Former CHE Project Assistant Kellynn Wee interviewed Dr. Mairéad McAuley from UCL’s Department of Greek & Latin, the winner of one of UCL Arts and Humanities’ 2024 Education Awards in the category of “Enhancing Belonging.”

In this interview, Dr. McAuley reflects on an unconventional journey into academia, how research on gender and Roman literature informs teaching, and efforts to create a more inclusive learning environment. The discussion covers the Department of Greek and Latin’s initiative to review Moodle module pages with a critical eye toward equity, diversity, and inclusion, as well as the collaborative process of drafting content statements that acknowledge sensitive material while fostering open discussion.

Hi, Mairéad! Congratulations on receiving the UCL Faculty Education Award for enhancing belonging! To start, could you please tell us a bit more about yourself and how you would describe yourself as an educator?

I joined UCL in 2013 after completing PhD and postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge in Classics. I haven’t had a completely straight trajectory from studying to working as an academic. Between my BA and postgraduate work, I spent a couple of years working in software development in Dublin, where I’m from. After my PhD I lived and worked as a postdoc in South Africa for several years. I was also lucky to be able to take several years of unpaid leave while having my children. before I returned to academia in 2017-18.

I think this trajectory –  working after university, spending time in South Africa and being a stay-at-home parent for a period – has given me a particular perspective on the job of an educator. Given ongoing cuts to the humanities, I feel incredibly privileged to be able to teach and research in a field where the priority is not profit or economic productivity per se,, but about cultivating a greater understanding of the ancient past and its resonances for us today. But I’m mindful that what we do can sometimes seem very marginal and strange to people in places like South Africa, where jobs are scarce, many basic needs are not met and the ramifications of European colonialism and apartheid are still felt in material ways. I’m also aware of the difficulty of combining academic work – with its long hours and requirement for intense focus and engagement – with other forms of (unpaid) labour like caring responsibilities, kinwork, and domestic work. I try to bring this awareness of the economic, structural and affective aspects of people’s non-academic lives, and how they impact the ways they engage with academia, to my work as a teacher.

In what ways has your research informed your teaching, and vice-versa?

I work on Roman Literature, particularly on gender and the body. My first book is on motherhood in Roman literature. When I started this project these were considered rather marginal and unusual topics in my discipline, but in recent years, I have found that these kinds of alternative perspectives and angles on canonical texts often interest our students most. My work on gender constantly informs my teaching in every way.  To take one example, I developed an UG and MA module focused on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which contains multiple vivid depictions of rape. The poem has sparked recent debate about how and whether to teach texts whose content jars with current values, and which might distress students, especially those who had experienced sexual assault. An unreflective approach might further silence survivors, making them feel unsafe in the classroom space. The challenge is to address the topic in a way that is sensitive to the needs of survivors but also enhances critical understanding of the ancient world. Rather than avoiding this topic altogether, I make it a central part of the module. I take steps to ensure that students have clear expectations that the classroom will be a secure and fostering environment, where they will feel safe exploring a topic that may be challenging both intellectually and emotionally.  These include advance content statements, verbal reminders of the need to conduct discussions with sensitivity, and focusing discussions by asking students themselves to find connections with contemporary media, art, literature, and film in order to reflect upon the similarities/differences between ancient and modern representations of rape.

You’ve been involved in an unusual project: reviewing module Moodle pages! Can you tell us a bit more about this? What prompted you to start this project? How does something  that’s such an everyday part of UCL life like Moodle relate to issues of diversity and belonging? 

We felt that our Moodle pages needed a fresh eye, from a student’s point of view,  to rethink the presentation of content from an EDI perspective. We paid student editors to check all our Departmental module Moodle pages to identify bibliographical gaps and potentially sensitive content. They flagged up areas where lecturers might not have noticed some difficult content – a passage assigned for language translation that might incorporate problematic attitudes toward women, for example. Through consultation, the team drafted context-specific Moodle content statements, which were circulated among colleagues.

There was some considerable debate around the framing of these content statements – the concern was that they would not be simplistic ‘trigger warnings’, which might enable students to avoid specific topics altogether, and thus miss out on understanding certain key aspects of the ancient world.  The conclusion was that these statements, tailored to specific modules, would provide a preliminary ‘heads-up’ or advice about the kinds of things students might expect to encounter in the lectures – e.g. ancient attitudes to slavery, gender-based or ethnic prejudice; why these topics might feature in the module and the way they would be addressed within the module.

