Going North...
As part of the last phase of the research project we found ourselves
further up north in a beautiful small Scottish town to meet the final Syrian
new Scots families. There was a really warm welcome by both the local
council support officers and the families and a beautiful bouquet of
flowers for me!
There were so many fantastic ideas around supporting the Syrian families.
One of the most helpful activities for
the Syrian Scots was the running of themed English language classes addressing
everyday life needs beyond the class environment. As the local council support manager
explained, it wasn’t so much about nouns
and verbs and pronouns but about working with the families to help them
initially develop their conversational English. For example, how would they go
into a shop and ask for something? How
would they approach a member of the public and ask for directions? How would they go into the chemist and ask for
a prescription or to the doctors or the bank? It was impressive to find out that there were
even mock discussions scheduled with the doctor to learn how to ask health
related questions. A trip was scheduled to the local bank where people could
learn to ask ‘Can I have a statement please?’ and ‘Can I know what my balance
is’? in a real life environment. The local council support manager further
elaborated,
“in fact to the first family I worked with
the very first night when they arrived- I was leaving them and obviously they
were very anxious - I had said, do you have any real anxiety?’, ‘is there anything
you like to ask before I go home?' And
one of the families said, ‘Yes, when are
we starting the English language classes?”
The local public library was very accessible too and there was an early years programme that the families with young children attended. There was a real buzz about the place (unfortunately I would not be able name the location to secure the anonymity of our research participants).
There are so many other interesting
findings from that visit which I’d like to share with you, not to mention the Syrian families' drawings! They were all very special and I am sharing a couple of them here. They were translated with the help of the interpreter who helped us with the research and we are very grateful for their excellent support and approach:
We are delighted that we will have the opportunity to present our research findings and drawings at two
annual conferences this year, organised by the Chartered Institute of Library
and Information Professionals (CILIP). The first one will be in Dundee in
Scotland (on 5-6th June): http://www.cilips.org.uk/about/annual-conference-2017/ .
The second one is taking place in Manchester (on 5-6th July): http://cilipconference.org.uk/ Here is our abstract: http://cilipconference.org.uk/information-literacy/
.
We are also organising our own biannual conference, i3 Information, Interactions and Impact http://www.rgu.ac.uk/research/conferences/i-2017/overview/ at the Robert Gordon University and we have a paper accepted there too. A real busy year for us but we are very keen to increase awareness and share our findings!
We recently also presented phase 1 findings at the LILAC conference which took place in Swansea this month, organised by the Information Literacy Group who funded our research. A copy of our abstract can be found here: http://www.lilacconference.com/files/Swansea%202017/LILAC%20Full%20Programme%202017.pdf. The presentation slides are available via this link: https://www.slideshare.net/martzoukou/syrian-new-scots-phase-1-lilac-conference .
The data collection phase of the
research project has now been completed and we are analysing the final results.
However, this is not the end. There are many more activities to come! One
of them includes putting together examples from local Scottish public libraries
who support Syrian refugees as part of Refugee Week that is taking place
between 19-25 June http://refugeeweek.org.uk/. So please keep on checking this blog for new updates!
No comments:
Post a Comment