Victoria Odeniyi‘s lecture about ‘Reimagining Conversations with Multilingual Students‘ asked many relevant questions that are being raised on a day- to-day basis within our teaching team since we made the transition to online and blended teaching. Our reliance on language, especially written English to communicate with the students through email, Moodle, Blackboard chat, etc is more than ever, without the presence of face to face interactions.
It’s important to take the right tone as intention can sometimes be misconstrued through the written language. I, for one was used to writing very to-the-point, straight forward emails that could come across as a little unfriendly. I’m learning to be more encouraging through words.
The feedback on online learning has been mixed from students but there is no doubt that the majority of them feel like their written English is improving because they are having to explain their intentions more, in crits as well as classroom interactions. I have found that as ‘chat’ is the default way of peer to peer communication in their personal lives (through WhatsApp, instagram comments etc) students feel comfortable using this feature in Blackboard sessions. We encourage them to use the emoji buttons at the start of a session to share how they are feeling and many more engage using this simple tool. This sets a more informal atmosphere but I think it’s important for relatability and fostering belonging.
The importance of ‘silence‘ in a virtual environment is also not to be underestimated, something we discussed in breakout groups during Victoria’s lecture, but something that has become more and more relevant to my experience of online teaching. Everyone needs time to process information, whether that’s before or during a lecture, to respond to questions or construct questions after a session. This was recently discussed in a ISECoP meeting called ‘Explore the Silence’, which sadly I couldn’t attend, but I did explore the resources on Padlet later on.
Whenever I think of language, I’m reminded of an excellent example of pedagogy that I heard in an International Student Experience Community of Practice meeting. Mo-Ling Chui, the Course Leader of BA Design Management at LCC described a session on Chinese Creativity where she invited several speakers to give a talk about their work in Mandarin that had to be translated into English for students who didn’t speak the language. She described this as ‘shifting the centre‘ where home students had a one-off experience of what their international peers experienced on a daily basis. This also brings up the question of why English is always regarded the universal and superior language, when it can sometimes be limiting, especially in a global context.
UPDATE:
Since writing this post at the start of the T&L unit, I have participated in Victoria Odeniyi’s research, where she came and observed a couple of my tutorial sessions on Teams with the BA Textile Design students. I’m keen to read her report or hear any observations she made.
I also attended a rather revolutionary event called ‘Hindi: Jury in Translation‘ at the Architectural Association, organised by Manijeh Verghese (Head of Public Programmes at the AA). It was part of a bigger project her team were working on – to learn from ideas embedded in different languages, in terms of how we design and describe space. There were 6 students presenting their projects-in-progress to a panel of interdisciplinary critics with live simultaneous translation between Hindi and English. The event was on Zoom and attendees could tune in to either channel.
With English being pretty much the universal language of the world, it was wonderful to hear design, architecture and space being spoken about in Hindi. Also interesting as one saw both students and panel members borrow words from English when they chose to present or critique in Hindi, as they struggled to find some suitable words, perhaps a reminder of the colonial connections to the English language (especially in post colonial countries like India).