by Dr Wendy Sims-Schouten (UCL Arts and Sciences)

How can resistance, defiance and compliance equate to resilience?

Resilience, defined as “positive adaptation despite adversity”, has become a popular term in education, research and practice, centralising the role of ‘positive emotions’, ‘successful traits’, and coping mechanisms in adapting to life despite great odds. Moreover, the phenomenon of resilience has been adopted in everyday language with a focus on ‘making people more resilient’ or the ‘need’ to become more resilient.

Yet ‘resilience’ has also provoked scepticism, and at present there is little consensus on the referent of the term, standards for its application or agreement on its role in explanations, models and theories.

Some of this is linked to the fact that key terms, such as ‘success’ and ‘positive adaptations’ are not clearly defined, other than being measured in terms of education success, an ‘ability to achieve goals’ and having a ‘positive attitude’, to name a few.

Revisiting resilience through lived experiences

To fully reflect on these questions, on Wednesday the 13^th of December 2023 the Arts and Sciences department hosted the launch of the Eclectic Resilience Hub.

Located at the intersection of the arts, humanities and sciences the aim of the Eclectic Resilience Hub is to provide a new lens through which to view human resilience and wellbeing, through coproduction with students, staff and the wider community, centralising personal experiences.

Here, ‘eclectic resilience’ reflects the dynamic complexity of human resilience, including defiance, resistance and compliance as resilient acts putting coproduction and ‘counter’ voices of members from a range of communities at the centre.

With the Eclectic Resilience hub, we will develop a base and repository for current and future education, teaching and research projects around wellbeing and resilience.

The event saw an exciting programme of guest speakers, including Donald Campbell founder of The Forgotten Generations, reflecting on voices and historical facts of information and achievements made by African and Caribbean people, Nicole Brown (IoE) who talked about Ableism in Academia, Ranjita Dhital, Clare Lewis and Francois Sicard (Arts and Sciences) who presented internal and global projects on wellbeing and inclusive practice, and an Alumni Talkshow.

Defiance and resistance as acts of resilience

Wendy Sims-Schouten (Associate Professor and Deputy Director Arts & Sciences) and Sara Wingate-Gray (lecturer and pathway lead for the Cultures Pathway, Arts & Sciences department) opened the event, giving examples of historic and contemporary voices of resistance and defiance, where instead of being praised for being resilient the person is blamed for behaving ‘improperly’.

A quote was provided from an interview with a member from a minority community who was accused of being aggressive for confronting people who used the ‘N-word’:

“There was another black lady, her son had been taunted and called the N-word, and she kicked off at the school, and they told her that they will call the police to get her arrested.”

The first speaker, Donald Campbell, founder of the Forgotten Generations, discussed his experiences upon arrival in the UK, as part of the Windrush generation “we were not liked by everyone because of the colour of our skin.”

Sharing oral and written stories of the early and later years of individuals from British African & Caribbean Countries and former children’s experiences of their years of separation from parents due to emigration, colonisation, repatriation, Donald Campbell provided a powerful narrative of resilience, challenge and survival.

The invisibility of disability 

Nicole Brown (Associate Professor, Institute of Education) followed with a powerful account of ‘ableism in academia’. Asking questions, such as “from your own experiences and/or your observations of others’ experiences, what is it like to be disabled/chronically ill/neurodivergent in higher education?” Nicole highlighted how:

“Invisible disability in the academy is exhausting, peers & work conditions constantly overlook my needs. They have difficulty grasping fluctuations & often it’s easier to just shrug off my needs.”

Innovative methods: Participatory methods, pizza pathways and measuring well-being

The next speaker Ranjita Dhital (Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Health Studies, Arts & Sciences Department), took the notion of ‘eclectic resilience’ to a global level, providing insight in participatory methods and eclectic inclusive practices in Nepal.

Clare Lewis (lecturer and pathway lead for the Societies Pathway, Arts & Sciences Department) and former BASc student Ambreen Shaikh took the conversation back to the department of Arts and Sciences, showing how effective eclectic personal tutoring practices are a two-way relationship putting inclusive practice and wellbeing at the centre.

Sharing information about inclusive coffee mornings for students and ‘pizza pathways’, Clare highlighted the multiple benefits of fun activities: breaking from routine, relaxing, and bridging awkwardness, providing opportunity to chat and enjoy companionship of others.

