Hi Elettra – many congratulations on receiving the Faculty Education Award for enhancing belonging! Can you tell us a bit more about your work as Widening Participation and Outreach Tutor for the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS)?

I was Widening Participation (WP) and Outreach Tutor for SELCS from 2019 to 2023 but have worked with WP since 2016. I started by teaching a session on Italian and Norwegian for the first Y12 Residential Language and Culture Summer School run by SELCS and then ended up coordinating it the year after. I have never looked back, and WP continues to be a big part of what I do as I am still heavily involved in our Language and Culture Taster Days and Summer Schools.

Since 2017, I have aimed to design a comprehensive WP strategy that today involves colleagues across UCL and engages with a wide range of schools, pupils and teachers. Thanks to the generous support of UCL Access and WP and many UCL colleagues, I began constructing a dedicated online platform which features information about WP activities and initiatives and a library of online resources. Our yearly activities have so far included running the Y12 WP Residential Language and Culture Summer School, contributing to the Routes into Language Schools and managing a scheme called Near Peers – designed and coordinated by Terry King – which provides a platform for UCL language undergraduates to mentor school students of languages online. In 2023, I also created a programme of Language and Culture Taster Days for Y6 to Y12. This has been a great way to establish contacts with different schools: we have welcomed 50-60 pupils per taster day by dividing them into four groups and rotating them across four different activities. These include a session on why and how we study foreign languages, a visit to the exhibition ‘Not Just Words: Learning Languages through Objects and Art’, a surprise language taster and a campus tour.

During the pandemic, I also focused on providing teachers and learners with free online resources promoting innovative approaches to foreign language learning and multilingualism. These include our ‘A Language is Not Just Words’ series, which I coordinated with my colleague Christine Sas (Associate Professor in Dutch and WP and Outreach Tutor for SELCS since 2023). I highly recommend checking out these resources which so many colleagues worked on – the multilingual songs were so much fun to make!

The second series was ‘The Language and Culture Show and Tell’ series. This consists of language tasters and related materials created around objects from UCL Art Collections. This was also the basis of the above-mentioned UCL Art Museum exhibition, ‘Not Just Words’.

You’re also the academic lead and creator for the exhibition ‘Not Just Words: Learning Languages through Arts and Objects’, which promotes innovative object-based approaches to language education! Please tell us a little bit more about this exhibition and how the idea for it came about.

As I mentioned, ‘Not Just Words’’ was born out of the Language and Culture Show and Tell series, a collaboration between a group of language specialists at UCL and UCL Art Museum. The exhibition (or showcase, as my colleagues and I prefer to call it), which I co-curated with Dr Andrea Fredericksen (Curator, UCL Art Museum), opened in January 2023. It initially featured 13 short language taster videos, which take artworks from UCL’s Collection as their starting point while encouraging visitors to learn some of the basics in several languages. The aim is to showcase the benefits of this innovative object-based or, more specifically, collection-based approach to language teaching, which demonstrates that language is not just words by emphasising the connection between language and culture.

I think the showcase has shown how a collection-based approach to language teaching can successfully promote both the importance of language awareness and the relevance of university collections to academic and non-academic audiences. I was thrilled to see how the showcase encouraged more tutors (across UCL and beyond) to create similar collection-based tasters as Ancient Greek, Faroese, Hebrew and Romanian joined the series in 2023 and 2024. In fact, three more tasters which significantly expand the series’s scope (and which were generously supported by the Centre for Humanities Education) are in development now, so watch this space!

The ‘Not Just Words’ exhibition in the Summer of 2024.

How do the objects or artworks in this exhibition impact its visitors? Have there been any particular responses sparked by this exhibition that you’d like to share? 

In this exhibition, the objects very much take centre stage. They are what visitors see even before they engage with the video tasters on the iPads. My colleague Andrea often calls the objects ‘conversation starters’ and I really like this expression. They are the starting point of the conversations we have had with colleagues who created the tasters and of the narratives developed in the videos. They have also been the source of many interesting conversations with different visitors. The focus on the object is why I am so keen to emphasise that the video series is called ‘Show and Tell’. As I often explain to the school groups that visit us, the ‘show and tell’ methodology – which they are all familiar with from Early Years settings and Primary school – offers many opportunities and allows learners to take control of their learning. It is also not dissimilar from what we call Object-based Learning (OBL), a methodology UCL colleagues have developed extensively in recent years.

While the videos are generally suitable for visitors from 15-18 years of age upwards, the objects themselves allow us to engage even younger audiences. The enthusiastic response we had from a group of Y3s (aged 7-8) when we organised a language treasure hunt in the museum will remain one of the highlights of the exhibition.

How did you grow interested in museums as a site of learning? What role do they continue to play in education?  

