 Hi everyone, my name is Robin and I lecture on the foundation year and so what I'm going to do today is try and give you a very brief overview of what the foundation year is and then introduce you to one of the modules which is called cultural fluency and then in the last 10 minutes hopefully we'll have time to answer any questions you have about the foundation year. You've probably chosen to attend today's mini lecture because you already have an interest in the foundation year or some knowledge of what it is but just to summarize the foundation year is like the year zero of a degree so on the foundation year we try to introduce you to the range of subjects that we teach and so us and to give you some kind of background in terms of knowledge to those subjects but also really help you to build the academic skills and the confidence you need to be a great student and you don't have to choose the actual pathway in terms of the degree you want to study until the end of the foundation year so if you're someone who knows that you really want to take a degree but you're not quite sure yet in what direction you want to head that could be useful for you to know. Okay so let me just introduce you to some of the key modules we have on the foundation year the core module is called academic practice and academic practice really is focused on helping you to develop the academic skills you'll need to be a really successful student and although we're focusing quite a lot on writing great academic essays or giving great academic presentations we're also focusing a lot on reading and research and the type of critical thinking skills and creative thinking skills you need to be a brilliant student. Then as you've probably seen if you've checked out the website or any literature on the foundation year there's two streams on the foundation year there's inter business management economics and law and social sciences arts and humanities and depending on which stream you're on you'll have lectures and seminars orientated around business management economics and law or social sciences arts and humanities and hopefully these lectures and seminars will give you a really strong foundation in terms of knowledge of what you'll need to know or some kind of basis to give you a head start for studying business management economics and law or any social sciences arts and humanities subject and so the most popular module is one called the world from so us which is quite difficult to explain without going into the module in great depth because it really tries to introduce how in so us we perceive the world and the kind of unique values we have in terms of how we approach different topics and so in brief it's an introduction to the economic political and social history of the world but from a so us perspective I think the most common feedback we get from students on our module is that it's everything we wanted to learn in school but never got the opportunity and then I'll just move on then to the module I'm going to talk about today which is cultural fluency and on cultural fluency there are no lectures everything is seminar based or in other words although we provide some materials in terms of articles films documentaries blogs social media resources the emphasis is on the students to apply the kinds of academic theories and concepts that they'll need for their applying to their academic interests but also hopefully to their own personal interests and so we'll be developing critical thinking skills creative thinking skills and hopefully your sense of confidence in yourself as a student and your ability to study independently and to drive your own learning so in order to explain cultural fluency we probably need to start by just agreeing on what we mean by culture a dictionary definition of culture and this is just one I took from the gamers dictionary was a way of life especially the general customs and beliefs of a particular group of people at a particular time and while I think we often associate culture with nations in terms of English culture or Irish culture Italian culture we could be talking about any group so we talk about pop culture or business culture or even your school or college probably has its own culture in terms of the way people behave the beliefs the people share the way they dress the jokes they tell the music they listen to and there's a very good chance that any culture changes over time and changes over space so you've probably noticed that the school you went to feels very different to a school three miles away and that you can identify students from different schools not only by how they dress or their school uniform but because they talk slightly differently and have different jokes and think different kinds of music is better than others so we can describe cultures but because cultures change over time and space we can infer that different forces shape culture and that's what we're going to be looking at in the rest of today's short lecture is how power changes culture so just as a very quick example of that probably the majority of films you've watched in your life have been from America and from Hollywood and if certainly if you go to the cinema in Britain the majority of films will come from the United States but Nigeria make great films Korea makes great films Argentina makes great films so why do we watch so many American films the answer is really simple there that is just the economic and political power of the US gives them not only the financial clout to make very big budget films but also to control distribution to establish strong links with other elements of American culture such as through TV music their interlinks as a kind of cultural power but even at a more local level if you wanted to look at British business for example you'd be able to see that within corporate culture power is active and power shapes the way that corporate culture operates so if you just want to look at footsie 100 companies who has the power well only five percent of CEOs in footsie 100 companies are women and even if there are increasing numbers of women on boards and or on board of directors what kind of values predominate in those board rounds well if those boardrooms are dominated by males certain types of behaviors and certain kinds of values will most likely predominate while others might not what do these men who dominate UK companies look like well 69% of footsie 250 companies do not have any BAME directors so it's predominantly white male from similar socioeconomic backgrounds now we might think that this doesn't matter very much but these power relations are obviously going to shape people's opportunities in life and the way we feel we can behave in certain cultural situations so if footsie 500 companies are dominated by white