MFL & INCLUSION | ||
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ABOUT ME | ||
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Hi! If you clicked on this, you'll be looking for a bit of background...
After a few years teaching in England and France I spent most of my teaching career in Scotland where I taught French and English in various secondary schools in Tayside until, as Principal Teacher of Languages, I was seconded to what was then the Scottish Office Education and Industry Department to undertake a 2-year project (1994-96) looking at how the national policy of 'Languages for All' was being implemented in the case of pupils with special educational needs. The project resulted in a compendium of advice which was issued to all secondary schools in Scotland - Europe, Language Learning and Special Educational Needs. As a mainstream teacher I was astonished to find out how enthusiastic 'special' learners were about language learning, and how many of them there were. At a time when mainstream teachers were beginning to find numbers of 'alienated' pupils in their classes, I felt we had here an anomaly that merited closer examination. As by this time my hearing was deteriorating, I left classroom teaching and went freelance. This allowed me to develop the interest sparked by the project, and I have been working in the combined fields of modern languages and special needs (or support for learning, or additional support needs) ever since. Working with the Higher Still Development Unit and schools, I was closely involved with the development of Access level qualifications in Modern Languages and have worked with Learning and Teaching Scotland to produce or revise support for teachers and learners working at those levels. I have received approval from the General Teaching Council to provide Continuing Professional Development and have delivered training days for modern language teachers from all over Scotland, as well as training days for local authorities. I have also been visiting speaker on Modern Languages and Support fot Learning/Inclusion at three of the Scottish Universities which train post-graduate teachers. In 2002 the Scottish Executive Education Department sponsored me to undertake a small research project, and the resulting was listed as one of ten key documents for modern languages in Scotland. Information about this and my other publications is available elsewhere on this site. More recently I have been invited to contribute to the work of two European projects (Council of Europe and European Commission) both of which focus on the language learning entitlement of learners with special needs. For the last 6 years or so I have been running in-school projects entitled Working Together for Inclusion in Modern Languages which teams up modern language teachers and support for learning teachers who work together on curriculum development intitiatives related to school and MFL department priorities. The success of these led to a further project to produce free-standing materials which could be made available to a larger number of schools. This new version of the materials, piloted in a few Scottish schools in session 2006-7, became an online project now known as Maximising Potential. It now forms part of the MFLE website. Further information about the programme can be found on the CPD page on this site. I am currently working on materials for primary teachers and others who may be teaching languages to pupils and students a the early stages of language learning and who may not themselves be confident linguists. The modular materials, recorded on CD, will provide more support for the teacher than is usually the case. You can find details of all these projects on this website. I hope you will also find articles and links of interest to you. Almost all of my career has been spent in Scotland, so of course that colours my perspective. However, I hope that visitors to my site from elsewhere in the world will feel welcome and will find things of general interest. I am always interested to hear of good resources relating to foreign languages and inclusion, especially in those areas which are poorly covered on my site at the moment. If you have such materials or know of any that I can link to, or incorporate here, please contact me. I am very grateful to all the teachers, learners and others from whom I have learned so much over the years. I am also very grateful to Margaret Crombie and Vivienne Wire, acknowleged experts in their respective fields, who have contributed valuable pages to this site, and to other well respected writers who have allowed me to publish extracts from their work. I am particularly pleased to have been able to publish on this site papers submitted by newly qualified Chartered Teachers as part of the requirements for the award of their qualification. There are few other opportunities for personal research and personal experiences to reach an interested audience. If you have material related to modern languages and inclusion that you would like to make more widely available, I should be delighted to discuss this with you. Bear in mind, though, that this is a not-for-profit site, and no money changes hands. You can contact me at h.mccoll@clara.co.uk
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This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence. | ||||
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This page updated20.8.08 | ||||
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