Last weekend, Miss Manion (Head of French at CLS) presented at the Oxford University Languages Teachers’ Conference 2025, hosted at Somerville College.
Through her presentation, she offered an overview of her work over the past few years on Holocaust education and language learning, and her application of creative translation methodology designed by the Stephen Spender Trust.
Miss Manion’s projects started by collaborating with the CLS Modern Foreign Languages department to design creative translation resources for multilingual Holocaust poetry, running workshops in school to mark Holocaust Memorial Day in 2024. In 2025, the project expanded through a partnership with the Wiener Holocaust Library, culminating in an event for pupils from CLS and CLSG who were given a lecture, tour of the archive, and session translating poems by young Romanian girl and victim of the Holocaust, Sonja Jaslowitz.
Subsequently, Miss Manion has been the recipient of the Rolf Schild and Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) Professional Recognition Award, travelling on study visits to Lublin, Berlin and Leicester this year.
“My projects have always been guided by a desire to highlight the rich linguistic and cultural diversity of the pre-war Jewish and other communities who were persecuted in the Holocaust. HET stress the importance of humanising the victims and telling individual stories, and I’ve found that the Stephen Spender Trust’s creative translation methodology offers a new and valuable route in for pupils. I am pleased to have been able to share reflections with peers at the Conference and look forward to applying new ideas from my experiences on the HET and Rolf Schild Award over the years to come.
Brigette Manion, Head of French at CLS
