As a language educator at Vanderbilt University, my classroom community is founded on three principles: intercultural competence, communicative language performance, and meaning-focused, content-driven instruction with an emphasis on student-centered activities.

My classroom is a safe space where students come to dissect the world through language. With this in mind, it is essential for me to acknowledge, at every language level, that France’s colonial past is the primary reason that French is spoken all over the world. By using intercultural communicative competence and critical pedagogy to explore difficult topics productively, I employ transformative learning where “a more nuanced and complex understanding of one’s own situatedness within cultural frameworks, and the analogous situation of others” encourages a positive shift in a student’s view of their own place in the world over time (Sosulski, 3).

Furthermore, I prize cultivating a community of learners who feel comfortable when they share unfamiliar words, forms and structures in a new language, that new is synonymous with excitement rather than intimidation. I continually strive to incorporate humour and empathy into my pedagogical strategy, two words I came to admire from my reading of the teaching manifesto ‘A Radical Hope’, because I too was once a bundle of nerves who dreaded the moment upon which I was called. I take from my personal experience as a second language learner and combine it with effective theory and practice in Second Language Acquisition to ensure that my students enjoy learning and become better at it. I accomplish this by incorporating well scaffolded authentic texts (those made by native speakers for native speakers) and task-based activities that focus on using language, not just accumulating knowledge of it.

Current and Past Courses (Vanderbilt University)

French 1101: Introduction to French in the World (first semester)
French 1102: Introduction to French in the World (second semester)
French 1103: Accelerated Introduction to French in the World
French 2203: Intermediate French Language and Cultures