I’ve passed the baton of the Global Studies course to a colleague for this quarter. However, my colleague asked me to substitute for her on two days, and it so happened that the material to be discussed on these days included the text I was the least proud of creating from the last two years of teaching this course.

This gave me the opportunity of reworking the text, which was a Global Studies version of the cultural reflection text for Chapter 11 (La France vu d’ailleurs) of Réseau 2.

As the French election results had recently been announced, I decided to discuss international perspectives on the results of this election. The adapted text, including the comprehension and discussion questions, can be found here.

In the Department of French and Italian at UC Santa Barbara, French 6 is the course that rounds out the end of the second-year French sequence, in which students complete a review of French grammar. The course emphasizes speaking, reading, and writing through study of French and Francophone history, politics, language policy, and culture within a global and larger European context.

In Spring 2015, I crafted and taught a preliminary version of this course, which I am further developing this quarter (Spring 2016). I adapted or created all of the 12 literature and culture sections for the course, which involved finding authentic texts that are suited both to the students’ reading level and to the lexical and syntactic material of the chapter; creating an introduction to the text, to its author, or to both; and developing activities suited for pre-reading, for comprehension assessment, and for interpretation and discussion.

While it has been a challenge to create authentic, approachable, and appropriate materials, developing this course has given me the freedom to find and implement materials that would more effectively address the interests of my students, many of whom are majoring in Global Studies or Political Science.

A sample text I adapted to use as the Literary Reflection for Chapter 10 (Le septième art ou le cinéma) of Réseau 2 can be found here.