MLAC Language Ambassadors

Engaging with the wider community and promoting higher education is a fundamental belief at Durham University. For years, Durham University students and academics alike have been directly involved with outreach activities, in the North East of England, in particular. This is especially the case for the School of Modern Languages and Cultures (MLAC), which has strived to encourage and foster further language study and cultural appreciation in County Durham and beyond.

Ever since joining Durham University in 2017 as a student of French, Spanish and Catalan, Jack Muers-Raby has been motivated to engage with the wider community and promote language study at every level, from Key Stage 2 all the way to university. He has been involved in the many outreach activities run by MLAC, which all aim to help introduce students in the North East of England to the cultures and languages that they perhaps would not have come across before. These events have ranged from masterclasses and language taster sessions to open days and Apprentice-themed workshops.

These events have been highly successful and rewarding both for those at the receiving end and for the students and staff of Durham University. Building on such experiences, and with support from OWRI, Jack has started a new initiative to ensure that student-led outreach events continue and develop consistently in the future, even as cohorts of MLAC students come and go. This is how the MLAC Language Ambassadors scheme came about – the formation of an activist group of Durham University students from all years, studying an array of languages, and working as a collective to help devise, develop and deliver outreach in Modern Languages and Cultures.

MLAC Language Ambassadors all share the same drive and ambition to engage with the wider community and show students from the North East what studying languages and cultures means and what benefits it can bring to oneself and one's community. Founded by Jack Muers-Raby, this group is now led by first-year students Michael Carmody (Spanish & Anthropology) and Olivia Nevins (French & German). The Language Ambassadors are working closely with Dr Penelope Johnson (Associate Professor and Outreach Coordinator at MLAC) to continue to run existing events as well as pilot new ones.

Over the coming years, the group plans to engage with many more schools across County Durham. In addition to offering more virtual and in person activities across a wider range of languages (Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese), the aim is to create more long-standing partnerships with schools. One of the ideas currently developed is also the Year Abroad ‘buddy' scheme, in which a Durham University student on their Year Abroad pairs up with a year group from a school in County Durham and through regular online meetings discusses with them what it is like to live and study abroad and what amazing opportunities studying languages has to offer.

On 22-26 March 2021, the MLAC Language Ambassadors, coordinated by Michael Carmody and Olivia Nevins, supported Durham County Council's Express Yourself North East Festival of Languages, which saw MLAC students of almost every year group running introductory language classes in almost every language offered by MLAC. Some very positive feedback was received from those involved and the plan is replicate this in the future.

The end of the 2020-21 academic year saw over 20 students become trained as Creative Translation Ambassadors. The training was provided by Translation Exchange (The Queen's College, University of Oxford), led by Charlotte Ryland (University of Oxford) and Rahul Bery (translator). The training sessions covered picture book, poetry, and prose translation. Our Language Ambassadors gained insights into different ways to integrate tranlsation into outreach work, vital to planning future Creative Translation outreach workshops.

The group's first Creative Translation workshop took place on 9 July 2021 in collaboration with Ferryhill Business and Enterprise College. Four Ambassadors led a workshop on translation from French to two classes of Year 10 pupils, which explored Joseph Joffo's semi-autobiographical text: 'Un Sac de Billes'. The pupils learnt some new French idioms and were introduced to the historical context of the text as well as the basics of literary translation. They wrote their own literal translations of an extract from the book with the help of a glossary and then rewrote this translation creatively. We were very impressed with the enthusiasm of the pupils towards the session and the high quality of work that they produced. The session did a particulary good job in demonstrating to pupils the importance of human translators, in the context of the increasing global reliance on AI translation.

The responses received from the Langauge Ambassadors include the following:

'The training was interesting and engaging with good examples to help us understand the content. The planning and preparation beforehand also made the workshop really easy to deliver as all the resources were ready and the timings worked well' - Zoe Kaye

'The training encouraged us to learn from the point of view of the pupils as we did things in languages we were unfamiliar with, which was beneficial. Our workshop was fun and engaged the students, and the training on lesson planning meant that everything went smoothly' - Charli Connor

'The training was fun and engaging and meant we got to meet new people from our course which was nice! The workshop went well and we had good participation from the students which meant things ran smoothly and stuck to our time schedule' - Erin Hamer

As coordinators, Michael and Olivia have also started the process of gaining formal recognition of the MLAC Language Ambassadors with DU Volunteering in order to ensure the longevity of the project. They have also recruited four new members to help organise and manage MLAC's outreach events for the academic year 2021-22. The new recruits are: Louisa Rose Harkness (Italian), Emily Gray (Spanish), Erin Waks (Arabic), Lewis England (Chinese). Further members will be recruited during the Freshers' events at the start of 2021-22.

Contact: penelope.johnson@durham.ac.uk