Connections: Charles Mphande

What’s your standout memory of Warwick?

My studies in the CELTE (Now School of Education, Learning, and Communication Science) were very much enriched by the Warwick Debates. The debates created a conducive environment of scholarship as we heard the diverse views of the speakers.

The other experience was my Presidential term in the staff-student committee in the Centre, looking after shared teaching/learning resources and student welfare. It was an honour and a privilege to work with the Centre's esteemed academics and the administration team.

I also had the privilege of attending the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) where we interacted with scholars, authors and teachers from across the world. This was a highly rewarding experience and I continued to be a member of IATEFL for many years.

How would you sum up Warwick in the time that you were there and your generation of students?

It was a prestigious institution that was growing in reputation, attracting high achieving students from around the world.

What was the student culture like at Warwick, and were there any annual traditions, societies, sports clubs, or events that you remember?

There were dances, but I wasn’t a big fan of dancing.

What attracted me more was the powerful student advocacy and activism, in which some banks were campaigned against heavily for their participation in such human tragedies as the Atlantic slave trade.

Further to this, student life was vibrant; in our kitchen at Arthur Vick Hall 2, we had students from Malaysia, Hong Kong, Greece, Oman, Cyprus, Japan, Malawi, Mauritius, Taiwan and local British citizens. It was a happy lot!

Finish the sentence: Warwick influenced who I am today, because…

I was introduced to networks of scholars, particularly in the broad applied linguistics field, and in corpus and discourse studies. This turned out to be highly useful in a range of studies in social sciences which I pursued to research and teach in the latter part of my academic career.

Charles Mphande

MA English Language Teaching for Specific Purposes, 1997