Basic French
1. First writing assignments, Gettysburg College, Fall 2011
What follows is the first and second writing assignments that I gave to my Basic French class after two (1) and four (2) weeks of French. Students had to use Comic Life, a software that allows user to create comics with their photographs or drawings. The software is pre-installed on every Mac, and PC users could download a trial version for free. Students worked in groups of 3 or 4, which enhanced peer learning outside of the classroom. I designed this writing exercise and proposed it to them very early on in the semester because it requires a creativity that has to emerge in and with the foreign language right from the start of their apprenticeship. I designed this exercise to foster students' creativity in the target language while having them write and use some of the skills that we had practiced that week.
1. First writing assignments, Gettysburg College, Fall 2011
What follows is the first and second writing assignments that I gave to my Basic French class after two (1) and four (2) weeks of French. Students had to use Comic Life, a software that allows user to create comics with their photographs or drawings. The software is pre-installed on every Mac, and PC users could download a trial version for free. Students worked in groups of 3 or 4, which enhanced peer learning outside of the classroom. I designed this writing exercise and proposed it to them very early on in the semester because it requires a creativity that has to emerge in and with the foreign language right from the start of their apprenticeship. I designed this exercise to foster students' creativity in the target language while having them write and use some of the skills that we had practiced that week.
Sample comics from the class (reproduced with the permission of my students) :
Assignment 2 (week 4):
Sample comics from the class:
Intermediate classes
1. Blog project, Intermediate French I, Gettysburg College, Fall 2011
This is an assignment that I designed for the intermediate language class that I taught in the Fall of 2011 at Gettysburg College. I asked students to create a blog on the weebly.com website. Weebly is an easy interface to create a website, and it is also free of charge. This format allowed students to enhance their creativity more than a regular paper assignment; it was our first writing assignment. They had 4 other "rédactions" papers to hand in during the semester. Since for all these "rédactions", I would grade both the content and the form, I kept the blog assignments as a periodical writing practice that would not get graded on the grammar or even the form, but rather on content and creativity. Regularly during the semester, I gave students some informal questions to discuss on their blog. One was for instance: "Que pensez-vous de la vie des stars? Est-ce qu'elle reflète des aspects de notre société?" I let students decide if they wanted me to correct the grammar or not, because I wanted their blogs to function as an informal communication tool between us and between themselves. I thus graded the first entry as part of the five big "rédactions" of the semester, but they general "blog" grade (10 percent of the final grade) was based on their creativity, the content of their blogs, and the responses that they posted on each others' blog.
1. Blog project, Intermediate French I, Gettysburg College, Fall 2011
This is an assignment that I designed for the intermediate language class that I taught in the Fall of 2011 at Gettysburg College. I asked students to create a blog on the weebly.com website. Weebly is an easy interface to create a website, and it is also free of charge. This format allowed students to enhance their creativity more than a regular paper assignment; it was our first writing assignment. They had 4 other "rédactions" papers to hand in during the semester. Since for all these "rédactions", I would grade both the content and the form, I kept the blog assignments as a periodical writing practice that would not get graded on the grammar or even the form, but rather on content and creativity. Regularly during the semester, I gave students some informal questions to discuss on their blog. One was for instance: "Que pensez-vous de la vie des stars? Est-ce qu'elle reflète des aspects de notre société?" I let students decide if they wanted me to correct the grammar or not, because I wanted their blogs to function as an informal communication tool between us and between themselves. I thus graded the first entry as part of the five big "rédactions" of the semester, but they general "blog" grade (10 percent of the final grade) was based on their creativity, the content of their blogs, and the responses that they posted on each others' blog.
Sample blogs from the class (many thanks to Hilary and Wesley, for agreeing to let me reproduce their work here):
- Le blog d'Hilary
- Le blog de Wesley
I am thinking of having students work on a similar project at Clemson, and when I do so I plan to use the Adobe program Spark instead of Weebly -- Spark is a bit easier to use and has more dynamic layout options than Weebly.
- Le blog d'Hilary
- Le blog de Wesley
I am thinking of having students work on a similar project at Clemson, and when I do so I plan to use the Adobe program Spark instead of Weebly -- Spark is a bit easier to use and has more dynamic layout options than Weebly.
