1st Edition
Rethinking the French Classroom New Approaches to Teaching Contemporary French and Francophone Women
This volume investigates how teaching practices can address the changing status of literature in the French classroom. Focusing on how women writing in French are changing the face of French Studies, opening the canon to not only new approaches to gender but to genre, expanding interdisciplinary studies and aiding scholars to rethink the teaching of literature, each chapter provides concrete strategies useful to a wide variety of classrooms and institutional contexts. Essays address how to bring French Studies and women’s and gender studies into the twenty-first century through intersections of autobiography, gender issues and technology; ways to introduce beginning and intermediate students to the rich diversity of women writing in French; strategies for teaching postcolonial writing and literary theory; and interdisciplinary approaches to expand our student audiences in the United States, Canada, or abroad. In short, revisiting how we teach, why we teach, and what we teach through the prism of women’s texts and lives while raising issues that affect cisgender women of the Hexagon, queer and other-gendered women, immigrants and residents of the postcolony attracts more openly diverse students. Whether new to the profession or seasoned educators, faculty will find new ideas to invigorate and diversify their pedagogical approaches.
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction
E. NICOLE MEYER AND JOYCE JOHNSTON
PART I Exploring Identities/Exploring the Self: French Literature and Women’s Studies in the Twenty-First Century
1 Why Teach (French) (Women’s) Literature?
EILENE HOFT-MARCH
2 Fractured Families: Program Growth through Innovative Teaching of French and Francophone Women's Autobiographies
E. NICOLE MEYER
3 Worldwide Women Writers and the Web: Diversity and Digital Pedagogy
ALISON RICE
4 "Representing the Self": Contemporary French Lit meets the Twenty-First-Century Student
DAWN M. CORNELIO
PART II New Beginnings, New Horizons: Women Writers in Beginning and Intermediate French Classes
5 Teaching French and Francophone Women Authors Online
SAGE GOELLNER
6 Integrating Women’s Voices and Contemporary Cultural Materials through E-journaling
ELIZABETH BERGLUND HALL
7 Linking Beginning and Advanced Language Learners through Images of Women
JOYCE JOHNSTON
8 Building Bridges from Language to Civilization through Gisèle Pineau’s Un Papillon dans la cité
NATALIE EDWARDS AND CHRISTOPHER HOGARTH
PART III Colonial and Postcolonial French Women Writers: Teaching Diversity on Shifting Ground
9 Peoples, Authors, Protagonists: Teaching Francophone Women Authors through Gender Identity Themes
LAURENCE M. PORTER
10 Incorporating Oceanian Women Writers into the Francophone Literature Classroom
JULIA L. FRENGS
11 Making the Case for French Studies: Strategies for Teaching Gendered Multiculturalism in Contemporary French Literature
REBECCA E. LÉAL
12 Teaching Algeria through the Lens of Feminism
FLORINA MATU
13 Teaching Hélé Béji, Post-Colonialism, and the Arab Spring: Perspectives from Baudrillard, McClintock, Giroux
ERIC TOUYA DE MARENNE
PART IV Interdisciplinary Approaches to French Studies
14 Breaking Down Jail and Cross-Divisional Walls: Teaching Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialist Writers in the 21st Century French & Criminal Justice Classroom
ARACELI HERNÁNDEZ-LAROCHE
15 Francophone Women Writers outside the French Classroom: An Integrated Approach to Exploring Women’s Voices
SHIRA WEIDENBAUM
16 Pushing Boundaries: A Feminist Interdisciplinary Approach to Team-Teaching French and American Women's Lives during World War II
COURTNEY SULLIVAN AND KERRY WYNN
17 Women Novelists and the Music of Paris
ARLINE CRAVENS
18 Introducing or Expanding Queer Content in the Contemporary Francophone Classroom
CJ GOMOLKA
Index
Biography
E. Nicole Meyer (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of French and Women’s and Gender Studies at Augusta University, USA. She publishes on a wide array of topics including contemporary French and Francophone women’s autobiography, Flaubert, and French for specific purposes. Her current book project is Fractured Families in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Autobiographies.
Joyce Johnston (Ph.D. Indiana University-Bloomington) is Professor of French and Director of the Division of Multidisciplinary Programs at Stephen F. Austin State University, USA. She has received multiple teaching awards including Stephen F. Austin State University’s Teaching Excellence Award. She is the author of Women Dramatists, Humor, and the French Stage: 1802–1855.
"In the face of a backlash against multiculturalism, this volume offers professors concrete strategies for teaching difference and diversity at all levels of the French classroom, as well as tools to promote their programs on campus."
Colette Trout, Ursinus College (emerita)