males this means that certain groups of individuals are more likely to have access to power and others will find it more difficult to enter certain jobs or to gain equal rights or have access to promotions or certain entitlements so power relations shape culture and these power relations influence our lives and what we're going to do now is have a think about how power relations might influence education and in fact the first assignment on cultural fluency is to give a very short presentation analyzing the power relations in any subject you've studied so you could now get a gigantic head start on your first seminar sorry on your first assignment for cultural fluency by just thinking of one subject you've studied maybe you're even doing A levels at the moment maybe you've recently completed some form of education at some level so do you mind just writing down a subject you've recently studied in the chat box please any subject at all literature history economics all the way through I heard a brilliant presentation yesterday on geology and economics maths okay now what we're going to try and do then over the next 15 minutes or so is identify or introduce a number of academic theories that we could apply to our own education and see what we've learned about power relations because maybe once we've identified the power relations within education our own education would be able to think about how we can change that education system because obviously the education system really influences culture and our lives okay so the first one is really obvious which is patriarchy so patriarchy is male power as you already probably know but when we're looking at it in cultural fluency we'll probably try look more at the complexities of male power but for now we'll keep it simple enough except to say in the cultural fluency we wouldn't only look at feminism we'd also try and look at intersectional feminism and the way that feminism operates across cultures and now the first thing we could look at is just the curriculum for the subject that you have noted down here and if you were to do a scan of the curriculum for example the key issues you cover or the key figures you should study in terms of the people you should study the most prominent figures you've studied you'll probably see immediately that they are mostly men so if you're studying economics who are the key thinkers or if you're studying sociology who did the key theories come from but you might also want to have a look at when women are represented how they are represented so it's true that we might see women represented in a history curriculum or well history is a good example actually so in history we might cover or be introduced to the story of Florence Nightingale or Anne Frank maybe but what if all the women that feature in our education are represented as being carers or victims and then when women are included what are their backgrounds and who are they intended to represent and who are they speaking for so when we do have women theorists or we do see women represented are those women always from what from from one background and when they are represented is it intended that they represent all women because the problem could be that we might for example have women represented but it's always middle-class white women and they're always speaking for or often speaking for all women while other women with different backgrounds are never represented and if male power dominates education systems what ideas and values about the world are being reproduced so if you think about your history textbook if the history textbook was written from a point of view the challenged patriarchy would there be such an emphasis on war and what the language and narrative of the history textbook have such an emphasis on certain values that were considered heroic for example great leaders or war heroes etc so the other way to consider how our education might be shaped in relation to patriarchy has to do with just gender and what it means to be a man or woman so from our education what feedback do we get on who we should be aspiring to be in terms of how we perform as men or women so what does it mean to be a normal man or a normal woman and is there space to consider different experiences and different possibilities of what it might be a human that doesn't satisfy traditional gender norms or gender roles so what would society look like if we had an education system that wasn't accepting a patriarchy or reproduced male power again and again but instead challenged traditional assumptions about gender and heteronormativity now moving on to the theme that we would actually start the module with which is nationalism and the first article we look at on cultural fluency is one by Ben and Dick Anderson who asks how come we think of the world as being divided into nation states rather than us all being united as human beings but yet it now seems so natural when we turn on the tv and watch the olympics or on sunday morning the baking program we watch is called the great british bake-off that we are all divided into a world of nation states with separate and very distinguishable characteristics and cultures so just as an example of how strange anderson thinks it is that we're divided into nation states he asked how come we feel that we share a great affinity with everybody within the borders of the territory we live in that we call a state when we've never met them so how come somebody who might work in a car factory maybe in a big city like manchester feels they share a deep connection with someone who might be a farmer in somewhere rural like cornwall how come the farmer from cornwall probably feels a much stronger connection with the factory worker from manchester than a farmer from normandy or kerry well anderson says that this affinity or connection we feel with other people inside our nation can't be natural it needs to be something constructed or a feeling that we learn to have through living in society and being educated to feel that everyone within a nation state has some very strong bond and it's i think nationalism is so ingrained in who we are we find it hard to imagine that once nation states as they are now never existed so if you think of italy and italyans you probably imagine them to have a really deep um historical connection and that's why we get the feeling that italian culture is so identifiable and distinct but italy was a collection of separate kingdoms until 1861 so if you want to look at a map of italy from 200 years ago it's not there it's a collection of many smaller kingdoms that only became united 150 years ago but sometimes when you make that argument others argue that although states are something modern or something very recent the cultural connection that underpins those states