Finally, through his blockchain project on ‘decentralized authentic wellbeing assessment as a new vector to put the “whole well-being” at the core of education, Francois Sicard (Lecturer in Science and Engineering, Arts & Sciences Department) highlighted that measuring the overall well-being of both students and members of staff accurately in higher education remains particularly challenging.

He indicated that the difficulty comes not only from the complexity of developing comprehensive models reflecting overall well-being accurately, but also from the need for more reliable authentic well-being assessment protocols.

Francois referred to the benefits and advantages of using blockchain technologies to implement an open and accessible community-led tool that can support the production of new and reliable knowledge on the “whole academic education well-being” in higher education.

Final words: Be easy on yourself

The day ended with an Alumni Talkshow led by two BASc students (Devaki Jayal and Ibukun Osibona) with support from four former alumni.

Talking about their resilience, wellbeing and life after UCL, the alumni highlighted the need for selfcare, but also accepting that your first job may not be your ‘forever job’, be prepared to shift your career goals, talk to people, eat well and most of all do not be too hard on yourself!

We are currently in the process of developing a website for the Eclectic Resilience Hub. Upcoming projects include a piece of work on Mental Health Literacy in the UK and Indonesian context, as well as ‘Eclectic Resilience’ in the context of child migration.

By Marga Navarrete, Alejandro Bolaños and Mazal Oaknín (SELCS Centre for Translation Studies / Spanish Portuguese and Latin American Studies)

Update: The open-access e-book based on this seminar is now available for perusal here! See the end of the blog post for the full reference for this book.

This e-seminar on medical translation came out as the 7th edition of our e-Expert seminar series in Translation and Language Teaching, a collaboration between UCL’s School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) and the University of Cordoba, Spain, which started in 2018 and has since caught enormous attention worldwide.

Through different national and international mailing lists, we reached hundreds of prospective attendees – teachers, lecturers, researchers, PhD students and professionals from translation and publishing industries, from modern language and translation departments and in secondary and higher education in the UK and overseas.

Our seminars devote a special emphasis to the areas of curriculum design, assessment and feedback, interdisciplinarity and EDI challenges. We dedicated our previous series to current perspectives and applications in audiovisual translation, recent advances in pedagogical translation, mediation and culture, media accessibility, LGTBQI+ understanding, feminism and gender and our next one, taking place in 2025, will be “Tackling the BIPOC awarding gap”.

Our e-seminar in medical translation followed a two-day format :13^th of June and 12^th of September 2023, both took place in UCL at the Institute of Advanced Studies’ Common Room (IAS, London’s Bloomsbury Campus).

Online attendance was provided via a Zoom Webinar as we strive to promote presential and remote participation, therefore accessibility has been ensured by coaching our keynote speakers on how to make their presentations accessible to neurodivergent audiences. These are initiatives that we have done in the past and that have been very warmly received in hybrid format.

Most importantly, attendance to our e-seminars has always been offered free of charge. However, over the years we managed to get some limited funding for our events, including the funds from the IAS and the Centre for Humanities Education.

Our June and September events were divided into the following categories:

• Individual talks by keynote speakers followed by Q&A sessions on a range of topics aimed at training practitioners in both translation and pedagogical translation (for language learning purposes) such as how and why to teach crisis translation in the context of health and the principles on teaching medical translation and interpreting for international organisations. As a novelty, a recent special issue of the Spanish medical translation journal Panace@ was discussed by its guest editors.
• Two workshops: The first one for language and translation tutors wishing to carry out situated medical translation experiences in the classroom; and the second one, on Sketch Engine, an application based on the study of corpus linguistics.
• A roundtable with experts followed by a Q&A session in which keynote speakers, experts, attendees and organisers interacting whilst contributing to a more informal discussion.

UCL’s Dementia Research Centre constituted the perfect opportunity for this roundtable to serve as a platform of their work, which has already appeared in the Institute of Translators and Interpreters’ Bulletin and is steered by Dr Olivia Cockburn (MA Director, Centre for Translation Studies). This well-established partnership has attracted considerable attention from the School and Faculty and is likely to become a long-term teaching initiative that follows principles that are similar to the Portfolio scheme put forward by members of this committee at SELCS/CMII.

Our series has already reached over a thousand attendees worldwide, including Latin America and Asia. We have grown consistently, and we had 287 attendants registered for this event (increasing from 90, 100, 167, 221, 236 and 161 in the previous six e-seminars). Following the feedback received, we are confident that our 7th e-seminar has generated a great deal of enthusiasm and participation has been boosted even further.

