My proposal addresses a specific language barrier affecting some of our Y3 Chinese students.
This cohort of Chinese students has been flagged as having been accepted with a lower IELTS requirement because UAL was concerned about their international students’ numbers. This has been mapped across courses and is currently being addressed by Language Support, to make a case for not lowering IELTS requirements again. IELTS requirement should be pedagogically determined, not according to how much money UAL needs from international students, a dehumanizing rational in par with the institutional discrimination Chinese students face on campus.
The result is a handful of highly isolated Chinese students because their language skills don’t allow them to take part in the group situations, lectures, workshops and crits our course pedagogy is constructed around. They also find 1:1 tutorials difficult. Most of them had retreated from the course, their mental health attainment was heavily affected. One of my students this year fits that profile and it has been a long process to get him to trust me and engage, first with me and lately with group activities.
My current solution is using my iPhone Google Translate app. Students speak into it, pass it to him to read, then he responds into it, and I read it out load. It has taken us a while to get to this solution and for the group to adapt and get used to the slower speed, the errors in the translation app, for him to feel that is ok to that extra space, etc.
I want to develop a better protocol in which we could use two laptops running Teams. It could capture the sound of the group discussion (potentially with a better mic) and he could access instantly translated subtitles and vice-versa). It could be expanded for lectures, external guest crits, and workshops as well. I’ve done some training on Teams and accessibility with UAL’s Digital Team and I’m confident that it is possible. This year is ending but I would like to be prepared and potentially set out a protocol that might be useful in the future for other tutors as well.