Wedgwood Memorial College
Wedgwood Memorial College is a small residential college in Barlaston, near Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. The college is owned and operated by Stoke-on-Trent City Council, and is nationally important as a centre of Esperanto education.
There is also a similarly named building in Burslem, the Wedgwood Institute, which is sometimes called the "Wedgwood Memorial Institute". This is a completely separate institution.
The college, a member of the Adult Residential Colleges Association, offers short courses in literature and languages (French, German and Esperanto); political science and history; and art, art history and architectural history.[1] Wedgwood Memorial College has a non-circulating library with 15,000 volumes available for research and private study.[2] The buildings are also rented out for weddings, parties and small conferences, with eight rooms available that accommodate from ten to 40 people per room.[3] One of these rooms is the Montagu C. Butler Library, located in Esperanto House on the grounds of the college.
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[edit] History of college
The Barlaston estate was acquired by Wedgwood in the 1930s, and the college opened in February 1945 in Barlaston Hall, a country house. The building was endangered by coal mining operations and a geological fault, which caused major diagonal cracks in the walls. The college moved from Barlaston Hall to Victorian and Edwardian buildings in Barlaston village.
[edit] Esperanto instruction
The headquarters for the Esperanto Association of Britain has its main office at Wedgwood Memorial College.
Since 1960 Wedgwood Memorial College has offered a week-long Esperanto summer school every August. This came about partly through the influence of Horace Barks, the Lord Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent, who was an advocate of Esperanto.
The college offers a weekend course in Esperanto theatre every January and a weekend residential course in Esperanto language every October. The latter course is particularly suited to people who have completed an introductory free course, whether a traditional postal course[4] or an Internet-mediated one.[5] The Esperanto Association of Britain offers a partial subsidy to Esperanto learners attending the Wedgwood Memorial College program and who have first completed such an introductory course.[6]
Esperanto tutor Paul Gubbins, who has taught at the college for many years, declares that students typically learn Esperanto to a more advanced level than students of other foreign languages: "Students of Esperanto do not have to wrestle with the irregularities of a foreign language: these impede fluent, uninhibited expression. This means that often, particularly with an advanced group at the college, I find myself not so much ‘teaching’ Esperanto but exploring the language with students – pushing it, testing it and challenging it to an extent that is impossible in a traditional language classroom."[1]
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b College Tutors
- ^ College Library
- ^ Seminars and Small Conferences
- ^ Ana Pana Esperanto correspondence course
- ^ lernu.net - Several free on-line courses in Esperanto
- ^ Languages taught
[edit] Further reading
- Cecil Scrimgeour. Fifty Years A-Growing: A History of the North Staffordshire District, the Workers' Educational Association 1921-1971. Stoke-on-Trent, 1973.
