Culture and Content in French: Frameworks for Innovative Curricula - Paperback

by Aurélie Chevant-Aksoy (Author), Kathryne Adair Corbin (Editor)

Instructors in today's language classrooms face the challenge of preparing globally competent and socially responsible students with transcultural aptitude. As classroom content shifts toward communication, collaboration, and problem solving across cultural, racial, and linguistic boundaries, the teaching of culture is an integral part of foreign language education. This volume offers nontraditional approaches to teaching culture in a complex time when the internet and social networks have blurred geographical, social, and political borders. The authors offer practical advice about teaching culture with kinesthetics, music, improvisation, and communication technologies for different competency levels. The chapters also explore multi-literacies, project-based learning, and discussions on teaching culture through literature, media, and film. The appendices share examples of course syllabi, specific course activities, and extracurricular projects that explore culinary practices, performing arts, pop culture, geolocation, digital literacy, journalism, and civic literacy.

Author Biography

Aurélie Chevant-Aksoy is professor of French at Santa Monica College. Her literary research interests include contemporary Francophone Vietnamese writers, Francophone women writers, and the graphic representations of historical trauma and exile. Her pedagogical research explores the use of technology in language instruction and the use of graphic novels and comics to teach culture in context at all levels of the French curriculum.

Kathryne Adair Corbin is assistant professor of French and Francophone studies at Haverford College. Her teaching and research explores the intersections of journalism, visual culture, and literature in nineteenth-and twentieth-century France. Her forthcoming book considers the spectacle and style in the works of France's first woman reporter, Séverine. Additional research has been published in George Sand Studies, Romance Notes, and Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education.