All talks were recorded live so as to be included in an ISBN-registered e-book soon to be published by UCO Press, Spain. Our post-seminar e-books allow us to disseminate our seminars beyond UCL and our partner university. Ultimately, our aim is for colleagues to embrace newer teaching approaches and materials when reviewing language and translation curricula.

Needless to say, all this work would have not been able without the support of our host institutions UCL and our international partner – the University of Cordoba.

For further information on our previous editions please check our page here.

Follow us on Twitter @eExpertSeminarS for any updates on future events!

Steering Committee:  Dr. Alejandro Bolaños, Dr. Marga Navarrete and Dr. Mazal Oaknín (UCL), Dr. Soledad Díaz Alarcón and Dr. Azahara Veroz (University of Cordoba). 

References

Training the Experts in Medical Translation, edited by M. Azahara Veroz-González & Alejandro Bolaños García-Escribano (2024). E-Expert Seminar Series: Translation and Language Teaching series. ISBN: 978-84-9927-803-2.

By Anne Grydehøj (SELCS Scandinavian Studies) 

The More than Words symposium was a full-day event on 14 June 2023 which focused on language teaching and learning at UCL and in schools. The event was hosted by the Languages Stream within UCL Centre for Humanities Education with organising members from the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES).   

It was an inspirational day and one which provided many insights and ideas. An overarching purpose of the symposium was to broaden the perspective of the individual educator and university tutor and place their work in the wider context. A further function of the symposium was to create space for dialogue between stakeholders involved in all stages of language teaching, and to encourage networking and future collaborations across UCL and between the sectors. It is evident that holistic and collaborative approaches are needed to counter the current decline in language provision in the UK. If children are engaged with language learning in primary school, they are more likely to bring an interest in languages and culture with them into secondary school and to continue throughout education.  

During this event, scholars and teachers representing different languages and different educational institutions gathered to exchange knowledge and build understanding and dialogue around the status quo and the prospects of language teaching and learning across the educational system and its different stages.  

In the symposium’s first roundtable, we heard presentations by representatives from different UCL units involved in language teaching and learning: Christine Hoffman (CLIE), Luke Pearce (English), Gesine Manuwald (Greek and Latin), Sonia Gollance (Hebrew and Jewish Studies), Wei Li (IoE), Claire Thomson (SELCS) and Ramona Gonczol (SSEES). The panellists introduced their organisational units and shared their perspectives on the current situation for language teaching and future challenges in this area at UCL.  

The afternoon was dedicated to a second panel with invited speakers from primary and secondary schools alongside other stakeholders directly involved with language teaching in schools. Camilla Smith (IOE), Caroline Conlon (IOE and National Consortium for Languages Education), Elizabeth Threadgold (ELS, Connah’s Quay High School, Wales), Ella Teskey (Head of Inclusion, Park View Secondary school, Haringey), Vicky Prior (Head of Languages, Burntwood School, London), Valentina Vereha (primary teacher, Lyon Park Primary School, London), Tom Pandolfino (teacher of Russian, French, and German, City of London School), Stephanie Versen (Modern Foreign Languages Coordinator, Gospel Oak Primary School, London) gave us insights into – among other things – language provision in schools, the transitions between university and school (teachers) and the other way in terms of supply of language teachers (students), community languages, and lesser-taught languages.  

The roundtable was followed by a workshop where participants worked in groups reflecting on areas of existing and potential future collaboration between schools and universities. The groups were asked to consider barriers to and opportunities for enhanced interaction between primary, secondary, and higher education under specific headings: raising aspirations; increasing A-level numbers for languages / encouraging and supporting students to carry on with languages; accreditation of language competence beyond GCSE and A-level; heritage languages; language skills and knowledge outside school; cultural enrichment / diversity.  

Valentina Vereha, a primary teacher at Lyon Park Primary School, London, says:

“I would like to express my sincere appreciation for the exceptional symposium on language teaching and learning. The event was truly enlightening and provided valuable insights into the world of language education. It created a platform for meaningful connections and collaboration. I wholeheartedly commend the organisers for their outstanding efforts and thank them for contributing to the advancement of language education. ”

Before the concluding remarks, delegates were invited to view the showcase exhibition  Not Just Words: Learning Languages through Art and Objects currently on at UCL Art Museum where it can be viewed until 15 December 2023.  

This was the first in a series of events under the provision of the UCL Centre for Humanities Education Language Stream. The stream will be reflecting on presentations, conversations, ideas and feedback we collected during the event with a view to creating follow-up collaborative activities between UCL and schools.