This year the University of Bristol is running 2 residential courses that are totally accessible to visually impaired people of all ages. Sighted people are needed to act as guides/mobility aids to the students.

No experience is necessary, as training in guiding techniques will be provided.

The programme for each course will include talks, discussions, demonstrations, field trips and visits. Each visually impaired student has their own guide who is expected to accompany them for the duration of the week, including evening lectures. Students (and guides!) are of all ages, from 25 for 85+. Both courses will include trips out, although the English course will be very sedentary in nature. Guides must be physically fit for field trips. There will be lectures or other events each evening. Guides are usually residential but people living close to the course venue may be non-resident as long as you can be at Badock from 07.45 to 21.30, the exact times to be negotiate with individual students. (Some students may be happy for you not to arrive until 08.45.)

Guides will be provided with accommodation and meals. We ask guides to consider making a contribution of £80 towards the cost of the accommodation (the actual cost is over four times this amount). However, this donation will be waived for guides who are on benefits and/or who cannot afford to meet it. We do not select guides on their ability to pay.

Your role as a guide is to assist your student at mealtimes and with general mobility around Badock. On field trips you will be invaluable to make sure that your student has the opportunity to see everything of interest. During lectures and workshops you may be asked to help with practical activities, pass objects round and you will be able to listen to the range of experts that we have invited to contribute to each course. Ideally you will have an interest in the course subject, but you are not expected to be an expert in the course topic.

The courses will be held at Badock Hall (Bristol). Accommodation will be in single study bedrooms.

Engineering is the ultimate in the application of scientific theory. This week will consist of lectures, visits, demonstrations and hands-on practical sessions where you will have an opportunity to carry out experiments linked to the more theoretical talks. We will consider the role of nanotechnology in Engineering through to the construction of major structures and how Engineering principles govern this wide range of topics. We will also examine the materials used by modern Engineers and compare these with ones used in the past. There will be contributions from many Departments within the Faculty of Engineering, including Civil Engineering and the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre. Visits will include SS Great Britain and the Swindon Railway Centre.

Charles Dickens was profoundly and actively concerned with the political and ethical problems of Victorian England, using his fiction and journalism to promote social change. But he also wished to entertain his readers, drawing for inspiration on a wide range of popular culture, from melodrama to the circus, and regularly presenting dramatic readings from his own novels (some of them in Bristol). Much of his work, moreover, is an imaginative re-creation of his autobiographical experiences. We shall explore these four novels in the light of Dickens's ambitions as a moralist, creative autobiographer, and popular entertainer. The course will incorporate performances of some of Dickens’ own dramatic readings. We shall also visit Tyntesfield and the Theatre Royal at Bath for a performance of “Little Nell” - a new play about Dickens.

Novels to be considered:

David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times and Bleak House