The Department is delighted that the teaching of two of its members of staff was highly commended at the QM Students Union Education Awards. Mlle Estelle Paranque was voted Teacher of the Year for her outstanding commitment to her students. She reflected: 'I try to make my students feel relaxed as I believe that they work best when they are enjoying the class. I often use puns to entertain them in French; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't! Teaching, for me, means learning together, working in a team to achieve goals.'
Professor Adrian Armstrong received a nomination for the provision of excellent teaching resources. Designing his Comparative Literature module Why Belgium?, for example, posed a number of challenges. Reflecting on his detective work as he pieced together the module, Adrian observed: 'I did a lot of digging around -- in novels, short story collections, online literary journals, databases, and specialist bibliographies -- to identify dates and sources. That way, my students had a clear sense of where and when the material first appeared. Finding critical materials in English, particularly on the texts in Dutch, was also a problem, so I've translated quotations from various critical studies and made them available to students so they can draw on the work of specialist scholars in other languages.'