovations in Education and Teaching International I was somewhat intrigued by this form of protest (the book opens with an account of students getting arrested for occupying the administrative building at the University of Texas).

The differences between US and British universities cannot be addressed in anything as short as a blog post. But whilst I have difficultly foreseeing these sorts of campaigns in British universities, I think that there is an interesting point here. For students unable to ‘go away’ for university many subjects are not available to them. For example students in many areas of England are unable to access a languages degree in their own Travel To Work Area (TTWA) or even in the next one. Students who live in the Welsh borders, parts of Lincolnshire, parts of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset and parts of North-East and North-West England are not within two TTWAs of a university which offers language degrees. I expect similar patterns would emerge for other subjects. Could students in the UK start lobbying for the provision of new courses in their university or locality?

Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur, Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education (Ashgate, 2011).

My review in Innovations in Education and Teaching International

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Should we standardise language course titles?

Common European Framework, languages, learning, LLAS, ,

Suppose you have just completed French Level 4. What standard are you at? Can you ask for directions, read L'Étranger, conjugate the pluperfect subjective, book a hotel room, express your thoughts on the Arab Spring, recognise the past historic tense, or discuss Molière on French TV?

It depends of course. In my most recent report of ‘non-specialist’ language learners (in other words, those not doing a degree in languages – I’m not really sure about the term), I asked learners to provide me with the exact title of their course. I then mapped their answers to the standard they said they should have reached by the end of the course. What I found was that Level/Stage 4 courses appear at all three levels to which I mapped the course titles.We have a Level 6 at A1/A2, a Level 8 at B1/B2, a Level 4 at C1/C2 showing just how every institution has its own system. Thinking radically for a moment, why don’t we standardise our course titles?

Some of the advantages I can think of include:

  1. More learners would be able to articulate their level to employers or other stakeholders. (Over a third of learners were unable to say what standard they should have reached by the end of their language course)
  2. Learners would be able to continue their language learning at another institution (e.g. if they got a job in another part of the country or wanted to continue studying at a higher level not available at their current university).
  3. We would be able to collect better data cross-institutional on the language abilities of ‘non-specialist’ language learners.
  4. Students might be less worried about whether a certain level of course was too easy or too difficult for them.
  5. We could have a national recognised standard for all language learners (you could argue that we could achieve this simply by putting CEFR levels into every course title).
A defence of the current unstandardised system would be most welcome!

Read the full report.


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Day 2 at the LLAS Centre

Islamic Studies, LLAS, National Student Survey

New LLAs logo

We are now at the end of Day 2 of LLAS: the Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. Our new website is up nicely integrated with Twitter and Facebook. Our new logo builds on our longstanding identity as LLAS (pronounced L-L-A-S) and we have kept our purple colours.

We have 19 events up on our website now kicking off with our annual workshop for Heads of Department on 14 September. Much of our professional development is going on as it has for the past eleven-and-a-half years as we seek to maintain and develop that which we have built up.

On a personal level there are significant changes. I am now only working only four days per week, but am seeking ways to make up my shortage of hours(!). Additionally, as from next week I will start as the Acting Academic Coordinator for the Higher Education Academy Islamic Studies Network, a role which I expect to be undertaking until March 2012.

I’m currently catching up on some unfinished business from last week (I was ill for a couple of days), notably a summary report on the National Student Survey projects we funded and the 2011 survey of non-specialist language learners.

I will be a taking some time off work later this month with plans to finish painting the hallway, landing and stairs (in Dulux cookie dough) and continuing to organise my messy outbuilding (bigger than a shed, smaller than a garage).

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