Teaching Diversity and Inclusion

Examples from a French-Speaking Classroom

E. Nicole Meyer, Eilene Hoft-March, E. Nicole Meyer, Eilene Hoft-March

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000414011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French-Speaking Classroom explores new and pioneering strategies for transforming current teaching practices into equitable, inclusive and immersive classrooms for all students. This cutting-edge volume dares to ask new questions, and shares innovative, concrete tools useful to a wide variety of classrooms and institutional contexts, far beyond any disciplinary borders.

This book aims to instill classroom approaches which allow every student to feel safe to share their truth and to reflect deeply about their own identity and challenges, discussing course design, assignments, technologies, activities, and strategies that target diversity and inclusion in the French classroom. Each chapter shares why and how to design an inclusive community of learners, including opportunities to promote interdisciplinary approaches and cross-disciplinary collaborations, exploring cultures and underrepresented perspectives, and distinguishing unconscious biases. The essays also provide theoretical and practical strategies adaptable to any reflective teacher desiring to create a welcoming, inclusive classroom that draws in students they might not otherwise attract.

This long overdue work will be ideal for both undergraduate and graduate students and administrators seeking fresh approaches to diversity in the classroom.

SECTION III

Embracing Cultures/Extending Contexts

11

Strategies for Teaching Diversity and Inclusion in Introductory Literature Courses

Dominique Licops

DOI: 10.4324/9781003126461-12

In this chapter, I share the principles of course design and teaching strategies that I developed for undergraduate introductory literature courses while participating in fora about diversity, equity, inequality, and inclusion in our classrooms. These principles and strategies are founded on a commitment to a student-centered pedagogy of active learning transposed from the foreign language classroom to the foreign literature classroom.¹ One of the central questions in these times of increasing violence and inequalities and heightened awareness of our global history of colonialism, racism, and hetero/sexism becomes: how can we harness this pedagogy to transform our classrooms into inclusive learning environments where diverse students explore questions of identity, difference, diversity, power, exclusion, and inclusion in French language literatures? How can we create a community where that exploration leads to self-reflection and better understanding of our positions in this complex world through the identities represented in the texts we study? One answer lies in developing a pedagogy grounded in intercultural competence and foreign literature pedagogy, and in selecting texts that model complex dynamics relating to diversity, exclusion, and inclusion.

In their model of Intercultural Teaching Competence (ITC), Nanda Dimitrov and Aisha Haque explain that “knowledge of the existence of cultural differences … and an awareness of the limits of [our] cultural knowledge” and “[t]he ability to analyse events, social phenomena, and motivation from multiple perspectives” are “fundamental [… to] intercultural competence” (442, 444; my emphasis). A pedagogy that centers on diversity and inclusion fosters awareness of our cultural blind spots and openness to diverse ways of knowing. A focus on marginalized characters and their intercultural journeys leads to defining intercultural learning in terms of an informed, evolving, respectful conversation among our own cultures and worldviews and those represented in the texts. As students analyze the dynamic of blindness and vision inherent in the characters’ navigation of several cultures and how this dynamic affects the characters’ personal development and their relationships with others, they learn to navigate diverse environments and how diversity shapes identity. Discussion of the characters’ learning of a new language and culture also reflects students’ learning of the language and literature, and by comparison, reveals to them their preconceptions and biases.

The ITC model provides a blueprint for inclusive teaching that “nurture[s] diversity” more effectively (437). Three sets of competencies are central to inclusive teaching: foundational competencies that “focus on an instructor’s own intercultural awareness and ability to model intercultural competencies for their students” (443), “facilitation competencies [that] encompass the instructional skills necessary to recognize learners’ needs, build community in the classroom, create shared academic expectations, as well as the ability to facilitate active learning with diverse audiences” (445), and curriculum design competencies that “include the ability to … create learning materials that transcend the limitations of monocultural disciplinary paradigms [and] scaffold student learning so students [can] master intercultural skills relevant to their discipline” (448).

