France

This course develops linguistic skills to increase cultural competences for a more comprehensive understanding of the French way of life. It studies the main media of information and their credentials, the organization of information in a newspaper, the press review, and the press design. The course includes a visit to the printing house of the newspaper Sud Ouest.

The course provides an introduction to comparative public policy analysis used in political science and administrative studies. It develops theoretical and methodological skills for students interested in public policy analysis. The course provides the necessary tools for understanding and conducting in-depth research on a variety of political issues. Each class is divided into two parts. The first part of the lecture deals with the main concepts in public policy analysis. The second part applies those concepts to a specific policy related to urban issues through a presentation by the students followed by either a group work or a debate in class. Learning outcomes include understanding and criticizing comparative analytical frameworks; investigating policy processes, outputs, and outcomes across various policy areas; conducting their own research on a specific policy domain following a comparative perspective. The course is structured so that the learning experience in class sessions is cumulative. Students are expected to read all assigned readings, regularly attend, and contribute to the class, and develop their own comparative analysis of one policy in the United States or Canada and in a European country.

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.