is something that has existed for a very long time so if you take france as an example you might say france is a modern state but the culture of france existed before the states but historians have shown that that's probably not true so according to the historian era cubs born at the time of the french revolution 50 of the people in france did not speak any french at all and only 12 or 13 percent of people spoke french so how did france generate such a strong sense of everyone within its borders sharing the same culture and being unified in some way well i would argue that a great part of that is through education and if you want to have a look at your own education you'll probably see that through much of or through many of the subjects you've studied the idea that nation states is not our natural is never questioned but if you look at subjects like history or literature you'll see a story of the nation being told that encourages you to believe in the inevitability of the nation and nation and nation states so if you just look at your history textbook what wars are being celebrated and what figures are being considered great or when you look at a literature curriculum where are all the authors from and what values are being promoted in the text series so most of our education is not a story of all human beings or of all human history literature society and politics it's the story of a nation but because of its story within that story we'll probably find that certain groups of people are emphasized and play a predominant part in that story but some groups might have their role minimized or not represented at all so where is the experience for example in your British history a-level curriculum of those who suffered or were displaced or were enslaved or died as a consequence of British imperialism or in the tale of 20th century Britain where are the black people where are South Asian people where are British Muslims and what does this lack of representation of some groups tell us about who is valuable to the nation and who belongs and how would this then influence society and then the final part with final section we're going to look at today is colonial thought and the influence of colonialism on our education so I just mentioned nationalism in the last section and how the facts of what happened during the area of British colonialism may sometimes be overlooked but what I want to focus on now is not physical colonialism itself in the 18th 19th and early 20th century but the legacy of colonial thought so in seminar two on cultural fluency we'd have a look a theorist called Edward Said who shows how in the 18th and 19th century Europeans were developing an idea of themselves as being modern scientific progressive and advanced and then it served Europeans to think of non-western cultures as being traditional primitive backward and timeless so that non-western cultures were like a mirror so that just as when you're an insecure teenager in school it makes you feel good to present someone else as being bad it served Europeans to think of non-western cultures as being inferior to them so western European cultures were rich sophisticated complex and in contrast then non-european cultures were simple homogenous and timeless and that's why Europeans could talk about great expanses of territory as if they were all the same even the name of this university is the school of oriental and african studies as if the orient was one unit that shared very similar or homogenous characteristics and then could be studied as such as if they were all the same in terms of culture and also in terms of the people so what we're talking about here is a hierarchical way of viewing the world with Europe or at least western Europe being supreme and then other regions being viewed as not only inferior but that western Europe should be the model for those non-western European cultures so physical colonialism is over but be interesting to look at your own studies and think to think about what assumptions from colonial times remain so when you study societies and sociology what kind of societies are considered the norm are they always western cultures when non-western cultures are presented are they presented as being equal in terms of sophistication and complexity as western cultures who's thought about societies is considered most important are there only western sociologists on your sociology curriculum or when you study economic development and geography on economics who is considered developed and why and who is third world or underdeveloped and how are they presented in comparison to the west and who are the forces who can drive or promote development can non-western cultures drive their own development or do they need help and assistance from the west and why would that be or when you study art whose art is considered classical or surreal or abstract and whose is considered to be perhaps not primitive but of more historical or anthropological value so even though colonialism is over or not colonialism is over but even though the physical colonialism of western Europe may be over it might be interesting to look at your own his educational experience to think about whether the legacy of colonialism still exists so when we're looking at education from a cultural studies point of view analyzing the correlations evident in our own educations we could think about what knowledge was considered a value but what knowledge was left out or was not included what people or groups were considered to be a value and who was not included or represented whose ideals and values were being reproduced and whose were not being represented at all and in your own educational experience did you feel included or represented or did you feel in some way that your own experience was being overlooked could there and I think this is the big one to consider after answering those questions could there have been alternative ways of teaching learning and assessing what you learned because maybe the outcome of analyzing correlations could be that we make a meaningful change so the cultural fluency module hopes to embody some of the remit of the foundation year on this module we are definitely introducing academic theory and trying to help you develop academic skills but what we're going to do with that theory is encourage you to apply the concepts and arguments to your own life your own experiences and the areas of academic interest that you want to research in the future and we also want to give you as much autonomy as possible so that you can drive transformation in your own life and in the final assessment for a cultural fluency you develop a portfolio which applies the theories that have really interested you to whatever issues that matter to you the most so the final assignment