Nicola Work, OWLA Editor for Electronic Media
University of Dayton, Associate Professor of French

One of my goals for the near future is to encourage more higher education language faculty to be involved with OWLA. Why? To learn more about what is happening in K-12 language education in the state of Ohio, to exchange higher education program changes and enrollment strategies, and to collaborate with fellow Ohio language educators from different districts or institutions. This could be a useful step in bridging the gap between K-12 education and higher ed to make language teaching more cohesive. But, this is a project for another day.

In the meantime, I would like to share about a new course I created for our general education curriculum in order to get fuller classes and hopefully (fingers crossed) get some students interested in taking French. The course is called “Pop culture in the French-speaking world: Street art, comics, music and beyond”. This course is taught in English and in addition to fulfilling a general education requirement, it can count towards a Global French Studies major or minor, an International Studies major or minor, and as an intercultural requirement for Business School students. No world language skills are required and the course is open to all undergraduate students. 

The course focuses on five main topics: street art, graphic novels (bandes dessinées), fashion, food, and music. Instead of having a textbook with traditional scholarly readings, students use YouTube videos, websites, blogs, news articles, social media, and podcasts as primary sources for the course content to be more in line with the premise of pop culture being accessible to all. The course is an active learning experience and very student-centered. Throughout the semester, students create short 2-3 minute snapshots of different Francophone street artists, graphic novels, musicians / groups and one of their songs, regional dishes, and fashion designers to give a comprehensive overview of pop culture in the French-speaking world. Students also participate in group discussions, do research and create slides in class, make timelines, come up with definitions as well as draw diagrams as part of the in-class work. In order to add an experiential learning component to the course, students create their own street art based on inspirations from Francophone street artists, draw a cartoon or write original captions for an existing cartoon, and go out in the neighborhoods or while traveling to find local street art. The course culminates in a final research paper or final creative project to give students a choice. 

Why did I create this course? When I don’t have enough enrollment to teach such a course in French, I can bring Francophone culture to students who have not studied French and do not know much about the French-speaking world to  pique their interest and hopefully get them to take a French course in the future. At the very least, this course gives students a glimpse into other cultures, opens  their minds to new ways of thinking and seeing the world, and helps them on their road to becoming a global citizen. And, if I have students that would like to use their French language skills, they can submit any written assignments in French, and potentially communicate some of the time in French if enough French students are enrolled in the class. 

I don’t have any official data, but all students this semester seemed to have loved the course (I did, too!): They learned about other cultures, they became interested in one or more of the course topics, they made comparisons between their own culture and others, and expanded their own world view. At least one student decided to enroll in a first-semester French class after taking this class. Yay!

I could not have created this course the way it is without the inspiration I took from many presentations by and exchanges with world language educators from Ohio and all over the US. What a wonderful resource world language associations, language conferences and language workshops are!!!