Rethinking the French Classroom: New Approaches to Teaching Contemporary French and Francophone Women

This volume investigates how teaching practices can address the changing status of literature in the French classroom. Focusing on how women writing in French are changing the face of French Studies, opening the canon to not only new approaches to gender but to genre, expanding interdisciplinary studies and aiding scholars to rethink the teaching of literature, each chapter provides concrete strategies useful to a wide variety of classrooms and institutional contexts. Essays address how to bring French Studies and women’s and gender studies into the twenty-first century through intersections of autobiography, gender issues and technology; ways to introduce beginning and intermediate students to the rich diversity of women writing in French; strategies for teaching postcolonial writing and literary theory; and interdisciplinary approaches to expand our student audiences in the United States, Canada, or abroad. In short, revisiting how we teach, why we teach, and what we teach through the prism of women’s texts and lives while raising issues that affect cisgender women of the Hexagon, queer and other-gendered women, immigrants and residents of the postcolony attracts more openly diverse students. Whether new to the profession or seasoned educators, faculty will find new ideas to invigorate and diversify their pedagogical approaches.

E. Nicole Meyer (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of French and Women’s and Gender Studies at Augusta University, USA. She publishes on a wide array of topics including contemporary French and Francophone women’s autobiography, Flaubert, and French for specific purposes. Her current book project is Fractured Families in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Autobiographies.

Joyce Johnston (Ph.D. Indiana University-Bloomington) is Professor of French and Director of the Division of Multidisciplinary Programs at Stephen F. Austin State University, USA. She has received multiple teaching awards including Stephen F. Austin State University’s Teaching Excellence Award. She is the author of Women Dramatists, Humor, and the French Stage: 1802–1855.