Rationale
Our school district’s current French I curriculum incorporates some cultural components of the la francophonie2 (the French-speaking areas of the world) beyond France. However, the current textbook series presents the greater French-speaking diaspora in a very disjointed manner without ever really going into enough detail about any one place. This curriculum will serve to replace part of the second unit on noun/adjective agreement. The colors are usually a good starting point for students of French to describe nouns because while most of them are regular (noir/noire, vert/verte, bleu/bleue, etc.), they also offer good practice working with irregular (banc/blanche) and static adjectives (orange, marron) as well. Rather than a more rote memorization-based approach to learning the colors, which ends up being tedious and painful for everyone, I would like to have students explore and examine art representing the culture of the former French colonies while using the language to describe the artist's color and image choices. This will give students the opportunity to encounter not only significant historical and cultural aspects of Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, etc., but also to see French speakers of color depicted in the works of art.
The teaching context for this unit is Pierre S. DuPont Middle School3 in Wilmington, Delaware. A strong proponent of public education, PS DuPont commissioned the building of the school in 1934 to provide an accessible for students in the city. Pierre DuPont himself was the great-grandson of French-born industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours4. The area’s Francophone connections have held strong over time, and Nemours, France remains Wilmington’s sister city to this day.
PS DuPont serves students in grades 6-8. It is the only one of the district’s three middle schools eligible for free breakfast and lunch for the entire student body. The building’s demographic encompass a feeder pattern that is primarily from inner city Wilmington. The remainder is made up of students outside of the feeder pattern who are enrolled in the district’s Gifted and Talented (GT) program, totaling a little over a quarter of the school’s 927 students. 40% of the population is African American, 30% is White, 15% is Asian, 10% is Latinx, and 5% is mixed race/other3; This make up can be challenging because the demographic represents a canyon-sized gap between the mostly minority, frequently economically disadvantaged feeder population and the overwhelmingly White and Asian portion comprising GT, who travel from more middle-class neighborhoods with financially stable families.
While it is true that Delawareans in general grapple with the misconception that Spanish is the “easier” choice because “no one speaks French here”, anecdotally this is even more prevalent among black and brown students. In 2019, the Brandywine school district began using a career pathway approach to helping students to select a language for high school credit based on what job or college major they may choose in the future. Although French is deemed applicable in this presentation to over 25 different types of vocations or areas of study (about equal to the number identified as applicable for a speaker of Spanish), the majority of students fall prey to the generalization that French will be a more difficult language to learn and that their opportunities to use it in real life will be limited. Despite Delaware’s strong Francophone history and school namesake, this generalization results in a rather small French program at both the building and district levels. According to a 2013 study of 5th grade students of French by Sybille Heinzmann, “the more important they [students] judge French to be, the more positive their language attitudes are”. Indeed, research has shown that learners’ attitudes toward the target language (TL) is much more predictive of their ability to gain proficiency than the language itself.
The other factor which heavily influences World Language course selection, and perhaps the one I am most interested in for the purposes of this unit, is the discrepancy between the number of white versus black students who choose French. This schism is quite clear in the eighth grade World Language classes, where only 3% of African American students who chose to study a language selected French, compared to 29% of their White peers. As previously mentioned, the cause is largely a very pervasive stereotype that if you are not a white person, French is just not possible for you to learn. Though it may seem an overly-exaggerated statement, further research by Heinzmann has also found that “only learners’ attitudes on specific TL groups exert a significant effect on their motivation to learn French”. In short, if students’ immediate mental image of the phrase “French person” conjures an image of a man in a beret smoking a cigarette in front of the Louvre, they likely don’t see themselves as being a good fit as a character in that world. To fill this gap, this curriculum unit will present the larger Francophone world as an interwoven part of French language and culture, rather than the short paragraph insets and footnotes we currently rely on.
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