2. Collective Creative Writing in a Language class: "French Language, Literature, and Cultures I," Wellesley College, Fall 2013.
Writing a Collective Description: Pastiche of a Balzacian text
For the following assignment, students worked on a literary text reproduced in their textbook, Réseau. The excerpt comes from Balzac's Histoire des treize.
And here is the final result on the right of the original Balzac text. I made and printed a poster out of it, and each student received a copy of the 11x16 inches affiche.
3. La mode: Activities designed to accompany the unit on fashion in the textbook Réseau. "French Language, Literature, and Cultures I," Wellesley College, Fall 2013.
Réseau has a unit entirely dedicated to French fashion; in that section, we also work on relative pronouns. My goals in what follows were to have students assimilate the chapter's vocabulary (clothes/cosmetics) while practicing relative pronouns. I also wanted them to reflect on the problematic representations of women in the fashion industry.
We started by a "défilé du jour" (instead of my traditional "chanson du jour": while I take attendance, I always have students watch a short musical clip). This was followed by a "trouvez quelqu'un exercise" reproduced below. In the course of this unit, we also worked on an interview of Karl Lagerfeld (2 minutes, students had a questionnaire to fill in) and Jean-Paul Gaultier (idem); I also asked students to bring extra clothes so that we could have our own "défilé de mode" in which students orally present their creations (traditionally this is one of the best moments of the semester; this group was definitely ready for the catwalk, and we had some uncommon combinations to say the least).
Trouvez quelqu'un:
Trouvez quelqu’un qui porte une jupe qu’il ou elle adore
Trouvez quelqu’un à qui la prof a déjà dit qu’il ne fallait pas parler anglais
Trouvez quelqu’un dont les chaussures sont vertes
Trouvez quelqu’un dont l’un des parents est étranger
Trouvez quelqu’un que vous aimez bien et demandez-lui s’il ou elle vous aime aussi
Trouvez quelqu’un dont les habits viennent de chez Zara ou HetM
Trouvez quelqu’un qui adore Jean-Paul Gaultier et lui voue un culte…
Trouvez quelqu’un qui n’aime pas mettre de maquillage
Trouvez quelqu’un dont les yeux sont maquillés
Analyzing TV commercials and the gender representations that they convey
For this activity, I showed students the following clips. I reproduced my questions below (they were printed on a questionnaire that students filled in in groups of 2):
Chanel:
Réseau has a unit entirely dedicated to French fashion; in that section, we also work on relative pronouns. My goals in what follows were to have students assimilate the chapter's vocabulary (clothes/cosmetics) while practicing relative pronouns. I also wanted them to reflect on the problematic representations of women in the fashion industry.
We started by a "défilé du jour" (instead of my traditional "chanson du jour": while I take attendance, I always have students watch a short musical clip). This was followed by a "trouvez quelqu'un exercise" reproduced below. In the course of this unit, we also worked on an interview of Karl Lagerfeld (2 minutes, students had a questionnaire to fill in) and Jean-Paul Gaultier (idem); I also asked students to bring extra clothes so that we could have our own "défilé de mode" in which students orally present their creations (traditionally this is one of the best moments of the semester; this group was definitely ready for the catwalk, and we had some uncommon combinations to say the least).
Trouvez quelqu'un:
Trouvez quelqu’un qui porte une jupe qu’il ou elle adore
Trouvez quelqu’un à qui la prof a déjà dit qu’il ne fallait pas parler anglais
Trouvez quelqu’un dont les chaussures sont vertes
Trouvez quelqu’un dont l’un des parents est étranger
Trouvez quelqu’un que vous aimez bien et demandez-lui s’il ou elle vous aime aussi
Trouvez quelqu’un dont les habits viennent de chez Zara ou HetM
Trouvez quelqu’un qui adore Jean-Paul Gaultier et lui voue un culte…
Trouvez quelqu’un qui n’aime pas mettre de maquillage
Trouvez quelqu’un dont les yeux sont maquillés
Analyzing TV commercials and the gender representations that they convey
For this activity, I showed students the following clips. I reproduced my questions below (they were printed on a questionnaire that students filled in in groups of 2):
Chanel:
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Chanel, 1988 (Inès de la Fressange). Chanel, 1991 (Vanessa Paradis).
