Multiculturalism

Address of Multiculturalism in my classroom

The foreign language classroom provides an obvious venue for the address of multiculturalism because the focus of the class is to study a language and a culture that are different from those of the students. In my French classes, I found that the study of French and francophone culture permitted the students to learn about a society with ideas or practices that occasionally surprised them. This allowed all of the students – no matter what their cultural background – to experience how it feels to be an “other” or a minority in the society. They could constantly compare their own culture to the cultures that we studied to realize that their way of doing things was not always dominant and that they, too, could easily feel lost or excluded in a different society.

The common experience of the students as outside of the culture of study was generally an equalizing factor in the classroom. If anything, studying another culture could give an advantage to those students who were seen in other settings as cultural or racial minorities. The best example of this advantage was KL, an 11 th grade foreign exchange student from Germany who was in my French 2 class. In the middle of the semester, I was surprised to learn that KL was struggling to the point of failure in most of his classes, when I saw him as a steady, mature, and hard-working B+ student. Language differences and differences in the school culture were KL’s main difficulty in his classes. French class was equalizing for him because nobody in the class was fluent in French – he was expected to have language difficulty. Beyond this, he had the opportunity to be a sort of expert in our class because he had personal experience with European cultural norms. Other minority students had advantages in the French classroom as well. A Hispanic student in the French 1 class often took advantage of his English and Spanish fluencies to relate French vocabulary or grammar to Spanish. When the French 2 students gave PowerPoint presentations about francophone regions or countries, the two black students in the class were excited and motivated to present about countries of their heritage ( Benin and Martinique). Because of the equalizing experience of studying another culture, the French curriculum can succeed for all students and would not need drastic adaptations for changes in the racial, ethnic, or gender composition of the class.

The study of the French language in particular leads to a multicultural curriculum because French is spoken in so many diverse places throughout the world. The “Allez, viens!” series of textbooks used in my classes addresses francophone diversity by thematically arranging each chapter or group of chapters by region. During the time I taught them, the French 1 students had chapters about Québec and Paris, while the French 2 students studied chapters about Martinique and Touraine (a province of France). The textbook materials also make a very obvious effort to include diversity in terms of the characters they present. For example, the main character in the Paris chapters and films was named Thuy and of Vietnamese descent. The French 1 students were always commenting on how book materials had so many characters in wheelchairs. The book also provided forums to compare American culture with the francophone cultures studied, as well as to compare the different francophone cultures with French culture. However, I did often wish that materials (or my classes) could address more facets of each individual culture. See below for a lesson plan that I adapted to address this issue.

Multicultural adjustment of a lesson plan

Here, I revised a lesson from my three-week lesson plan to emphasize multiculturalism and to remove cultural stereotypes. This lesson gives seventh grade French 1 students a cultural and historical introduction to the Canadian province of Québec.

For the first day of my three-week lesson plan, I planned to use the textbook’s guidelines to lead into some mini-research and presentation about Québec. In the “Allez, viens!” textbooks, each chapter has a theme location. The chapter openers about these locations operate using a geographic take on the “heroes and holidays” approach – the “landmarks” approach. A page introduces the location with pictures of landmarks or monuments, and then more information about the location may appear within the chapter.

To learn about Québec in a more multicultural fashion, I would still begin with a brief discussion of this chapter opener and the students’ comments about what they found interesting about this information. I would then have a discussion about the photos of Québec in “Rencontre Culturelle” on p. 111. The questions within the book and the note under “Savais-tu que…?” ask the students to consider the American and European influences on Québec that they can understand from looking at these photos. I feel that this is an important cultural aspect to consider and that this exercise helps to introduce a concept of multiculturalism within Québec; however, the book gives a rather simplified portrayal of a happy combination of cultures.

In my revised lesson, I would now put in the research/presentation part of the lesson. I would revise this aspect, leading off from the discussion of American and European influences on Québec. Some of the articles or passages that I would give the students to read would relate the combination (or the clash) of these cultures in more difficult and important issues, such as Québec separatism, language policy, and enforcing of French. I would also find articles on the influence of other ethnic groups that have influenced Québec – for sure the Native Americans of the region, and also any other groups (I would need to actually research this myself). This should give a more complete and less hoky view of cultural influences in Québec.