A bit by chance really… Museums, OBL and, more specifically, collection-based teaching are now central to my teaching, but it all started when I attended a drop-in session at UCL Art Museum in 2015. There I met Andrea and Dr Nicholas Grindle (Lecturer (Teaching) Education and Practice Development) at the Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching (now UCL Arena). They were trying to encourage more staff members to use UCL Collections in their teaching and UCL Art Museum as a teaching space. Following this session, together with then Danish language tutor Dr Jesper Hansen (who today is Associate Professor (Teaching) and Programme Director for Arena for Lecturers on Probation at UCL Arena), I began to pilot a new teaching approach to a series of joint Danish and Norwegian language classes that took place in UCL Art Museum and introduced collections-based teaching as a language learning methodology in Scandinavian Studies curriculum. Today, I try to include collection-based sessions in my teaching whenever I can: in my language sessions, literature and cultural studies sessions and public engagement and knowledge transfer events.

Can you tell us more about the language tasters you have developed, and how you view their role in making language learning more accessible to students?

Given that UCL offers the widest range of language-based degrees in the UK, the Language and Culture Show and Tell series showcases as many languages and objects in our collections as possible. We began by focusing on the foreign languages we offer at UCL while exploring objects from our UCL Art Collection but then expanded our scope to languages beyond UCL (like Faroese) and a broader range of UCL collections (like Special Collections and the Petrie Collections). For each language, the tutor produced a short video which takes an object from the UCL Collections as its starting point. Some also include a worksheet based on the video’s content.

By using objects from UCL’s Art Collections as their starting point, the language tasters digitally recreate the experience of learning through objects in museum spaces, making our collections and approach to learning as accessible as possible. As I mentioned earlier, these materials were originally designed with students in Y10-Y12 in mind. This means that, while they were created within a research-intensive university environment, they are tailored to be accessible to a much broader audience. The tasters, which are freely available online, thus allow learners to access them from their own devices, presuppose no previous knowledge and are accompanied by a full transcript.

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

My teaching projects with UCL’s collections have entirely changed the course of my research. Ever since Professor Dilly Fung outlined the UCL Connected Curriculum in her book A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education (2017), research-based learning has become a core principle behind UCL’s educational framework. As outlined in Fung’s book, student learning ‘should reflect the kinds of active, critical and analytical enquiry undertaken by researchers’. creating connections ‘across subjects and out into the world’, ‘connecting academic learning with workplace learning’, ‘producing outputs directed at an audience’ and ‘connecting with each other’ (Fung 2017, 5, 20). Working with OBL and Collections is a great way of introducing these key principles in our teaching and informing our research. At the moment, I see most of my research as an example of ‘teaching-based research’, namely research that comes directly out of exploring new teaching practices.

The collection-based Scandinavian Studies teaching project I carried out in 2016 provided the first fragments for my research while encouraging me to embrace a different approach to research, one that ultimately takes its starting point from serendipity. As I unearthed new materials these were included in my research but also fed back into my teaching. In 2021 I launched the online exhibition Nordic Fragments, where historical items from UCL Collections are combined with modern-day digital objects to explore stories of UK-Nordic connections from the nineteenth century onward. In addition to articles that analyse the impact of a collection-based approach to teaching, I am also finishing a monograph: British Representations of Modern Scandinavia: An Object-based Investigation (to be published by UCL Press). In this book, I explore the cultural contacts between the UK and Scandinavia, taking as a starting point selected items from UCL Collections. Divided into three sections (landscapes and communities, translation and remediation, research and teaching), it examines UK-Scandinavian relations and considers shifting power dynamics between these regions. With its focus on material fragments and its object-based approach, this volume also aims to give a methodological contribution to the study and use – in both research and teaching – of archival materials from university collections.

Ultimately, I firmly believe that the link between research-based education and teaching-based research is a dynamic one that reminds us of the important role that university archives, and access to them, play in the production of culture and dissemination of education.

What does belonging to a community mean to you? 

For me belonging to a community means sharing experiences and practices to support individuals and the community as a whole. Being part of a community is important, but being open to being drawn into different communities is even more important. Had my colleague Dr Annika Lindskog (Lecturer in Swedish and then Admissions Tutor for SELCS) not asked me to contribute to the Y12 Summer School in 2016, I might not have worked so much with WP. Had Andrea not pulled me into the UCL Art Museum in 2016, none of this might have happened and I would not have had the chance to work with so many colleagues from so many different fields. I really like being part of different communities, both in my professional and private life, and ultimately I think it’s when we are open to support and learn from these different communities that the best collaborations and friendships are born.

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Dr Elletra Carbone is an Associate Professor in Norwegian Studies and Scandinavian Studies in UCL’s School of European Languages, Culture, and Society. Since 2017 Elletra has been Widening Participation and Outreach Tutor for SELCS, and in 2020 Elltra joined the UCL Art Collections Advisory Group. Elletra is also one of the directors of the non-profit publisher Norvik Press Ltd, UCL, a council member of the Anglo-Norse Society, a deputy editor of the journal Scandinavica. An International Journal of Scandinavian Studies and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of European Studies.

All images courtesy of Dr Elettra Carbone.