Crecia C. Swaim
I teach French at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School, a New Haven middle school. It is a wonderful, creative environment in which students truly learn, grow, and thrive, utilizing and expanding on their strengths as they stretch and strengthen all their capabilities. I find that at times this enriching environment can be unwittingly compromised by the necessity to fulfill all of the city- and state- mandated testing requirements, which now include pre-testing, pilot-testing, practice-testing, and post-testing. Although I understand the intentions behind the testing, I fear that it may in fact do our students more of a disservice than a service. I believe that over-testing disrupts the consistency of the school day too often, and that it also obscures the potential enjoyment factor of learning.
For instance, as an adult, I often "demonstrate a critical stance," (a skill assessed by the Connecticut Mastery Test, or CMT); I just prefer to call it articulating my beliefs, or expressing my opinion. Although our students certainly
have
opinions, they often have trouble articulating and supporting them. As a teacher, I believe it is my duty to find a way to show my students that this skill has a healthy life above and beyond tests, and to treat them to an example of what that life might look and feel like.
The National Standards of Foreign Language Learning urge educators to promote what they call the 5Cs: Cultures, Connections (among disciplines), Comparisons (between cultures), Communication, and Communities. I have designed this unit to reflect these goals at the same time as it reinforces English language thinking and writing skills. (1) The reading comprehension strands New Haven students struggled most with on the CMT in recent years are
Forming an Initial Understanding
and
Demonstrating a Critical Stance
. As a French teacher I act as a support to the test preparation process; in that role I am afforded the opportunity to choose alternate sources for analysis that bring to life the sights and sounds of the Francophone world. It is my responsibility to be creative in choosing sources that meet my students' needs, in terms of cultural content-learning, while guiding analysis that will further develop the critical thinking and writing skills they very much need to develop in order to be successful students, learners, and thinkers. Film is a familiar mechanism for reflecting and disseminating culture, imparting and exploring cultural values and norms in an aesthetically rich way. It provides multiple opportunities for students to craft meaning, and as such, film is an ideal bridge between the fascination of the unknown and the requirements of state and federal learning goals.
