Tuesday 26th November 2013 - A little knowledge of a language can go a long way

In the debate over making language classes available to all students I have several times heard disparaging remarks to the effect that students should be taught to do more than order a latte or a meal.  (I'll come back at the end to something about the latte.)  The view seems to be that if we are to offer language options to, say, computer scientists or psychologists, physicists or architects, they should learn the language to the level where they can practice their discipline in that tongue.  Let me tell you my own experience.

It may not be much of a claim to make - but for a period of years I believe I was the third best-known British human geographer in Portugal.  I first went to Portugal in 1999 at the invitation of a colleague I had first met as part of a European Science Foundation network 15 years earlier.  I don't like to be in places where I don't speak at least a bit of the language - a 'get by' amount.  I spent a few hours on a Portuguese phrase book and watched part of a BBC language course.  All the proceedings at that first meeting I went to in Lisbon were conducted in English, but I showed to my hosts that I had been prepared to go part way towards them.  Unlike other English-speakers there, I was invited back - and within three or four years I was Principal Investigator on a major research grant from a Portuguese funding body, working to evaluate policies for social exclusion in the poorest neighbourhoods of Lisbon and Oporto.  For some years I maintained close contacts with colleagues in a number of Poruguese universities - Lisbon, the Portuguese Open University, Oporto.  I edited a book with Portuguese colleagues, and one of my last research articles was a two-hander on the ways the UK and Portugal have dealt with issues of citizenship for migrants from ex-colonies.

My Portuguese is still confined to 'get by' standard (although I can now also peruse Portuguese publications and get some sense out of them).  But it was having a 'get by' knowledge of the language that opened up opportunities to me.  On the other hand in the past I have lectured and given conference papers in both French and Italian (although both are now somewhat rusty) and I have passable German. My Portuguese is a classic example of the law of comparative advantage.  That 'law' says that it is better to specialise in the thing where you have the greatest margin over your competitors, than in the thing that you are best at.  I am best at French, but I have the greatest margin over competitors in Portuguese.  English is the international language of science and of commerce, but a get by knowledge of another language can open doors, particularly if it is a tongue that others don't speak.  I would like all our students to have a get by knowledge of a language other than English - and preferably more than one. And if one of those is a language other than those still most commonly spoken by people from the UK then so much the better.  A little Arabic, or Mandarin, or Portuguese, or Russian (all of which we offer as part of 'Languages for All') ca go a very long way.

What about that latte?  Teaching students to be able to operate in Italian would also be a great thing - and they would learn that ordering a latte in Italy will generally bring them a glass of milk.   

Tuesday 12th November 2013 - Research students as lifelong friends

One of the greatest pleasures for an academic of a certain age must surely be meeting up with research students he or she has supervised from some years ago and hearing about what they have been doing.  There is perhaps inevitably a little bit of pride there in feeling (or perhaps hoping) that one helped them along the way.  But there is also the delight in hearing what they are doing now and relating it back to the PhD they completed some years ago.  And in meeting ex-students from the past there is also a reminder of one's own academic trajectory through the topics one was supervising at a particular time (some of which one would now claim no expertise in).

In the last three months I have been fortunate to meet up with three of my ex-PhD students - all now living in other countries.  One lives in Japan, a second a researcher in France, and the third a businessman in Germany.

My earliest research interests were in social and demographic changes in small rural communities, and one of my very first PhD students worked on rural depopulation in post-war Japan.  As an undergraduate he came on a field class I ran in rural Normandy in France, and there is a line of connection from the ideas I introduced him to there, through his PhD, to the fact that he is now a professor in a private unviersity in Japan, with research interests in the history of rural Japan.  He was in Sheffield to give a seminar in our School of East Asian Studies.

I later made a rural-to-urban migration and developed research interests in European cities (a field I have continued to pursue ever since).  One year I supervised an undergraduate dissertation on gentrification in London's Docklands, and the student in question also came on a field class to Paris with me.  On that class she and I decided on specific areas that would merit consideration as examples of the French governmental approach to urban renewal, and she then won a scholarship to pursue that topic.  If we fast forward a number of years, through her employment in the European organisations in Brussels, she is now working on a major European-funded project evaluating the effects of European spending on urban policy.  She was in Sheffield as part of the data-gathering work for her four-city study.

I met my third ex-student for dinner in London where he was on a business trip to evaluate the ways in which his German-owned retail company could break into the UK market.  Over twenty years ago I was flattered that a student from Germany wanted to do his PhD on the residential mobility of Turkish migrant workers in Munich with me in Sheffield, rather than with a German supervisor at a German university.  He could have had a superb academic career here afterwards, had it not been for his revulsion at the populist anti-German sentiment whipped up by news media such as the Daily Mail and the Sun during some international football tournament (I forget which).

All three become friends many years ago.  I have met their partners and (most of) their children. When I was in Japan a few years ago my ex-student covered some distance to meet me and to have dinner together.  I have stayed in the second home that my France-based ex-student now owns in Northern Provence.  I have been entertained and wined and dined in Germany.  And when I met them over the last few weeks, all three without prompting expressed strong positive feelings about what the University of Sheffield had given them, and the overall value of the education (not just the discipline but the wider approach) they had received here.

These rendezvous over the last three months have now led me to try to track down some other ex-students I have lost direct contact with.  It will be interesting now to follow them up!