Quelle(s) vision(s) de la femme présente chaque publicité ? Faites-en une liste.
Quels types de décors les publicités mettent-elles en scène ? (faites une liste aussi) Pourquoi à votre avis ?
Jean-Paul Gaultier:
Quelle(s) vision(s) de la femme présente chaque publicité ? Faites-en une liste.
Quels types de décors les publicités mettent-elles en scène ? (faites une liste aussi) Pourquoi à votre avis ?
Jean-Paul Gaultier:
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Publicités de Classique et Le mâle, Jean Paul Gaultier. (Classique, 2011, Classique et Le mâle, 2013).
Quels sont les éléments « classiques » de publicités pour parfums qu’on retrouve chez Jean-Paul Gaultier ?
A quel(s) moment(s) Jean-Paul Gaultier joue-t-il avec les codes du genre dans ses publicités ?
Quels sont les éléments « classiques » de publicités pour parfums qu’on retrouve chez Jean-Paul Gaultier ?
A quel(s) moment(s) Jean-Paul Gaultier joue-t-il avec les codes du genre dans ses publicités ?
Advanced classes: French Heroes and Mythologies (see Syllabus, students' evaluations, and departmental evaluation)
1. First session: defining the word “hero” and questioning the specificity of the French context.
This is an advanced French class that I entirely designed and taught at Brown in 2010 and at Gettysburg in 2012. I had created this activity for our first meeting. Students were in small groups, and they had to make a list of the French heroes that they knew of or had heard of. They came up with the names on the left column and wrote them on the blackboard. We then tried to classify these heroes in types (right column). I asked students a series of questions (reproduced after the table here) that led us to realize that there can hardly be a stable definition of the word “hero”: this topic would regularly come back throughout the semester in our discussions. The second thing that we understood from a short comparison with American heroes was that some types of heroes do not travel from culture to culture: France has no superheroes, for instance. Finally, by looking at our heroes’ “dates of births,” we realized that they all appeared after the French Revolution, and hypothesis were made about why that was the case.
-Est-ce qu’on peut trouver une caractéristique stable que tous ces héros partagent ? (le fait d’être des modèles ?)
-Est-ce qu’il y a un type de héros qui semble manquer dans les types que nous avons listés ? (par rapport aux héros américains ? Batman, Spiderman, Zorro ?)
-Est-ce que ces héros sont « nés » à un moment particulier de l’histoire ? Pourquoi ?
2. what do heroes they tell us about the cultures that produce them ? (reading activity)
I designed these activities for our second session. The Marc Touret text that we worked on (“Les héros entre mémoire et histoire,” reproduced on this page) is an introduction to the question of heroism written for an exhibit on heroes at the French National Library (BNF). I gave the students a handout with Touret’s text at the beginning of our session. My goal here was to provide general perspectives on the subject of heroism, before we reached the primary materials on the following week. This activity was also a way for me to introduce students to a type of writing that they would not necessarily be familiar with; it was less intimidating for them to tackle an abstract piece of writing while in group. I have reproduced on the following page the type of activities and questions that this short text allowed us to do on that day.
-Est-ce qu’il y a un type de héros qui semble manquer dans les types que nous avons listés ? (par rapport aux héros américains ? Batman, Spiderman, Zorro ?)
-Est-ce que ces héros sont « nés » à un moment particulier de l’histoire ? Pourquoi ?
2. what do heroes they tell us about the cultures that produce them ? (reading activity)
I designed these activities for our second session. The Marc Touret text that we worked on (“Les héros entre mémoire et histoire,” reproduced on this page) is an introduction to the question of heroism written for an exhibit on heroes at the French National Library (BNF). I gave the students a handout with Touret’s text at the beginning of our session. My goal here was to provide general perspectives on the subject of heroism, before we reached the primary materials on the following week. This activity was also a way for me to introduce students to a type of writing that they would not necessarily be familiar with; it was less intimidating for them to tackle an abstract piece of writing while in group. I have reproduced on the following page the type of activities and questions that this short text allowed us to do on that day.
