MEDIA CENTER

Director Daphne Chisholm-Elie interviews Business Class trainer and art restorer Emilie-May Hubbard

DCE: You're a trainer at BCLS. Do you currently wear any other hats?
E-MH: In fact, I do - I am an art restorer. I 'cure' old damaged paintings and do my best to help them survive a little longer. When I was a toddler, my mother took me to art museums and transmitted her eagerness for art and its history. She also sent me to drawing and arts-and-crafts clubs for children, always telling me that I had a gift that had to be nurtured. While I was able to reproduce what I could see, the potential for creating something of my own invention was a little less obvious! So art restoration seemed perfectly suitable because it associates art, its history and artistic reproduction abilities.

DCE: What's your passion in life?
E-MH: My son Tom, history of arts, art restoration and human contacts: minding that people are content/eager to learn new things (i.e. English and British customs!). My son is only 20 months old, though if I think of bringing him up in a bi-cultural Franco-British context , I’d opt for sticking to my maternal language and use it as something special and unique, a pretence for complicity and a magical relationship. I see this as doing your child a favour – much as my own mother did with me – because looking at the world through two cultures can be an eye-opener.

DCE: Do you have a burning ambition or a dream you're aiming for?
E-MH: Well, I hope to continue to be fulfilled in my two activities: being part of the BCLS team and being moved by works of art. Working for BCLS is definitely fruitful in identities and personalities. There are not 2 trainers alike. We all love our job and human contacts but teach English with individual made-to-measure approaches. I think the team enjoys sharing experience and it enables us to unceasingly requestion our lesson plans and theories. It’s an honour to be part of it all and motivating to be able to work with trainees from richly diversified backgrounds and positions. We never have the impression of doing the same thing!

DCE: Can your two ambitions/dreams work together?
E-MH: Being an art restorer teaches crafstmen to be patient and constantly adapt themselves to each painting, so I presume that this helps me in my everyday experience with trainees. It also probably encourages me not to opt for an automatic sholastic approach when training.
Perhaps one day I can create an English training workshop aimed at the art industry and art-focused trainees who work in an international context – that’s a scoop and the proposal is now open to debate!

DCE: Your mother was a trainer herself and something of a legend. How has being her daughter helped you into teaching and training?
E-MH: Thanks to her caring sensitive personality and curiosity for enrichment, my mother has 'contaminated' me with the love for British culture and for sharing knowledge and experience with others. And I think that being Franco-British helps to soften discrepancies. I’m lucky enough to be able to step back and understand cultural traits such as British self-derision and French bluntness and put them into context. When confronted with dilemmas, I try to think ‘How would a French person react to this?’ or ‘What would a British citizen do in my shoes?’