Creative Approaches to Teaching French and Francophone Culture Remotely

Abstract

Contemporary textbooks reflect these guidelines by including lessons which focus not only on the home country of the language (French/France;Spanish/Spain;Chinese/China) but also on the multiple areas of the world where this language is the common unifying factor. Pace currently uses the Learning Management System 'Blackboard' which provides numerous platforms that allow creative presentation formats for the instructor, as well as different modes of interaction between and among the students and the instructor. The reading/viewing list for this course as taught in Fall 2019 was as follows: [End Page 40] Films: Claude Ossaro and Emmanuel Benbihy: Paris, I Love You (Paris, je t'aime) Anne Fontaine: Coco Before Chanel (Coco avant Chanel) Tom Hooper: Les Miserables Laurent Cantet: The Class (Entre les murs) Jean-Pierre Jeunet: Amelie (Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain) Nora Ephron: Julie and Julia Fiction: Emile Zola: The Ladies' Paradise (Au bonheur des dames) Larry Collins: Is Paris Burning? Faces Places (Visages villages) The learning objectives for both courses are the same: A. Students will appreciate and understand aspects of French and/or Francophone culture that differ from their own;B. Students will develop an appreciation for the role cinema plays in France and/or Francophone countries, and appreciate it as an art form rather than simply entertainment;C. Students will use multimedia sources to research information relating to films or literature and use this information to write analytical essays;D. Students will view films or read literary texts in the historical or sociological context in which they were produced as evidence of a specific society's views of the world.