Diversify Your French
From Western Washington University's website: Teachers of French are invited to expand French teaching, curriculum, and worldview by participating in the Diversify Your French Virtual Summer Sessions taking place on July 10, July 17, July 24, and July 31. Each week a dialect, a world region, or an aspect of French will be explored with educators to help make French language classrooms a more global, diverse and welcoming space. Connect with other educators looking to expand their practice and discover new resources!
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Each Monday I will participate in a 75 minute webinar and submit a brief reflection on the experience. Descriptions of each webinar and the accompanying reflection are below!
01
Indigenous Worldview and Your French Classroom
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02
From Lagoons to Deserts: French as a Global Language
Today's webinar focused on decolonizing the French language classroom. The speaker began by introducing the well-known paradox of French language classes: 66.6% of all French speakers live on the African continent, but French language classrooms still focus primarily on Europe. This can be seen, for example, in the organization of university French studies departments, who typically differentiate between French literature and Francophone literatures. There tends to be one or maybe two specialists for all of the Francophone world, while there is typically one specialist per century for literatures from France. The ethical implications of centering European content in French classrooms means we tend to ignore issues such as the murder of a French teen by police in June; as it happens, the teen was of Algerian decent, so this latest incident of police violence in France has racial implications that parallel those seen in the U.S. The speaker then provided a list of resources that would help educators incorporate more non-European content into their curriculum.
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This was a useful seminar for several reasons. First, I can always do a better job of incorporating non-European culture and language into my curriculum. It was a good reminder to use contemporary debates as a point of entry for literature or literary excerpts, as well as for discussion of current events. I have a list of books that I would like to read now that could be accessible to students in French 4 or in College French. While many of the statistics that she cited were familiar, I didn't really think about how data can be manipulated to tell the story someone wants to tell. For example, she mentioned that according to most statistics, French is the 5th most spoken language in the world, but this figure ignores the fact that it is a colonial language to which many people lack access; so if you lump all Congolese, for example, in as French speakers, the data ignores the fact that not all Congolese have access to the schooling needed to learn French. This was a thought-provoking idea. Overall, this was an interesting and useful seminar, and my goal is to do a better job incorporating non-European voices into my curriculum.
03
Acadia Strong!
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04
Quebec French and Culture
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