- Ensemble : « Les héros, entre mémoire et histoire. »
- Lire le premier paragraphe.
- Listons par ordre chronologique les conditions nécessaires à la fabrique d’un héro :
- être « héroïsé », c’est-à-dire, devenir public.
- en général, « son acte de baptême est son acte de décès ». Donner des exemples/contre exemples.
- « les héros sont des révélateurs des civilisations qu’ils sont censés fonder » : comment comprenez-vous cette phrase ?
2. En groupe, puis ensemble : décrivez les valeurs promues à travers les héros suivants (en gris : réponses données par les étudiants ; les noms des héros étaient auparavant inscrits au tableau)
Jeanne d’Arc (†en martyre)
Napoléon (†en martyr) De Gaulle Zidane James Bond Batman Martin Luther King Jr Jack Bauer |
Sacrifice, abandon de soi, virginité
Stratégie, audace militaire, fierté nationale Courage, résistance, fierté nationale Méritocratie, travail, ascension sociale Matérialisme, désinvolture, sex appeal, intelligence force et beauté, (violence) Sacrifice, anonymat, justice parallèle/privée ? Paix, tolérance, non-violence Violence nécessaire, sacrifice, honnêteté et intégrité |
3. En groupe, puis ensemble : les anti-héros : faire une liste des « méchants » contemporains (en gris : réponses données par les étudiants).
-terroristes/occidentaux corrompus à leur cause
-psychopathes et pervers.
-millionnaires, firmes internationales et pollueurs.
-trafiquants de drogues
3. How are heroes constructed ? The example of Les trois Mousquetaires (reading activity)
What follows is a selection of questions asked in the “fiches de lecture” that students would download on MyCourses before class, and that we would later discuss together. We read excerpts from Les trois Mousquetaires after having spent time on Barthes’ Mythologies; my idea in this unit was to have student compare Barthes’ understanding of modern heroes (he focuses on the objects and characteristics that they are represented with) to Dumas’ rendering of his characters. Each of the musketeers has indeed a set of objects and recognizable characteristics that distinguish him from the others – the fiche here is designed to lead students to identify what these traits are, and to comment on this. By reading Barthes and then looking at Dumas’ texts, students reflected on how heroes are constructed, and how this construction works in literature or cultural representations. The final assignment of this unit was to write a “Mythologie” in Barthes’s manner.
Les Trois Mousquetaires
Fiche de lecture 3
CHAPITRE VII: L’INTERIEUR DES MOUSQUETAIRES
Questions de compréhension
1. Faites une liste des valets des quatre héros, et de leurs caractéristiques :
Valet de d’Artagnan :
Valet d’Athos :
Valet de Porthos :
Valet d’Aramis :
2. Quels sont les trois objets qui caractérisent l’intérieur de l’appartement d’Athos ?
Questions d’interprétation:
1. Commentez le rôle symbolique de d’Artagnan parmi les trois mousquetaires. Par exemple, quel est l’effet de sa présence dans le groupe? Quelles qualités de chacun incorpore-t-il ?
2. Les valets et leurs maîtres : commentez la phrase « Tel maître, tel valet. » En quoi est-ce vrai pour les quatre couples maître/valet ?
4. How are Heroes recuperated? The case of Joan of arc (document analysis)
This was one of the sessions that took place at the Hay Library when I taught the course at Brown, where we looked at History manuals from the late nineteenth century. We looked in particular at the Petit Lavisse (1884, fig. 1), which was strongly republican, and the Cours élémentaire (1901, fig. 2), which on the contrary was used in private religious schools. This session was designed to have students reflect on how a hero can be recuperated by very different, and sometimes opposite parties. Students had read a short introduction to the topic before coming to class, and when together we spent time looking at primary sources and commenting on them by using the comparative table (see following page). I reproduced a similar experience for my students at Gettysburg College, where we worked on the same documents by using Gallica.
