Claudia Mónica Ferradas

I first encountered Claudia when she was a student on the Masters course in Professional Development for Language Education run by NILE with the University of East Anglia. In a particularly strong group, she stood out as a practitioner whose work was already distinguished by an avid intellectual curiosity and a profound commitment to professional learning and personal development. The Masters course was modular, so we only coincided for part of the programme, but in the years that followed, we became close colleagues, finding common ground in our shared beliefs about the value of literature and its role in promoting intercultural understanding. We continued to collaborate, on successive trips to Argentina, where she organised talks and workshops for me and introduced me to tango (watching, not dancing!); then in the early years of the British Council’s Brit Lit project, working with groups of teacher-writers from APPI, the Portuguese teacher association; teaching together on a Masters course at the University of Alcalá de Henares; and most memorably, for five years as co-chairs of the British Council Oxford Conference on the Teaching of Literature. Claudia’s interest in the intercultural experience, whether at the macro-level of immigrant communities or the small cultures of the classroom, her concern with the representation of cultural identity through literary voices, and her own personal exploration of voice through poetry and song, have combined to make it a particular pleasure to work alongside her for the past twenty-five years. Claudia’s work is always characterised by her engagement with texts and what they tell us about human experience, and with ways to inspire learners, whether students or teachers, to become part of an intercultural dialogue.