These content statements were rewritten collaboratively, and added in relevant places on the Moodle page, both under a specific week’s lecture topic, and as part of a general course outline.

You’ve also been active in organising workshops focused on decolonising the curriculum. Can you tell us more about what inspired you to begin these workshops? What sort of themes often emerge from these discussions? What effects do these workshops have on both staff and students? 

We have developed a new BA with new modules that engage with debates around diversity in Classics, and its history of colonialism, such as “Race: Antiquity and its Legacy”.  But another major question for us was: what about our existing modules, or modules that are mostly language teaching? How do we incorporate debate and critique into all of our teaching contexts and our departmental environment? How do we ensure that ours is not just a ‘top-down’ vision of reform; how do we avoid the trap by which the language of diversity and its initiatives can simply become institutionalised performative acts, ‘symbolic’ commitments rather than something tangible, meaningful for students themselves?

Despite controversy in the media around decolonisation and cancel culture, the feedback we received directly from our own students in modules was often specific rather than a wholesale critique of the field. Some of their criticisms and suggestions related to module content – how it could be expanded or adapted, how we could have more modules on topics such as race – while others were more concerned with learning environment and pedagogical approaches in existing modules. So we decided to set up a staff-student forum to discuss pedagogy in relation to making the teaching and learning environment more inclusive.

This workshop has had several outcomes: the main one was that staff and students agreed that upfront discussion within lectures – conducted in a historically contextualised, sensitive manner – about sensitive content was the most productive and inclusive strategy, rather than avoidance or censorship, which might have detrimental effects on students’ understanding of core content. Different pedagogical methods that encouraged a variety and diversity of points of view were also discussed – such as student-led debates instead of individual presentations.

You’ve also organised several iterations of a very successful event — a student-led speaker series called ‘Beyond the Mediterranean’, which provokes discussions on the character of Classics in the modern world. Can you tell us more about the impetus behind this? Have there been particular moments or discussions across the years within this series which have stood out as particularly memorable to you? 

This was an initiative begun by Dr Caterina Pellò, in which student presenters chose a topic and developed a presentation on this topic, which addressed how to expand the boundaries of the traditional Classics curriculum. The series was organised by a student volunteer, and in the last two years, we’ve had 15 separate talks from undergraduates and postgraduates on a range of topics, from orientalism in Greek tragedy to Dionysus in India. We also had a range of exciting talks that focused upon the reception of the Classical World and thus expanded the boundaries of the topic beyond a Eurocentric frame: such as Greece and Rome in Indian cinema, Japanese sci-fi and video games. This has been one of the most inspiring and successful initiatives of recent years within the department.

Discussions at the speaker series were highly educational for both staff and students. Staff have been deeply impressed by the intellectually sophisticated ideas for disciplinary expansion proposed by the students; they reported that it had given them material for serious reflection on the diversity of content they could offer.  From the student side, participants and student attendees commented positively on how this series empowered them to engage in the future of the discipline within UCL and beyond. Itprovided a positive, non-threatening intellectual space in which they could have a first experience of presenting original research and receiving feedback. The Speaker Series provides a blueprint for how we might rethink our ways of teaching on a more holistic level.

Finally, what does belonging to a community mean to you?

I think education has to be viewed in terms of community: it’s a collaborative engagement between teachers and learners rather than simply a ‘top-down’ process. One of the great privileges of my job is that I get to share students’ enthusiasm about the ancient world and exchange ideas with them. I learn at least as much from them, if not more than they learn from me.

***

Mairéad McAuley is an Associate Professor at UCL’s Department of Greek and Latin. Mairéad’s research focuses on Latin literature, especially from the Augustan to Flavian periods, alongside gender, literary theory, and the Classical tradition. Mairéad’s first monograph Reproducing Rome; Motherhood in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, and Statius was published by Oxford University Press in 2016.

Classrooms are a place for learning, not for play. Teachers teach; students learn.

Actually, Professor Alison Phipps disagrees.

Alison gave an impassioned talk titled “Decolonising Multilingualism: Opacity; Justice; Joy” at Decolonising Language Studies Symposium II—a forum where scholars from a range of disciplines discuss how to decolonise the curriculum in language studies and beyond.

This post is the second part of a series where we summarise speakers’ main ideas from the symposium, which was organised by Dr Jelena Ćalić and Dr Eszter Tarsoly on behalf of PROLang.

