"To explain something to someone is first of all to show them that they cannot understand it by themselves."
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (6).
Jacques Rancière’s sentence quoted above has for years guided me in my teaching practice. Whether I teach a literary text or the differences between various past tenses in French, I keep in mind that the more one puts oneself in a position of having to explain something, the more one restricts what can be expected of students, limiting their intellectual perspectives and creativity. Explaining something to someone means casting that person in a passive role. I understand my teaching differently: my role as a teacher is not so much to explain something rather than to give students the means to understand it through their own logic and their own hypotheses. Tapping into students’ creative thinking has always paid off, and my teaching practice is more dynamic as a result: I do not know in advance how students are going to draw a stage set for a play we might be reading, or what topics they may choose to address in their podcasts, or what they will write or draw in their reading journals. Their input is the starting point of my teaching.
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Because of this belief, my first task is to foster students’ curiosity and rekindle their willingness to learn by empowering them. I have turned to bell hooks many times, over the last few years, for examples of activities that can make us what she calls a “learning community.” In order to speak French in a language class or to have the conversations that we need to have in a literature class, every person has to be in a position where they can contribute something. I like creative assignments for that reason. In the examples below, the students' reading journals show how each person has made the text their own, and how they have connected it to their present and thoughts (many thanks to Clemson students for allowing me to reproduce their work here).
I am committed to teaching language with a communicative approach. I expose students to Francophone music via our “song of the day,” which I play right at the beginning of class. I design assignments so that they both rely on each other and have fun with the tasks at hand. Students interview each other through small questionnaires or bingo games. I only use French both in and out of the classroom, and I have recently developed several pedagogical projects at the Intermediate level. One such project, which I am currently implementing at Clemson, is a semester-long project around the Netflix T.V show Dix-pour-cent. I assign episodes with questionnaires throughout the semester, and we use sections of the episodes for oral comprehension exercises (this has the advantage of showing a scene in a context that students are familiar with: they learn to approach comprehension along with clues other than simply listening to an audio tape), creative exercises (asking students to write a follow up dialogue or scene), or shot description/oral comprehension exercises (one student describes a screenshot and their partner has to draw it with those directions). At the intermediate level, I have also used a semester-long blog project (see teaching portfolio), which works like a visual diary and which I have students complete with Weebly.
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I am impressed every semester by how willing and creative the students can be if I manage to set the class right. In my Literature classes at Clemson, I picked texts that I thought might be the most susceptible to speak to a modern audience and to help us look at today’s world with a critical and historical perspective. We talk about gender performance as we read Balzac’s Sarrasine. We talk about race when we read Ourika, an early 19th-century novel whose main narrator is a black woman. We talk about gender inequalities and colonization when we read Letters of a Peruvian Woman, an 18th-century epistolary tale. All of these texts denounce various types of violence and discrimination, but these texts also reinforce some problematic stereotypes. When I ask students about that, they can be taken aback. This process is often uncomfortable for all of us. I recently had a discussion with a student who was “bothered” that we read an excerpt from Edward Said’s Orientalism as we read Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. I am glad that we could have a conversation about this: we are all likely to identify with the positive missions of the texts that our culture produces, and it can cause us discomfort when we have to face the problematic representations that they can also foster. We had a productive dialogue, at the end of which the student was bothered by a different question: what do we do about this contradiction in Montesquieu’s text? I had no definite answer, but I said that I suspected it was a life’s work to think about such problems.
Excerpt from a children's book written, illustrated, and bound for the "Fictions of Childhood class" at Wellesley College (2014). Many thanks to my student Sunnia Ye for allowing me to reproduce her work here.