France

This course, the third in our intensive summer language program sequences, with its contiguous course FR34A, is roughly equivalent to the third and fourth quarters of French language instruction on students' home campuses. FR34A and FR34B provide students who have a working knowledge of the basic skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing in French the opportunity to expand and improve these skills with an emphasis on the introduction of new, intermediate-level, forms of grammar and communicative skills within a French-immersion context. Placement in this course is determined by students' previous experience and the results of a language assessment taken prior to arrival. Successful completion of this course combined with FR34B targets the low-Intermediate French level. Course material includes: MOTIFS: AN INRODUCTION TO FRENCH, Heinle K. Jansma, 5th Edition, 2011, and RÉSEAU: COMMUNICATION, INTEGRATION, INTERSECTIONS by J.M. Schultz and M.P. Tranvouez, Prentice Hall, 1st Edition, 2010. Through the FR34AB sequence course, students gain the ability to communicate in spoken and written French and develop a understanding of intermediate French grammar points as well as a working vocabulary including health and illness, vacation time, family structures, schooling and values of the French Republic, the distribution of household chores, environmental protection, cuisine, grocery shopping and eating habits, the workplace, café life, multiethnic society, youth culture, and the geography, music and cuisine of the francophone world. Following the 34AB course sequence, students should be able to engage in short conversations in French, using both simple and more complex sentences and vocabulary, with occasional use of past and future tenses as well as conditional and subjunctive moods, on familiar topics and express their basic everyday needs using the indicative, imperative, conditional and subjunctive moods, regular, irregular, and reflexive verbs, as well as use object and relative pronouns, articles, prepositions, possessive and demonstrative adjectives, interrogative expressions, and expressions of quantity. Through the FR34AB sequence, students reflect upon basic cultural differences as reflected in a variety of French and Francophone contexts, such as varying levels of familiarity/formality, etiquette, family structures, relations between men and woman, urban life, social-cultural representations of France, the professional world, the political world, etc., as well as in cultural products such as film, performances, news, and music Assignments include class participation, small group and pair work, role play, games, individual and group presentations, written exercises, grammar, dictation, presentations of cultural products such as songs, films, audio texts, a variety of short and simple texts on cultural perspectives, and writing activities.

Paris inscribes on every street corner a page of France's history. Its cobblestone streets record centuries of struggle, offering a narrative of this history. Writers, chroniclers, and later filmmakers have picked up these narratives and turned them into eternal works of art. The historian of today, retracing this past, has turned them into sites of memory. This course uses literary texts and films as well as historical texts to search for and reconstruct these sites of memory. From the French Revolution to the student revolt of May 1968, this course follows Parisians, exploring the ways in which cinematic representations and literary texts shape collective memory and are a particular historical/political representation of France. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach and compares and contrasts works of fiction with works of non-fiction, the written word with the visual representation, and includes site visits. Classes are broken up into specific themes each pertaining to a major event in the life of France.

Paris has long been recognized as a center for both revolutionary activism and innovative artistic production. This course explores the coming together of these two domains through diverse visual manifestations of social justice and advocacy produced and/or displayed in Paris from the Revolution to the present, including painting, sculpture, architecture, performance, installations, photography, video, posters, graffiti, and street art. Students explore the ways in which the urban landscape bears the scars of revolutionary destruction and serves as a showcase for politically engaged production, housed in its museums or visible to all on the streets. The instructional format consists of both lectures and group site visits throughout the city, to venues including public and private museums, which are studied both for their content, architecture, and their politics of display; galleries, artist collectives, and Parisian neighborhoods with outdoor art displays.

This course addresses how immigration has been built into the political and social dimensions of France from a socio-historical perspective. The course traces the history of immigration in France beginning with the industrial revolution until today. The French and European institutional context, as well as geopolitical and ideological upheavals, are viewed as the driving forces that brought immigration to the political and societal forefront.