History in Our Everyday Lives

Rationale

I teach French at a public high school in East San Jose, California called William C. Overfelt High School. It is one of the poorer areas of the city, in a rough neighborhood where one can find gang activity.  The average family income is considerably less than the average income level for all families living in Santa Clara County. According to the school’s data from 2013-15, approximately 92% of students qualify for free and reduced lunch programs. It is part of the 11-High School East Side Union High School District. Out of 1,455 students, 375, or 26% are English Learner students. Approximately 80% are Latino, 15% Asian (including Filipino), and about 2% African American.³Most French students begin their French studies during high school. This unit will be given to a combined class of students in their third year of French (French 3) and students in Advanced Placement French Language and Culture. Class discussion and teaching will be in the French language about 90% of the time.

This project will be done over a 4-week period during the months of September and October. Students will have 4 days of French per week, one of which will be a block period of 95 minutes. The other three will be 55-minute periods.

The textbook for the French 3 class is Valette and Valette’s Discovering FRENCH Today! There is not a strict curriculum that is mandated by our district. One goal is to prepare the French 3 students to be able to succeed in the AP class the next year. Another goal is for students at both levels to become much more fluent when speaking French. This is why the class will be conducted mostly in French. Presenting their research orally to the class, without reading a script, will also go a long way in improving their oral fluency.

They will constantly be working on the National Standard of Communication in their speaking and their writing. Of course reading French is also very important in learning the language and being able to communicate it well. We will be able to read and study primary source documents in French, such as French newspapers printed in San Francisco in 1853, books written in French in the 19^th century describing pre-gold rush and post-gold rush life, and 19^th century letters written in French. The students will learn that they could actually put their French to use locally, by possibly helping to translate some of these documents that have been passed down to museums and historical societies. Using numerous types of resources helps engage the students in the interpretation and writing of history while giving them an opportunity to increase their grammatical accuracy.

Culture and Comparisons are two more Standards that drive the student’s learning in this unit. There will be many opportunities to observe and compare francophone cultures, historical and contemporary, to the current American culture. To prepare students for the AP test, they need to be listening to a lot of French by a variety of people to improve on their listening comprehension. Students will be listening to French reports online about the plum/prune industry, and hopefully, listen to a guest speaker in French, a descendant of the Pellier brothers. They will also be using other resource types such as literature online articles, and a short, online movie about the Pellier brothers. Although this movie and some good sites to research will only be available in English, they are valuable and important sites, which help researchers to better understand Louis and Pierre Pellier. Much of what was written on the subject of the Pelliers in the 20^th century or later, has been in English and cannot be ignored if one wants a more complete picture of these men.

The AP students look at six different themes throughout the year: Families and Communities, Science and Technology, Personal and Public Identities, Global Challenges, Contemporary Life, and Beauty and Aesthetics. We will touch on the Families and Communities theme in this unit as we research the Pellier family and the community of San Jose. We will be looking at the movement of the French language in order for the students to better understand where French is spoken and why and how it got there. This language migration would come under the theme of “Community.” We will look briefly at the way prunes are prepared in order to get a better understanding of what Pellier’s small business eventually became. The preparing and packaging of prunes would fall into the Science and Technology theme. Personal and Public Identities would cover topics such as Louis Pellier as a historic figure, while the information about how the Pellier brothers are remembered today through local public history projects such as the park, the grave stones, in books, etc., would be part of the Contemporary Life theme.

This unit will not be a lot of names and dates on tombstones. This is local history. It is a desire to know about these people, the French settlers, who spoke the French language right here in San Jose, California and the events that took place a long time ago. Discovering these answers and more, makes it much more real to us, linking us to the past. It also makes learning French much more interesting, as we learn about these French immigrants and their descendants. There will also be the possibility of meeting actual descendants of the Pellier family.

The community can be our laboratory for learning. It is also about preserving the past, our past. The story brings us to explore outside of our school’s immediate surroundings to East San Jose, less than three miles from Overfelt High. During this unit of researching the French in our area, students may develop a desire to learn about their own past, their own immigration story, connecting not only their French studies and San Jose history, but their family and San Jose history.

This could be adapted to another local situation using someone from France who immigrated to your area. Local history libraries and librarians, as well as Census records could help you find local French immigrants and develop a similar unit combining local history with French language instruction. The unit could also be adapted to other World Language classes, such as Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, German, Italian, etc.

The French have traveled and settled in far corners of the earth throughout the last few centuries, bringing with them their language. A great reason to learn French is to be able to go around the globe and communicate with the approximately 200,000,000 people in roughly 50 countries.