UNTEACH: a Shadow Heroes Festival

In collaboration with SOAS World Languages Institute, the Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, and the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, SOAS

 
About the festival
Shadow Heroes is hosting a day of discussions and creative workshops to explore pathways towards education that is free from prejudice and discrimination. Our speakers, workshop leaders and presenters will discuss frameworks and methodologies to create educational spaces that value a plurality of languages and ways of knowing, where young people learn to value all sides of their identities.

The focus will be on language as a proxy for knowledge, the role language plays in creating plural spaces, and also how language is often obscured as a vehicle for discrimination. Our aim is for attendees to engage critically with techniques and approaches that work towards inclusivity in teaching. 

This festival is for the general public and will be of particular interest to secondary and HE teachers as well as artists, particularly writers, translators, poets. 

About Shadow Heroes
Shadow Heroes is an arts education initiative that supports young people in embracing all sides of their linguistic and cultural heritages. We do this through creative translation workshops that explore issues of representation, self-expression, colonial history and the power of language. Working with a network of accomplished translators, writers and other artists, we develop and run workshops for schools, all of them carefully designed with the students’ needs in mind, covering sixteen languages: Arabic, Bissau Guinean Crioulo, French, German, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Urdu. 
 
Programme 

All times are in BST

10:00Introduction to UNTEACH Festival:  Gitanjali Patel (Director, Shadow Heroes)

10:15-11:15Keynote by John Agard, hosted by Yansé Cooper
John Agard is a Guyanese poet, playwright, and writer of children's books, whose poems have been studied at English GCSE since 2002. His many awards include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2012. With Renaissance One he co-curates liming events to encourage spoken word revelry and dexterity.
Yansé Cooper is a school leader with over 10 years' experience teaching French & Spanish in state secondary and primary schools across London. 

11:45-13.00Panel discussion
Valuing a plurality of languages and ways of knowing in the classroom. What needs to be unlearned?

Each of the four speakers will offer a five-minute provocation on the topic of creating educational spaces that value a plurality of languages and ways of knowing. This will be followed by a one-hour discussion, including questions from the audience.

Amina Yaqin is a Reader in Urdu and Postcolonial Studies at SOAS. She is co-author of Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 911 (Harvard UP, 2011). Her book Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing (Anthem) is out later this year. She is Chair of the Decolonising Working Group and Director of the Festival of Ideas.

Jeffrey Boakye is an author, broadcaster, commentator, educator, journalist and teacher with a particular interest in issues surrounding education, race, masculinity and popular culture. He has taught English to 11- to 18-year-olds since 2007.

So Mayer is the author of A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020) and a number of other books. So previously worked with English PEN and taught creative writing and film studies, and is currently a bookseller at Burley Fisher, and a feminist film curator and activist.

Raymond Antrobus was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is author of To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press), The Perseverance (Penned In The Margins), All The Names Given (Picador), and children’s picture book Can Bears Ski? (Walker Books)

Kavita Bhanot (Chair) is a writer, translator, editor, and ECR Leverhulme Fellow at Leicester University. She wrote the landmark essay 'Decolonise not Diversify' (2015), founded the Literature Must Fall Collective, has edited three short-story collections and is co-editing an anthology on decolonising translation (Tilted Axis). 

13:00-14:30Lunch break with a series of four spoken word pieces about language and power, produced by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme and Chouette Films
 
14:30-15:30Concurrent workshops
Two education organisations will share their groundbreaking methodologies and approaches towards an inclusive arts education in concurrent interactive workshops.

1Shadow Heroes - this workshop is now full. Please email Shadow Heroes if you would like to be added to a waiting list
'Shadow Heroes' will be showcasing the results of their recent Arts Council England-funded project Race Through Translation.

Speakers: Nariman Youssef, Mohini Gupta, Katia Halls

2Literature Must Fall - this workshop is now full. Please email Shadow Heroes if you would like to be added to a waiting list
'Literature Must Fall' is a new paradigm for how we read and write. This workshop will explore how we can read and enjoy literature with critical awareness; interrogating supremacies, hierarchies and invisibilised assumptions in literary texts and within ourselves.