Alison, who is Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies at the University of Glasgow, focused on how learning new languages can be an opportunity for expressions of joy and vulnerability – if classrooms and research settings were rethought to support such emotions.

Put on a show in a new language  

On a course Alison once taught on German popular culture, she told the students that they would have to put on a play at the end of the course in German.

Students, whether studying Marx or feminist theory, eagerly prepared for the final performance through learning how to embody characters from German novels and films.

The pleasure of embodying a character and of coming together to create something was not just highly motivating, but also “great fun.” As Alison tells the story:

“They would raid all the charity shops… and they would dress up, and then they would come and perform. What I discovered they were doing through performing in the language, with the theoretical concepts, dressing up, wearing the lipstick, putting the hair up, all that adrenaline — it meant that they were taking it really seriously, they were wrapping it around, they were clothing their studies.

They were caring for [their studies] in a way that we rarely ask our students to care for their studies… It was a much wider human sense of the work.”

The students did so well that the external examiner suggested that some research should be conducted into the reasons behind their grades. In their oral exams, students talked excitedly about how much fun it was to perform and how regular rehearsal helped to structure their language learning through repetition. Some would even launch into snippets of their performances. Alison sums the experience up as follows:

“It was participatory. The whole class shared it. They really felt it was their work overall.”

Make a fool of yourself  

Another one of Alison’s stories described her volunteer work at a detention centre, where she was recruited to help translate for people housed for deportation.

To her dismay, she realised that “though I was a professor of languages… my languages were useless.” She was “way too fluent in too many colonial languages and European languages… and here I was, sitting in front of people who spoke Pashtu, who spoke Arabic…”

Instead of translating or teaching, Alison found herself becoming a student instead:

“The young guys would teach me to speak their languages and they would be helpless with laughter, because here is a professor of languages who didn’t even know their language existed, and in that moment, there was an equalising… The dignity of language was restored to a group of people utterly stripped of their dignity, and they were laughing at me. I was the learner, and I was stumbling.”

Alison says that part of the work of decolonisation is to “centre the understanding and knowledges of the communities that you are with, and this is a fundamental decolonising move.”

She adds:

“All the things I’d learned about ethnography, and language learning, and performance… is that all of them require you to make a fool of yourself. All of them require you to know nothing. All of them require you to make many, many, many mistakes. A central concept in ethnography is naïveté, the ethnographic naivety: you do not know, you are not an expert, you decentre yourself.

It’s a move that’s vital to interculturality. We are required to decentre ourselves in any intercultural framework to be able to understand from the perspective of others, and so I realised that this decentring might also be useful in the [detention] centre.”

Recognise that language is a gift

Alison recounts other stories, working in places like Ghana or the Gaza Strip where she felt — through experiences of incompetence and inarticulation — how we rely on others to speak for us, or to teach us how to speak.

She says that part of the work of decolonising the curriculum is:

“The attempt by one human being to have a go, to render themselves vulnerable, to laugh at themselves and be laughed at, to stumble through that pronunciation and to be in a place where a new set of relationships might be made and made collectively…

Because there isn’t a word I speak that I haven’t been given by other people, and if I expand that to the context of language learning and language education, then that, my friends, is how I believe we […] find what might be found when we improvise and make things together.”

Alison rounds up her talk by speaking about how she wants to create spaces that are “responsive to dignity, that are fun, and that will allow us collectively to hold that bowl of tears in ways which are safe and ethical and expand a space for joy.”

Alison’s talk was followed by Victoria Odeniyi’s reflections on the challenges and opportunities of embedding research findings into institutional practice: how a university might say things like, “not now, the staff might become confused”, or “this doesn’t align with university policy and standards”, and how we might react to that in turn.

Want to read about Victoria’s presentation? Keep an eye out for the third part of our blog post series, featuring summaries of speakers’ key points, by subscribing to our blog (link on the right) or following us on Twitter.

Watch Alison Phipps’s full talk here.

You can also read an earlier post in the blog series here:

• Let’s re-centre multilingual communities in our classrooms and research: a summary of Prof. Li Wei’s talk

This symposium was organised by Dr Jelena Ćalić and Dr Eszter Tarsoly on behalf of the PROLang (Policy, Research and Outreach for Language-based area studies) Research Group in collaboration with UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, with the support of CHE’s Education Enhancement Grant. This post was written by Kellynn Wee.

