Year Abroad Essays: What's the point?
Year abroad essays, the bane of my existance for the past couple of weeks, and the thing that have been nagging me at the back of mind since January. Now this is quite easy you might all say. What are you complaining about? I hear you all cry. Well ok I don't mind doing work my problem is with how it is administered, the guidelines set out, and what we actually do.
First up I don't know about anybody else, but there was never any clear guidance on how much work is expected for these essays. Yes the year abroad essay(s) does/do add up to 120 credits, but no-one is going to tell me that you should spend 1 1/2 (or 3 times if your Single Honours) as much effort on a year abroad essay as you do on a final year dissertation. If this is(was) the case then you wouldn't do much other than work during your year abroad, considering the various other commitments you have (abroad student work or assistantship work, depending). If we ask, the tutors would have answered with something along the lines of "Are you asking if you can write an essay without any work?" Now the requirement for the history to have primary sources indicated that something more was expected than just year standard essay written in less than a week. But it was never said what exactly. Confusion abounds.
Then we get to the handing-in requirements, for history that is. It had to be in the history office by the 1st May, and one copy had to be posted. From what I could understand from the brief, this posted version had to be in the office by this point, being postmarked by this date did not seem to be good enough. I tried to clarify the handing-in requirements with Prof Peter Jones, he very helpfully referred me to the brief again, as well as saying that all essays had to be no more than the word count, and ignoring what I believe is the established 10% rule. Peter Jones was my biggest problem with the history thing, he was unhelpful, unsympathetic, and frankly rude. How he got to be a uni professor I don't know. Oh yes that's right because the department don't give two figs if lecturers actually like students, as long as they enhance the department's rep.
Now I don't think it has to be like this. I don't think I should have to double the work of my single honours counterparts (10,000 compared to 6,000), and I think the whole concept of year abroad essays is flawed. We're in a foreign country to learn about the country and speak the language. You speak the language by being in social situations, by working together, not by sitting in libraries looking through tedious academic sources. I don't think analytical academic essays are appropriate to a year abroad. The erasmus students should be writing plenty of those for their unis abroad, and those of us working as assistants frankly don't have the time, or the energy, to work on academic concepts after getting up at 6am to deal with screaming kids.
Other unis do things differently. Some unis don't ask for work for other departments, some even don't ask for work for the language department! Others ask for translations, or blog entries of experiences. Surely this last idea would be a far better way of marking (if you must absolutely mark everything that is done at uni) a year abroad.
We could tell the non-language departments to go hang (especially the dinosaurs in the history department), and let language students concentrate on the country and language on their year abroad. You could write about your experiences what you have learnt, linguistical phenomena etc etc etc. In fact this last point could actually help lecturers in their research of the language (in my case German), by using what year abroad students find year on year in studying the development of the language. Would these ideas and others be not more worthwhile in many ways? Well they would, but seeing as Birmingham University has all the imagination of a goldfish, it'll likely never happen.
First up I don't know about anybody else, but there was never any clear guidance on how much work is expected for these essays. Yes the year abroad essay(s) does/do add up to 120 credits, but no-one is going to tell me that you should spend 1 1/2 (or 3 times if your Single Honours) as much effort on a year abroad essay as you do on a final year dissertation. If this is(was) the case then you wouldn't do much other than work during your year abroad, considering the various other commitments you have (abroad student work or assistantship work, depending). If we ask, the tutors would have answered with something along the lines of "Are you asking if you can write an essay without any work?" Now the requirement for the history to have primary sources indicated that something more was expected than just year standard essay written in less than a week. But it was never said what exactly. Confusion abounds.
Then we get to the handing-in requirements, for history that is. It had to be in the history office by the 1st May, and one copy had to be posted. From what I could understand from the brief, this posted version had to be in the office by this point, being postmarked by this date did not seem to be good enough. I tried to clarify the handing-in requirements with Prof Peter Jones, he very helpfully referred me to the brief again, as well as saying that all essays had to be no more than the word count, and ignoring what I believe is the established 10% rule. Peter Jones was my biggest problem with the history thing, he was unhelpful, unsympathetic, and frankly rude. How he got to be a uni professor I don't know. Oh yes that's right because the department don't give two figs if lecturers actually like students, as long as they enhance the department's rep.
Now I don't think it has to be like this. I don't think I should have to double the work of my single honours counterparts (10,000 compared to 6,000), and I think the whole concept of year abroad essays is flawed. We're in a foreign country to learn about the country and speak the language. You speak the language by being in social situations, by working together, not by sitting in libraries looking through tedious academic sources. I don't think analytical academic essays are appropriate to a year abroad. The erasmus students should be writing plenty of those for their unis abroad, and those of us working as assistants frankly don't have the time, or the energy, to work on academic concepts after getting up at 6am to deal with screaming kids.
Other unis do things differently. Some unis don't ask for work for other departments, some even don't ask for work for the language department! Others ask for translations, or blog entries of experiences. Surely this last idea would be a far better way of marking (if you must absolutely mark everything that is done at uni) a year abroad.
We could tell the non-language departments to go hang (especially the dinosaurs in the history department), and let language students concentrate on the country and language on their year abroad. You could write about your experiences what you have learnt, linguistical phenomena etc etc etc. In fact this last point could actually help lecturers in their research of the language (in my case German), by using what year abroad students find year on year in studying the development of the language. Would these ideas and others be not more worthwhile in many ways? Well they would, but seeing as Birmingham University has all the imagination of a goldfish, it'll likely never happen.
posted by Julien at 19:20
1 Comments:
Good for people to know.
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