Selection of a diverse corpus is key to providing opportunities to study diverse identities in various contexts.² Scaffolding texts with images, paratexts, interviews and designing sequences of varied activities and assignments helps students explore the complex relationships between history, culture, identities, biography, and genres. We explore how texts present the social production of identities and differences, how characters deal with social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, how they negotiate and critique social systems that exclude them, and in what conditions they imagine alternative models that value diversity and inclusiveness. Activities focusing on dis/identification with characters engage diverse students by validating their multiple positionalities vis-à-vis the characters. Students develop their intercultural and interpretive skills and build their cultural self-awareness as they go from analyzing the work of cultural critic in the texts to performing that role in the final project.

Integrating ITC competencies with foreign literature pedagogy makes teaching more inclusive. In fact, the rubrics of human learning that Elizabeth Bernhardt applies to literature teaching––time on task, appropriate feedback, prior knowledge, situated learning, task difficulty, multiple solutions, and release of control (201)––are also central in ITC. Combining the following features of both approaches is key to creating an inclusive learning community: designing classroom activities and assessment so students spend time practicing intercultural and interpretive skills, scaffolding and sequencing activities according to risk level and task difficulty, and giving students opportunities to “demonstrate learning in a variety of ways” for “real-life contexts” (Dimitrov and Haque, 448, 450). In addition, principles for effective group dynamics emphasize trust building, complementarity, and respectful collaboration to lead to production.

In Mme de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne [Letters from a Peruvian Woman], Zilia, the Peruvian princess who is abducted and brought to France, exemplifies the challenges of cross-cultural understanding. When her experiences contradict her culturally situated reason, she suspends her judgment, observes more, and asks questions. Zilia also reflects on her blind spots, e.g., her blindness regarding her fiancé, Aza (letter 38). She questions the limits of reason, since it cannot comfort a desperate soul, but remarks on the similarity of souls in contrast to the differences in Peruvian and French dress. Zilia refuses to marry the French aristocrat Déterville, offering him a friendship based on the exchange of knowledge and virtue, which she promises to take as a guide for judgment (letter 40). We analyze how Zilia engages with foreigners and the linguistic and cultural learning that is a condition and result of this engagement. We gather that rationality is insufficient, that intercultural relationships require an ethical and spiritual stance. Suspension of judgment and the recognition of a shared humanity enable a cross-cultural relationship based on reciprocity. In this sense, Zilia is an intercultural teacher who “model[s] and encourage[s] non-judgmental approaches to exploring … difference” (Dimitrov and Haque, 445). Graffigny’s model is an early variation of the “Describe-Analyze-Evaluate model, an intercultural training strategy used to model the skill of withholding judgment until one has had a chance to explore alternative explanations … of individuals’ behaviour” (445). We also reflect on the conditions of Zilia’s inclusion in Enlightenment society, since it depends on her moral and emotional strengths grounded in Peruvian culture and her means as a princess, which enable her to resist assimilation to the period’s gender norms.

This sequence of activities considers students’ diverse linguistic and interpretative skills and identities. We start with understanding Zilia’s journey by collectively reconstructing the narrative based on the illustrations of the 1752 edition. Pedagogical editions provide students the necessary cultural and literary knowledge to practice their interpretive and intercultural skills. Students work on the 2005 introduction in complementary and collaborative group work. With an understanding of the novel as love story and philosophical novel, and how these genres express gender and cultural differences in Enlightenment colonialism, students engage in close reading. Groups each outline a letter focusing on Zilia’s responses to cultural differences and analyze expressions of cultural analysis and comparisons. The assignment builds on the class’s discoveries: students 1) endorse Zilia’s stance as a cultural critic and imitate Graffigny’s style to write a letter where Zilia critiques an aspect of their home country; and 2) reflect on what they learned about the novel by endorsing an outsider perspective on their society. Students’ choice of the aspect they critique minimizes the risk of self-disclosure (Dimitrov and Haque, 447). This exercise values students’ diverse perspectives.