How can we decolonise the curriculum in higher education?

As educators, we often hear this call – and many of us rise to respond to it as a crucial part of our research and practice. Yet spaces where we can share our experience and practices with each other are rare, especially across disciplines.

On 25 October 2023, a symposium on Decolonising Language Studies, organised by Dr Jelena Ćalić and Dr Eszter Tarsoly on behalf of PROLang, sought to address this gap by inviting a prominent group of researchers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including linguistics, cultural studies, social sciences and politics, to respond to questions such as:

• How can we bring the study of minoritised groups, linguistic citizenship and transcultural becoming to the fore in language education?
• How can participatory initiatives translate into policy and be better embedded into institutional settings?
• How committed are institutions and researchers to progressive agendas, both in our research scope and our methodology?
• How can we better include community members as co-authors and fellow researchers in our work?

In this blog post series showcasing the symposium’s key takeaways, here’s our summary of Professor Li Wei’s take on the topic.

Prof. Li Wei is the Director and Dean of the Institute of Education (UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society), and he gave a talk that focused on how sociolinguistists and applied linguists can engage in decolonising the curriculum.

Centring participatory practices

Li Wei argues that the social responsibilities of linguists should include not only the analysis of linguistic structures but also the pursuit of social justice through investigating and understanding the interplay of language practices and the social worlds of speakers. As he puts it:

“We are observing participants trying to make sense of their world in a real-life situation. By trying to make sense of them trying to make sense of their lives, we are participating in their social world as well. That is quite an important point: their social world becomes part of ours, and ours becomes part of theirs.”

By simply embarking on a research project, researchers have an influence on (and a responsibility for) the people with whom they work. The process of research should not objectify the communities we study—and researchers should not position themselves at a distance.

This is particularly salient in an era of mobility and superdiversity: as Li Wei puts it, “We see our responsibility as participating in a social debate over the value of multilingualism and over the consequences of a community coming together.”

Acknowledging subjectivity in knowledge production 

Researchers should revisit the tenet that analysis must be objective, contained, and distant. Analysis is not a mere presentation of objective facts existing “out there”. As Li Wei says:

“We are presenting our analysis of what we have observed, which is necessarily subjective, because we all come into our analyses from our own trajectories and backgrounds and ideologies — and we should not be afraid to say that this is my own understanding, this is my interpretation, and to open it up to challenges as well.”

Instead, researchers should be open and explicit about their socio-cultural, political, ideological stance when they present their interpretation and analysis, and, as Li Wei suggests, “invite the reader to participate in our analysis as a social act.”

Rethinking multilingualism as a strength

Can we move beyond merely ‘allowing’ different languages to be used in the classroom?

Li Wei suggests that we should think of different languages not just as additive, but as constitutive, in a shift towards a translanguaging stance:

“The stance we want to move towards is a perspective that views multilingual language learners’ linguistic practices and their racial/ethnic identities together. It’s all integrated, together with the sociolinguistic realities of the community and the educational demands of the school.”

When we label a group of speakers’ practices as “foreign” or “second language” or having “English as an additional language”, it has serious educational consequences in schools, as these names and categories carry specific socio-political connotations beyond simple linguistic labels.

Through approaching teaching as co-learning, we can reset power relations within the classroom and challenge dominant language ideologies.

Additionally, students learn in many different languages beyond the classroom. Li Wei says:

“We tend not to pay any attention to the source of the information they get, or what language they are actually doing the learning in outside the lecture theatre. How can we incorporate that knowledge that is gained through different languages and different cultural contexts into the teaching and learning in the university?”

Li Wei’s talk was followed by Alison Phipps’s presentation on outside-of-the-box learning practices such as how students can get good marks through raiding charity shops, why researchers should make fools of themselves, and how to hold a bowl of tears.

If you’re intrigued, keep an eye out for the second part of our blog post series, featuring summaries of speakers’ key points, by subscribing to our blog (link on the right!) or follow us on Twitter.

Want to listen to Prof. Li Wei’s full talk, titled “Participatory Linguistics in the Translanguaging Framework: Towards decolonising linguistics and language education”? Click here to check it out.

This symposium was organised by Dr Jelena Ćalić and Dr Eszter Tarsoly on behalf of the PROLang (Policy, Research and Outreach for Language-based area studies) Research Group in collaboration with UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, with the support of CHE’s Education Enhancement Grant. This post was written by Kellynn Wee.