is just to take five theories from cultural fluency and apply them to five topics that really interest you and then the seminars are designed to help you develop your own knowledge so that you can deepen your understanding of these issues deepen your academic skills but also develop a deeper sense of who you are and how your own education can benefit you okay I can't believe I've actually finished slightly early and so if you've any questions then Aman can help to do the tech but if you have any questions about the foundation year please fire away or about what we've just talked about yes we've got a few questions in the Q&A section it's also worth mentioning to all attendees that we have a student present from the foundation year in the arena who's in the chat so if you have any questions about wanting to be about what it's like to be a SOA student on the foundation year please for a few to ask questions directed to Norena as well but from the chat box we have the first question from Malika is how large is the number of students who usually opt for this year? So the when we started the foundation year two years ago the plan was to try to attract 40 students in the first year and we had almost 300 students last year and this year we have I think 370 students enrolled okay great next question Carl sent this message about 15 minutes ago so he's probably talking about a specific area of your talk he says is this not very similar to the concentration and ownership of media corporations where six corporate bodies own all media establishments in 2010 they were holding 36 billion dollars more than the GDP of Finland in 2010 it's incredibly hard for minority and less privileged demographics to be fairly and honestly represented. I completely agree and you've hit the nail on the head what you've just done there is an analysis of the power relations in global media and you've probably found that they're very concentrated among certain groups in the world although there's very little access to any power. Yeah good question by the way what are great stats too. Okay the next question may have been from Jay hello I'm hoping to study a degree politics and international relations at SOAS but I want to do the foundation year first so that I can get a better understanding of how to study properly for the degree my question is that after the foundation year will I need to apply for the degree or do I transfer into the degree? No once you're accepted on the foundation year you are on your degree so as with any other year in university you just need to pass your modules on the foundation year and then you'll automatically go on to politics and international relations. I believe that also answers Freya's question how does the application to a degree course at the end of the year work somewhere I'm going to take that as done. Maybe I should just because even some students who have enrolled on the foundation year and are a couple of months into the foundation you're still asked questions about this once you are on the foundation year you only need to pass the foundation year to get on to first year of your degree and that's any degree in SOAS whether it's politics law international relations Korean anthropology etc but another thing to remember is that the foundation year is not a standalone and you don't get a certificate at the end of the foundation year so it's not like a standalone qualification in any way it's part of a degree. And while you're talking about that Robin there's another question about whether a student on the business economics management and law foundation course could then go on to do a politics degree yeah so you certainly could I'm not sure why you would do that except perhaps you thought economics would be very helpful for you but you absolutely could do that and I think what we find is that as the year progresses and you develop more awareness of what SOAS is like and of what different subjects are about certainly when I came out of secondary school I had no idea what anthropology was or what international relations actually involved studying but on the foundation year you learn more about different academic subjects and maybe you'll develop your interests and change your mind so I would be hoping students will change their mind as the year goes on and as I said whether you're on female or business management economics and law stream or the social sciences arts and humanities stream you can choose a degree from anywhere on SOAS. Okay I've got a question from Jay and Jay asks how is the foundation year assessed? How is the foundation year assessed? Okay so you have on the foundation year a core module academic practice which runs for the entire year you have a core module or a module that continues throughout the year called which is your introductory course to business management economics and law or social sciences arts and humanities and then you have four other modules so for each module you might have different assessments so on cultural fluency for example you have a presentation and a portfolio and on world from SOAS you have a portfolio and a long essay for academic practice at the end of the year you do a kind of micro dissertation where you write a research based essay on a topic of your choosing but in general the majority of the assessments will be essays because we're trying to train you to write fantastic academic essays because when you go on to your degree that will be the most commonly way that you're assessed but assessment overall over the entire year you can expect to produce portfolios presentations different types of reports and essays and just the technical part then of the assessments is that you need to pass your modules on the foundation year or you need to get a certain amount of credits so you'll need to pass your modules but if you were to not pass a module the first time you can resist in the summer. Great thank you a similar question I guess is this course taught through lectures mostly? Is this course taught through lectures mostly through I think in your 10 hours or your 10 contact hours a week you would have two hours of lectures yeah so I would say you'll spend more time in seminars with with the lecture but with the emphasis being on you contributing your own ideas your own reading and discussing ideas and issues and arguments with your classmates. Great thank you an interesting question here is do you believe that western culture will ever evolve from patriarchal domination due to the fact that globally other cultures have been westernised through patriarchal ideals making it harder for minorities to be heard or even accepted? I mean the the short answer is that I can see things changing very slowly in the environment I live in the United Kingdom right now and also in Ireland