6th Form Students across England Attend Pembroke Access & Outreach Easter Events

The Easter vacation has been a particularly busy time for Pembroke’s access initiatives, with current students working alongside staff to make our key events a success.

Highlights included the Easter Humanities Conference, the London Centre for Languages and Cultures (LCLC) Easter School, and the launch of the Manchester Centre for Languages and Cultures (MCLC).

Our Easter Humanities Conference, held from 1st – 3rd April at Kingsley Hall in Bow, London, offered our undergraduates the opportunity to teach a topic from their degrees to a small group of Year 12 students from our partner schools in East and West London, and the North West of England.

The annual conference aims to introduce school pupils to different ways of learning and to new subject areas. This year, students taught topics such as Theatre in Elizabethan and Jacobean London and Malthusian principles of population control.

‘I always find meeting these students, and seeing them develop their critical faculties throughout the course, to be a fascinating process’, commented Pembroke JCR Access Rep, Charles McGrath. ‘The Easter Humanities Conference forms a key part of the process of intellectual development that makes the Pembroke Access programme so successful.’

The conference was preceded by the LCLC Easter School on 29th and 30th March. Held at Westminster Academy, the Easter School had current Pembroke students teach sixth-form pupils a range of skills such as writing, grammar and translation, as well as introducing them to cultural, social or historical topics related to their chosen language.

Pembroke has been expanding its access initiatives, this year launching the Manchester Centre of Languages and Cultures in partnership with the Open University. 16-19 year olds from across the North-West region have been invited to take part in forthcoming events there.

The MCLC launch event, held at Winstanley College in Greater Manchester on 29th February, featured an introduction by Pembroke’s Access Fellow, Dr Peter Claus, and a guest lecture by Professor Theo van Lint (Calouste Gulbenkian Professor of Armenian Studies at Pembroke), followed by a range of language workshops by academics from the University of Central Lancashire, University of Manchester and Lancaster University.

Stephanie Atherton, who was involved in running the event at Winstanley College, added: ‘The MCLC Launch Event was a resounding success. We are looking forward to developing an intellectually stimulating course of events for aspiring linguists across the North West, to raise the profile of these subjects and assist in making world-class education more accessible.’

Pembroke is committed to providing access and outreach events that are academically-stimulating and inspiring. Find out more about our schemes here.