Category Archives: College

Adult Learners’ Week: Student Achievement Awards Ceremony

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This post was contributed by Sarah Potter, Learning Support Officer at Birkbeck.

At this year’s Adult Learners’ Week Awards Ceremony, nine Birkbeck, Stratford students were chosen to receive a £25 book voucher prize for their outstanding achievement.  The winning students were:  

  • Pauline Forder (Community)
  • Samuel Georgewill (Study Skills Suppor),
  • Kirstein Gourlay (Student Ambassador),
  • Antoan Grozdanov (International Student),
  • San Lee (Pre-degree),
  • Piotr Piterek (Schools),
  • Bogomil Staykov (Schools),
  • Marcus Williams (Schools)  
  • Tracy Yearwood (Services). 

In addition,14 Birkbeck Stratford students were awarded nominee certificates.  It was harder than ever this year for the judging panel to reach their decisions about the awards, since the nominees and prize winners had all achieved so much at a high level, often in very challenging circumstances, and had benefited their fellow students in a number of ways as well.

Speaking for Birkbeck, Dean Pateman, Academic Registrar, strongly affirmed the college’s commitment to adult education and working with the University of East London in Stratford when he presented the student awards and certificates.  The sponsors of this year’s awards were Tricia King, Pro-Vice Master of the Student Experience, Elizabeth Charles, Birkbeck, Stratford Librarian, Tina Rouse, Team Leader, Geography, Environment and Development Studies, Linda Trenberth, Reader in Management, Sean Rillo Raczka, Chair of the Students Union.

Kirstein Gourlay, chosen to receive the Students Union Prize this year, described how much her Certificate of Higher Education in Social Policy and the Care Sector meant to her.  She was awarded a distinction, even though she had developed severe health problems and disabilities.

Nadine Morgan, a UEL prize winning student, provided the evening’s entertainment by singing two songs, and the ceremony was rounded by a performance of bhangra drumming by an East London musician.

Celebrating students’ Achievements: through the Library Lens

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This post was contributed by Eleni Zazani of Birkbeck Stratford Library

The annual ceremony of celebrating the achievements of the Birkbeck Adult learners is an event that the Library always looks forward to.

Birkbeck Library is committed to providing a strongly customer-focused service to meet the multi-level needs of its students and staff and to supporting the mission and strategic aims of the College, one of which is to enable students to acquire the skills needed to find, evaluate, use, and present information in their studies.

The Stratford Library team has identified the Adult Learners Week ceremony as a major opportunity to recognise students’ efforts towards becoming Information Literate students and citizens! As the information landscape becomes more and more complex, it creates new challenges for the students to cope with finding reliable information across the vast amount of sources on offer and using it in an ethical manner.

The Stratford team acknowledges that Information Literacy is a process of “learning how to learn” and our prize winning students succeed in changing their prior learning habits, and the way they engage with information. They do just that; they re-learn how to learn.

In order for us to enable the acquisition of new learning habits, we offer group sessions, drop-in clinics, and one-to-one support, where the student is always at the centre of the service provision and driver in this learning journey.  The Adult Learners Week Awards Evening is a reason to celebrate the achievements of all Birkbeck staff involved in keeping the students at the centre of everything we do, and the strong collaboration across all the teams emerged as a result of this effort.

Equally, the event is a very resourceful opportunity for reflecting upon our practices and listening to the student voice in order to invent even better ways of enabling learning and see many more students nominated next year!

As part of this reflection, we would like to thank all our students for enriching our practice and professional life in Stratford!

Man Booker nominee Sarah Waters visits Birkbeck

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This post was written by Hannah Merritt on behalf of the Department of External Relations.

On Monday 14 November, Sarah Waters, the award-winning author of Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and The Night Watch, visited Birkbeck as part of the Man Booker Foundation’s University Initiative.  I arrived early to secure my seat, which turned out to be a very good thing indeed.  More and more people poured through the door until the crowd spilt over into the gallery above as well.   They had all come to hear Sarah Waters talk about her latest book, The Little Stranger.  Many, including myself, had copies of the novel firmly in hand.  I read the book in the week before the event.  It was the first time I had read a Sarah Waters novel and it won’t be my last.  Sarah’s writing draws you into the period she writes about and her descriptions of the crumbling house Hundreds Hall make you feel like you’re watching its decay yourself.

Russell Celyn Jones, Professor of Creative Writing at Birkbeck, hosted the event.  Russell and Sarah had an existing connection: he was a judge for the Man Booker Prize in 2002 when Sarah’s previous novel Fingersmith was nominated.  Sarah kicked off the event by reading two extracts from The Little Stranger.  The first was the opening scene, in which Dr Faraday, the narrator, describes his first visit to Hundreds Hall as a child.  The vision of the house in its prime sets the scene for the despair of its later crumbling state.  The second extract came from about a third of the way through the book, when Roderick describes the spooky happenings in his room, where collars and cufflinks jump from the dresser to the wash basin behind his back.  I remembered this scene vividly from my first reading of the book: it was the first (though not the last) time I felt shivers run down my spine and made me grateful that I was sitting in a well-lit room!

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The Vacuum

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This blog post was contributed by Sorcha Miller, a Birkbeck student from the Department of Media and Cultural Studies.

In his Orwell Lecture at Birkbeck, Alan Rusbridger talked about a vacuum of 18 months in connection to the widespread phone hacking phenomenon at News International. That is, roughly 18 months passed before anything happened about NI’s obvious widespread invasion of thousands of people’s privacy, their regular usage of blackmail and intimidation. All that was revealed by the Guardian, but was ignored by all relevant Government bodies. Nothing happened, nothing changed. NI still owned 40% of the British Media, was about to own more, and one of the former NI executives, under whose nose many questionable things happened, was the Prime Minister’s head of communication. In the meantime the Guardian kept coming up with the goods, the details and the filth. Despite the Sun attacking the Guardian’s investigation, senior policemen trying to convince Mr Rusbridger to stop pursuing the story, and persecution of journalists involved.

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