where I grew up and I also lived in in Korea Thailand Argentina and Ecuador in my 20s and I've seen changes in terms of not only equality in terms of gender I think there's also a global growth in awareness about equality and issues of representation to a huge extent because of social media and access to information but I mean whether we will see a dramatic change in my lifetime I don't know I actually don't know how to answer that question yeah but very good question maybe we should try would be the best answer I could give maybe. Great next should I take AS or A level exams for the foundation year or any other exams such as proficiency in English? Well that would depend on the backgrounds you're coming from I'm taking it you're are you studying in another country if you haven't got A levels or AS levels? I will see if I can unmute them. Do you hear me? Yes okay all right I don't have any AS level because I'm from Russia we have only a tight exam and actually so we have a proficiency in English and which is only Cambridge one and I got an FC exam recently I passed it so do I have to pass another exam such as CP or yields or something like that and should I take AS level and how to prepare for them during foundation year? I don't think so but I think what you should do is contact the foundation year address available on the website I'm afraid I don't know the exact answer to that question and I imagine that we'll need some measure of English proficiency and some evidence of having completed whatever education you've completed but I can't see why you would need to take AS level or A level while you're on the foundation year I'm sorry I can't give a more absolute answer but I'm sure we could help you if you could contact me. Thank you, thank you very much. Yeah okay thank you another question we've got is how many students does one class usually consist of? So the classes the average class size at the moment is 23 students per class um so but I would expect you know with the way class sizes work you can expect class sizes I would think of about 16 to 20 students per seminar. Thank you and uh so next question is what would be the pass mark for the foundation year? So the pass mark for the foundation year is the same as the pass mark throughout SOAS for every year of your degree which is 40 but remember that that's not a percentage in the way that the academic marking scheme works that's not exactly 40% but yeah 40 is the mark taking into account that 75 would be a very high mark. I've got a question from Anonymous which is could you go over the maths aspect of the foundation year please? I can try I don't teach maths thank god so we have a module called Quantitative Reasoning and Numbers in Term 2 which introduces some practical aspects of using mathematics and data for academic purposes. You don't need any experience of doing maths to take this module it really is just there to help you learn how to use data and numbers for your academic studies. We also run additional mathematics support classes for those students planning to go on and study economics um because for the micro component of economics you need stronger maths skills so we have additional support for students who will need more sophisticated maths skills on their degree. Okay great thank you very much this question you might have already touched upon but the question is I affirmed for the Humanities Foundation year and remember reading about making a portfolio as an assignment through website development and marketing how does that relate to the wider range of course content and modules? Okay so there's also there's a module called Digital Skills and Technology which aims to help you develop the type of technology skills you may need for academic study but also for work life so I mean Narina Narina I don't know if you actually can help me here because you've experienced the module itself I've only seen the work that the students have produced and they work on producing things like um what was I going to say they have produced work like a video cv a digital portfolio utilizing different type of technology skills and then we use some of those skills on cultural fluency for producing the final portfolio but in general I think that that module is more focusing on the type of skills you'll need in work life than in academic life like I said is it is it Narina who's the student rep? Yes um so yeah it's a summary yeah of what you were doing on digital skills and technology definitely so with digital skills it was very much like you were saying creating a video cv creating a hobby video so it was a lot about developing your digital skills as it were so um warming how to create tables from an excel spreadsheet learning how to use things like Adobe Spark to create videos learning how to copyright correctly which is very important you don't want to get in trouble for plagiarism and um also think learning things like coding html coding embedding that onto a website creating your own website so it is um very much like robin said learning skills that you're going to need in your work life but it's also very useful in the sense that um for example learning how to create tables from an excel spreadsheet of data we're going to need that a lot in terms of writing reports so writing reports um having these tables in them referring back to them sourcing your data correctly so um that is what I would say is a summary of the digital skills and technology module um but I can definitely say it's a lot of fun and it's very it's very different to the rest of the modules in terms of the things you learn as well as the way you're assessed so yeah that's what I'd say okay great thanks Narina okay have a good time for one more question uh which is are there mentors for new students who join at the foundation year absolutely so every student is allocated an academic advisor um that academic advisor is somebody who you can draw on for support doing the foundation year with any academic issues you're having that academic advisor will be able to hopefully help you with any non-academic issues that are affecting your studies maybe not in terms of giving you personal support themselves but directing you towards different um departments we have which can help you with those issues and also the academic advisor then should be able to help you move in forward in terms of maybe the degree choice you want to make or the skills you feel you need to develop to handle your degree great well uh thank you very much for attending session today I just want to say thank you to both Narina and Robin for for giving the talk and of course thank you to all attendees here today and I hope you enjoyed the session and please get in touch with us on the addresses available on the website if you want more information