Social impact reporting: Business vs Charities

When my mother told Klaus about my intention to start measuring the impact of charities, his reaction was, according to her, to say that he does not understand why there is such a pressure on charities in particular to evidence their social impact - the difference they make to their beneficiaries and to society as a whole, taking into account the positive effects as well as the potential negative ones. He said that there is not as much pressure on businesses to research what impact they make (in fact there is legislation saying businesses need to account for social impact as well, on which Deloitte is heavily cashing in). But indeed the idea of social return on investment and public benefit reporting seems to be mainly a matter in the voluntary, charity and social enterprise (VCSE) sector. Is this an unfair set-up? Why should the pressure to showcase doing good be higher on those explicitly and selflessly trying to do good, charities that have to go on their knees for every penny and cannot afford a whole lot of overhead expenses, than it is on ventures that are primarily intended to make profit, and that might therefore be more likely to have a negative social impact?

My argument in response to my mother was that rather than seeing this as an unfair situation, it could be reframed as charities taking the lead on social impact, and businesses slowly following after them. Making a social difference has always been the stuff of charities; it is what they are for and what they have expertise about. For for-profit ventures it makes sense to think in terms of finances, as the maximization thereof is the expressed purpose. Finances are kept track of through numbers and excel sheets, but while you can count some aspects of charity services (do people keep coming back?) if you want to know what difference the users have experienced due to the services offered, you will eventually wind up having to ask them. In that way it makes more sense for a charity to have a qualitative approach to measuring their impact. They are normally closely in touch with the people they are attempting to help. For large businesses, however, being in close touch with the customer and having the ability to receive dihrect input and feedback is something that has come as a side effect of the development of the internet. It is something that they are only figuring out now. And on this journey, charities can serve an exemplary function.


An example of a cool project regarding social impact: homelessnessimpact.org
They are bringing together information about the impact of different initiatives regarding homelessness, to figure out what works to actually help people, so that everyone can concentrate on doing those things that help, and we can cut any initiatives that do not actually make a difference and/or that make people feel worse.

Evaluation of the languages in the Master

Now that I have finished the Master (Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts), and the experience has already started greying out in my mind, it seems like the right time - or the last possible time at least - to write a blog post I had been intending to write, evaluating how I experienced it. Particularly I would like to evaluate some of the practical elements of how the multilingualism so proudly announced in the Master's name and on its website, actually plays out in and around the classroom and the student residences.

Entrance requirements
The Master is trilingual in English, French and German, and when I applied it was specified that you have to have C1 level English and B2 in at least one of the other two languages. Classes are taught in one or more of the three languages, and most of the staff is at least bilingual as well. It was also stated, however, that the degree is not a language learning course, although it included some language classes in the programme.

One of the first points to make here is about those specific language requirements. Because of the way English proficiency is obligatory, but aside from that you can choose either French or German, English is already effectively the lingua franca before the course has even started; through this requirement it is assured that English will be the language everyone has in common.

Teaching multilingually
The way that the classes worked is they were mostly taught in two out of the three languages, usually either French and English or German and English. There were also some ambitious teachers who taught in all three. I think the teachers were explicitly encouraged to make their classes multilingual. The actual balance between the languages differed per class, depending mainly on the teacher's choice of strategy but also on the students' input.

There were for instance teachers who tried switching between the languages while lecturing (the ones really dedicated to the multilingual ideal); teachers who mostly lectured in english but who presented case studies in other languages, with or without paraphrase; and teachers who mostly taught in French or in German but who might occasionally switch to English to accommodate student questions. Often the first class of a course would be more multilingual than the last one, as the teacher realises some of the students cannot follow the class well because their German or French comprehension skills are lacking, or because the students keep asking questions and discussing in English, so that the teacher starts to accommodate. That said I also had classes where students would make a genuine effort to make contributions in the class language, sometimes going so far as to speak it amongst ourselves. I had a few classmates and friends with whom I'd speak German, even though it was neither of our first language - I'm thinking of girls from Romania, Slovakia and China respectively (hi!).

I generally tried to pick classes in all three of the languages every semester, so choosing classes not just based on what I found most interesting, but also making sure I'd have at least a bit of French input. My French comprehension really isn't at an academic level though, as I found out while sitting through lecture after lecture in fast French. I eventually zone out, however hard I am trying to pay attention. If I do my best I will get a sense of what the teacher is saying, but I can't follow the specifics unless they talk slowly and give me some time to let it sink in or look up some words after every line. Powerpoints can help, but they can be distracting too, as you are trying to translate the info on the slides while also trying to follow what the teacher is saying. Somehow, with some teamwork and some bluffing, I did manage to get alright grades for these classes, but I haven't retained very much of what they were actually talking about.

The course as a language learning environment
That brings me onto the next topic, namely that the course wasn't intended to be a language learning course, but rather a multilingual way to deliver a humanities research course. The experience of multilingualism was part of the experience the course directors aimed for us to have, but greater fluency wasn't one of the outcomes on which students were evaluated. Yet almost everyone who chose to do the course, did so hoping to improve their language skills. At the start of the course, some intensive language classes were offered at beginner and intermediate level. I took French intermediate, so my 3rd language of the three course languages. I think people generally chose to do these courses in the course language that they were weakest in. The course I did was fun and it helped me to figure out some French past tenses and the like. In two weeks you are not going to reach fluency and I don't think that was the hope of the course designers. I know that some other students got quite annoyed with their beginner language courses, either because they found German too hard or because they didn't get along with the teacher. The intensive language courses were fairly separate from the rest of the degree and were not explicitly followed up on in the rest of the courses, which might be a tip, to integrate them more through e.g. reflection on how much you can learn in this way, which methods seemed to be most productive and so on.
 
The way the assignments worked is you were allowed to write them in any of the languages that the teacher felt confident marking in - so normally the stated course languages, but I suppose if you had another language in common with the teacher you could write it in that. (I never tried this but I seem to recall that the Luxembourgish students wrote something in Luxembourgish.)

Now, writing an assignment for university is hard in any language. Mostly every sentence costs a lot of thought and effort. You need to make sure your argument makes perfect sense, your explanations are well-written and sensible, your sources are quoted in relevant ways. But there is a lot of time pressure and you're also working on a few other assignments. Little surprise, then, that students do not venture to write in languages that they aren't very confident in. My German is at a fairly high level - I used to talk to my boss in German, I can maintain a long and nuanced conversation, albeit with some wrong inflections, I know words like ausbilden and eintrichteren and I know you can call money Mäuse. But academic writing is absolutely a skill apart. The teachers are aware that it is, and the course does offer classes in academic writing in French, German and English. I took the German one and enjoyed it, but it was a bit intimidating that I was doing the same assignments as the native speakers who were in the class with me (why they didn't take the French class instead is beyond me).

I think that the course could have developed its facilities for the students to develop their languages more, importantly by explicitly rewarding students for writing an assignment in another language. I suggested this to the course coordinators and they felt it would be hard to enforce this - as it would mean differentiating between a German native speaker writing in German, and a Greek person writing in German; or even between a Greek person who has lived in Germany before and a Greek person who hasn't; the implementation would be either quite subjective, or very complicated.