Documents looked at in class:
Questions de compréhension
1. Faites une liste des valets des quatre héros, et de leurs caractéristiques :
Valet de d’Artagnan :
Valet d’Athos :
Valet de Porthos :
Valet d’Aramis :
2. Quels sont les trois objets qui caractérisent l’intérieur de l’appartement d’Athos ?
Questions d’interprétation:
1. Commentez le rôle symbolique de d’Artagnan parmi les trois mousquetaires. Par exemple, quel est l’effet de sa présence dans le groupe? Quelles qualités de chacun incorpore-t-il ?
2. Les valets et leurs maîtres : commentez la phrase « Tel maître, tel valet. » En quoi est-ce vrai pour les quatre couples maître/valet ?
4. How are Heroes recuperated? The case of Joan of arc (document analysis)
This was one of the sessions that took place at the Hay Library when I taught the course at Brown, where we looked at History manuals from the late nineteenth century. We looked in particular at the Petit Lavisse (1884, fig. 1), which was strongly republican, and the Cours élémentaire (1901, fig. 2), which on the contrary was used in private religious schools. This session was designed to have students reflect on how a hero can be recuperated by very different, and sometimes opposite parties. Students had read a short introduction to the topic before coming to class, and when together we spent time looking at primary sources and commenting on them by using the comparative table (see following page). I reproduced a similar experience for my students at Gettysburg College, where we worked on the same documents by using Gallica.
Documents looked at in class:
Hand out distributed in class:
From these two images and the following questionnaire, students infer the paradoxical recuperations of the myth of Joan of Arc: as a warrior integrated in an army, she was represented as a proto-model-citizen (her posture in the first image resembles Delacroix's Liberté guidant le peuple). For these reasons, she appealed to republicans. But as a religious figure, she was also recuperated by conservative catholics as an icon of purity and sanctity.
Literature and Culture Classes: Fictions of Childhood in the 19th-century (see syllabus and Students' evaluations)
1. First-day worksheet
In order to help students get an overview of the course, I put them in groups of 2 and asked each group to pick a situation that we would find again in the course of the semester: from feral child Victor's case to Hugo's political plea about children in Les Misérables, from Rousseau's pedagogical preoccupations to Joseph Jacotot's teaching of a language that he does not know, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are full of fascinating problem-sets around the notion of childhood. Students had a much easier time understanding the progression of the syllabus after this activity.
2. A session at the Book Arts Lab: bookbinding techniques and 19th- and early 20th century printing presses
This group had spent a session in Special Collections, looking at 19th-century children's books and at various editions of Les Misérables. I had also brought images of my own collection to familiarize students with the Imagerie d'Epinal -- we looked closely at the "Gamin de Paris" poster partially reproduced here when working on Gavroche in Les Misérables.
Towards the end of the semester, we spent a session in the Book Arts Lab, where we learned how a 19th-century printing press works. We printed our own poster, with a slogan invented by one of the students in the class -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau's imaginary pedagogy made quite an impression on the group! For this project, we used an early 20th-century Vandercook Press (shown below).
The second goal of our session in the Book Arts Lab was to learn a few bookbinding techniques that students would use for their creative book project: each student wrote and illustrated a children's book during the course of the semester. They printed and binded their stories, producing beautiful accordion books reproduced below.
Screenshot of the homepage on Sketchbook Pro. The app allows students to draw their own images, to modify existing ones or use them as models onto which they can add various layers. The original model can be suppressed after the subsequent drawings have been done. The app is very easy to use because it is intuitive and allows for a large choice of brushes, erasers, and tools (rulers, curves, patterns, etc...). Students used the Library's styluses in the completion of the project.
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Students do not need to have any drawing skills in order to illustrate their stories: they completed this project by borrowing iPads from the Library on which we had installed the app Sketchbook Pro -- the app is also available for Kindle here.
One of the students' book project (many thanks to Sunnia Ye for allowing me to reproduce her work here). I invited students to reflect on how their images were going to be placed within the text; their books' visual coherence depended on a chosen format that they had to keep throughout the book. Some chose to have illustrations within the text, and others preferred to separate text and images, placing them on different pages.
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