The following blog was written by Mrs. Bree Stillings, a French Teacher at JCHS.
Language is not a college entrance requirement. It is a life entrance requirement.
- ACTFL Teacher of the Year Linda Egnatz.
The role of language learning is changing in North Carolina. There are state and national pushes to abandon the tradition grammar/translation model of learning a foreign language and embrace communication goals that are necessary for survival in the 21st Century Global Community:
- Communicate efficiently but not perfectly
- Understand cultures and communities of other language speakers
- Compare and make connections to our own culture and community
This month, I have been so excited about our new project with an exchange classroom in France. Mrs. Catherine Ville-Léger, who teaches in the Savoie region of France, and I have been collaborating together to plan a cross curriculum lesson with our students. Her students are also in an arts focused high school similar to Carson so it was only fitting that our classes exchanged an Art Project. We first started by establishing an email pen pal system where students exchanged personal profiles about their lives and interest. Then each school did a research project on "Mail Art" from the 1840s and 1940s and studied the work from French and American artist: Ray Johnson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Desnos, and André Breton. Then it was the students' turn to make their own "Mail Art" that would be mailed to our pen pals. Students decorated the outsides of envelops with clips of art that represented their life or that they just found pretty. Then we packed the insides of the envelops with "cultural artifacts" to send to our pen pals that would visually inform them about the lives that American teenagers live.
My students laughed about the "trash" that went into their envelopes but I had to remind them that the receipt from Starbucks or the ticket from "Little Women" or the tag cut off a new Vineyard Vines tee shirt was exactly the type of artifact that we wanted to share with someone from another culture. When you place all these artifacts together, you have a piece of art that symbolizes: American Teenager. Last week we mailed off our box for Twenty-Six Dollars. We also received the first three pieces of "mail art" from our French friends.
This type of project is exactly the type of learning that embraces the 21st Century learner and a new buzzword that you may hear in North Carolina in the upcoming years..."Global Education." Putting our grammar aside for a while, we are focusing on comparing our culture to a Francophone culture, collaborating with foreign students, and communicating across the ocean!
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