Implementation Plan
Using NEH Institute Resources

After having had the outstanding opportunity to attend this invaluably rich and rewarding NEH Institute the question we are asked to answer is, “How will we use the extensive resources introduced to us when we return to our classrooms?”

The answer will vary, of course, according to the discipline in which we are involved. I am a teacher of foreign language (world language), French, to be specific, in an excellent small rural school in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The large majority of our students are of French-Canadian ancestry and have been exposed to both French and English throughout their lives. Though many of them do not speak French themselves, they have parents and grandparents who do speak French and thus the idea of speaking, even being fluent in two languages, is not foreign to them.

When our school board decided to begin the teaching of French in the Middle School a few years ago, in addition to the high school French program, I was asked to create and implement the program.

We now find ourselves truly in a time when we all live in a global community and thus both we, as teachers, and our students need to begin to become citizens of this global community. Learning a foreign language has traditionally opened the door to the world for students – has been the discipline in which students learned in a very real way that there are indeed other ways of living, thinking, acting, and believing which are also valid and to be respected – other languages, cultures and religions. We are reminded that the global community exists daily and that reminder exists in the very words we have chosen to use. We no longer speak of learning foreign languages – rather of “world languages”.

As “westerners” we have long had “the western canon” of knowledge which, if one knew, made one an “educated person”. That has changed radically in recent years. John S. Major, co-author of the newest edition of Clifton Fadiman’s popular The Lifetime Reading Plan, (published in 1997) states in his preface that “As recently as a decade ago it was reasonable to construct a program of guided reading that included only works in the Western tradition, while acknowledging that a time might come when a shrinking world, and improvements in various communications media, would make familiarity with all of the world’s literary traditions a requirement for the well-educated and well-read person. That time has come sooner than one might have expected (italics mine). For an American in the last decade of the twentieth century, the ‘global village’ is a reality…” And thus The Lifetime Reading Plan now includes non-western writers.”

It has long been true that we have known virtually nothing, or very little, about the non-western world. With the knowledge I have gained from this Institute I have a wonderful possibility to share a part of this world with my students while teaching them French.

As my vehicle for opening the possibility of learning more of the non-western world I have chosen for the students to learn about the first western woman to enter Lhasa in Tibet, the famous French Tibetan scholar and explorer, Alexandra David-Neel and to discover Hergé’s Tintin, the francophone world’s intrepid young and idealistic explorer, beloved by generations of young people all over the world – the Tintin books having been translated into forty languages. Thus the students will have the example of a “real-life” (native speaker of French) person who “dreamed and dared” as well as the pleasure of experiencing an authentic French text, all while exploring new areas of the world and thus whole new cultures. Through the various links I will show the implementation of the program and how I will use some of the extensive resources acquired in this Institute in my classroom.

Goals: