Cultural Reading of movies in an advanced culture class in French

This page authored by Christine Lac, Carleton College, Department of French and Francophone Studies
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This material was developed as part of the Carleton Teaching Activity Collection and is replicated on a number of sites as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service Project

Summary

Students choose one of the cultural topics they analyzed in class after viewing three current films, L'Esquive (Games of Love and Chance by Abdel Kechiche, 2003), Le Goût des autres(The Taste of Others by Agnès Jaoui, 2000), et Le jour de la jupe (Skirt Day at School by Jean-Paul Lilienfeld, 2009). Possible broad areas of study include education, art, social integration, immigration, socio-economic status, communication, spatial boundaries, language variation, and social networks, so the students must first define what very precisely circumscribed phenomenon they will study as they research its statistical significance on a cultural level. By integrating socio-economic data analysis and the study of the movie, students evaluate the worth of the fiction as a faithful or distorted mirror of its society.


Learning Goals

In this first of three essays in a course on French culture, students learn to manipulate statistics from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies-France, better known as INSEE, to contextualize what they are viewing or reading within the society that produced it.
This short film analysis, combined with statistical data, show them how to decide if they need to understand the movie as a universal, culturally bound, or even quirkily individualistic object.

Context for Use

I created this assignment for an advanced culture course at the 200 level. Usually language proficiency levels are mixed in such courses, as students can register right after completing their language requirement, but also after several terms of advanced classes or a term abroad. Class size is capped at 25, and the assignment would be adjusted according to how many students enroll and their overall proficiency. Student may need more individual help navigating the INSEE data bases, since they may not master key words to elicit the information they would need in French. If most students needed this kind of help, the instructor could narrow down the topic and give more specific links or graphs to work with. I ended up giving a few of those for this first assignment, and for the following one, while providing more ad hoc help for the third longer more individualized research paper.
The first essay concludes a three-week introductory unit, which presents the aforementioned themes as well as the tools to analyze them in an integrated manner; we use Google maps street level to look at various houses, and subsidized housing complexes presented in the movies in a geographical context, and pull out the INSEE charts to define the characters socio-economic status everyday in class. The students need to replicate that approach in their essay on their own topic.

Description and Teaching Materials

For this particular topic, we would need the three movies aforementioned, but any others would work very easily. A link to the INSEE page represents the main resource, but I pre-selected several documents that are freely downloadable from the site about education, immigration and housing among others to provide more help at the beginning. All links are provided to the French language pages,although these can be found in English as well.
Assignment hand-out in English (Microsoft Word 34kB Oct18 10)
List of films (Acrobat (PDF) 21kB Jun16 09)
INSEE Immigration (Acrobat (PDF) 1MB Jun16 09)
INSEE housing (Acrobat (PDF) 133kB Jun16 09)
INSEE Education (Acrobat (PDF) 105kB Jun16 09)

Teaching Notes and Tips

Providing selected pages from INSEE really helps students who may be intimidated by numbers and by searches in French. Meeting individually with students to help theme define their topics worked best, though. Students often need guidance in order to evaluate whether an element represents a part of French culture or a global trend; steering them towards the OCDE pages as well as the US census bureau pages places some of these trends in context.

Assessment

I use a rubric for all essays that I adapted for this assignment. Language accounts for 40% divided in 4 categories (grammar, vocabulary, style, organization) and argument/thesis 30% and data/examples 30%. I graded according to how well the student had evaluated the movie as a social construct, reflective and creative of its context, according to the data provided.

References and Resources