Claire de Duras’s Ourika is the first novel to present a Black heroine living in Europe, suffering from the alienation resulting from the interiorization of racism, sexism, and classism (Little xi). We study the mechanisms by which a society justifies its domination, e.g. by accusing the marginalized of transgressing the social order it presents as “natural.” We discuss how this racist trope persists today in the stereotyping of marginalized people. We explore Ourika’s limited agency, her ability to critique racism and inability to question the hetero/sexism and classism that limit her notion of happiness to an aristocratic marriage. Ourika’s pain at rejection by the society that raised her in its image contrasts with Zilia’s ability to define her relationship with the dominant culture. This contrast leads to discussing access to cultural resources and community and its impact on inclusion. Ourika only knows about Black people through the dominant dehumanizing portrayal, which compounds her solitude. We compare Zilia’s understanding of “nation” with Ourika’s experience of “race” and study the historicity of paradigms of individuality, community, race, and class.³ Students learn how exclusionary discourses and counter-discourses of inclusion evolve historically, while certain of their characteristics persist over time. Students then use these conceptual tools to reflect on their experiences.

After reading Ourika, students explore “various disciplinary approaches” to the novel by comparing editions. This task “matches the real world” (Dimitrov and Haque, 449–50; Bernhardt, 203–04), allowing diverse students to relate to the material. Each group studies an edition’s paratext and writes a description for a timeline of the novel’s iconographic history. Students decide which edition they would buy based on these blurbs. We discuss the editors’ agendas and politics by analyzing the paratexts, focusing on the representation of Ourika and Black women in the texts’ iconography.⁴ This activity familiarizes students with multiple perspectives and the editor’s role as a cultural critic whose presentation of the text frames the reading. Students discuss their positionality in relation to the editions based on understanding the editors’ positionality as mediators between text and readership.

While in the first novels we explore the representation of the “Other” by writers who are privileged as aristocrats yet marginalized as women, Maupassant’s Le Horla [The Horla] brings us into the psyche of the white man of privilege.⁵ A text where a privileged protagonist faces an inexplicable, foreign phenomenon counterbalances the previous readings’ focus on outsiders navigating a dominant culture. The contrast strengthens student understanding of the intersectionality of identities and the impact of power in relation to difference. Moreover, the fantastic genre dramatizes the confrontation of two methodologies “we use to make sense of the world” (Dimitrov and Haque, 444), as protagonist and reader decide between the scientific or the supernatural explanation. We discuss 19th-century positivism, its definition of European Man as rational being, and its association of irrationality with the “Other.” The first-person journal where the protagonist grapples with his unfamiliar experiences provides a counter/model of how to approach difference. It also illustrates Sidonie Smith’s and Julia Watson’s point about white male subjectivity:

Where Western eyes see Man as a unique individual rather than a member of a collectivity, of race or nation [or class], of sex or sexual preference, Western eyes see the colonized [or the Other] as an amorphous, generalized collectivity.

(xvii; my additions)

Indeed, the protagonist defines himself in relation to his property and servants’ obedience, but cannot see them as individuals, nor as fellow sufferers, instead forgetting them in the fire meant to kill the Horla.

Students write an analytical essay on Ourika or Le Horla. Previous exercises of close reading and analyzing various editions, as well as the creative-reflexive assignment, have familiarized them with the work of literary and intercultural analysis and interpretation. Peer-reviewing essay outlines based on a rubric further builds on this scaffolded and sequenced approach to learning literary and intercultural interpretation to create shared academic expectations, since peer activities allow diverse learners “to learn from each other and share the … cultural [and linguistic] knowledge they bring to the classroom” (Dimitrov and Haque, 447; my addition).

After these novels representing “the Other” from a European perspective, we turn to texts written after decolonization by those perceived in the Western tradition as “Other” because it is essential to “incorporate content … that represent[s] diverse perspectives” and “validates cultural differences” (Dimitrov and Haque, 449). Including diverse voices opens up a space where students can identify the materials with their living conditions and reflect on the mechanism of dis/identification. The classroom thereby becomes relevant to our social environment, contributing to solve a perceived disconnect between academic culture and students’ experiences.⁶

An interview of the Beur writer, sociologist, and politician and the fi...