Week 20: 28th January – 3rd February
This week was all about intercultural exchange. I’d previously been on a training day about developing my international profile as a researcher (in Week 4) and from that, joined up to the White Rose Skills Development Network, a collaboration between universities in Leeds, Sheffield and York to share knowledge of academic cultures in other countries.
The network was specifically aimed at researchers within the arts and humanities, and encouraged interaction between members to facilitate academic language learning in their subjects. To this end, the organisation runs a series of training sessons and seminars throughout the year on different aspects of intercultural engagement.
Tandem learning
This week’s session was all about tandem learning, which is something I’ve been particularly looking forward to. Tandem learning is when two (or more) native speakers of different languages work together to learn each others language, usually over a predermined set of sessions.
There are generally three key concepts in this style of learning:
1. Autonomy: Each learner is responsible for asking what they need from the session. This includes doing the necessary preparation beforehand and collating relevant information from the session.
2. Reciprocity: As well as being responsible for your own learning, it is important that you help your tandem partner to get the most out of their session. This is where setting expectations can come in handy, especially around how to deal with correcting mistakes. There should be equal time spent on each language, even if there is a difference in language ability.
3. Intercultural learning: The third aspect of speaking to people from different countries is the element of cultural or idiomatic differences, which are essential to understanding, especially when planning to visit. This also is a good tip for things to talk about, for example, daily routines or specific holidays.
Tandem learning sessions can be conducted face to face, or by skype or email, and should have specific outcomes in mind. As my preferred second language is currently Spanish, I was lucky to find a Spanish Research Fellow at the training session and could arrange a tandem learning session for the following week.
Artist as explorer
This has also been quite fortuitous in terms of my art projects, as I enjoy organising international collaborations with artists. Despite this, I have never felt confident in working in different languages, until a recent conversation with a printmaker from Medillin, Colombia.
We had been discussing the prospect of organising a print exchange between the UK and Colombia, or perhaps collaborating on the creation of an exhibition which we could tour to different places. However, I’m a big fan in showing the work behind the work, so we decided that it would be interesting to bring together a select group of artists and discuss the art as it was being created on a bilingual blog called The Artist as Explorer.
Although this project is not specific to my work as part of the PhD, at the same time as we were discussing the project, my supervisor forwarded an opportunity to submit to a printmaking conference in Dundee, so I am now waiting to hear if I will present the project at the Impact 8 International Printmaking Conference.
I have also related my element of the printmaking to thoughts around cultural symbols in signage, which again feeds into wider questions in my research. Most of all, I’m looking forward to opportunities to translate my work into Spanish and present it to a wider audience and I think the tandem learning alongside the collaborative project will be a great motivator towards making that happen.
