Making your Rose(s) Important while Teaching Remotely

In a famous exchange between the prince and the rose in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le petit prince (1943), the fox explains to the prince: "C'est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante" (ch. 21). Teachers may readily identify with the extra time needed to adjust to online learning, as well as the challenges of making each student feel special while learning to communicate in French, especially given the reality of the vast fields of roses that require tending. Here I would like to share a few ideas for encouraging talents to bloom, even if across a screen, and for highlighting the human dimension at the heart of learning a foreign language.

I was teaching several face-to-face classes at various levels, from a beginning French class to a course on French Women and Literature, when we were forced to move online during the pandemic. Care of the whole person, one of our core values, may at times be facilitated by presence in the same physical space. However, I knew from previous online experience that it is possible to get to know and care for others even in an asynchronous online environment. Furthermore, for two language courses focused on communication, I was already using an ebook with accompanying online activities (MindTap), and students in my literature course by that time were accustomed to submitting weekly posts for discussion in Canvas, our course management system. Since I opted for synchronous online classes following our campus closure, I chose Zoom as our platform for distance education, and adapted materials and ways to accomplish objectives, which I will outline here.

In elementary French, the constraints of the gallery view and student faces in "boxes" in Zoom became a challenge that students embraced with thinking "out of the box" when role playing, such as acting as if they were passing a cup of tea across the squares when imagining themselves in a restaurant. The transition for many of our residential students back to living with family members also seemed to augment access to costumes for role playing. While I had seen full chef outfits donned before, the number of extravagant hats increased. One student managed to take on two roles, which she accomplished with an apron and standing while in the role of waitress, so that we only saw her apron, hands and notepad while taking an order, but her face when seated and speaking to a friend across the table.

Likewise, while we continued at this level with topics such as food and restaurants, because of orders to stay at home during the pandemic, in order to keep communication as authentic as possible, conversational practice focused more on cooking at home and take-out rather than, for instance, dining at restaurants, sports, or roommates.

Our students are also required to practice informal conversation in French with peer tutors weekly in our Learning Center, and while geared toward spontaneous interchanges, I give guiding questions to tutors as a point de depart, which were likewise modified. Tutoring continued with an online system through the end of the semester, with student workers who had traveled home, including to Switzerland. Students may sign up for tutoring occasionally in groups, especially when preparing for a project, but most receive individualized help with pronunciation and fluency. Our senior capstone students in French, who give a public presentation on a topic they have researched, are likewise required to practice beforehand with a tutor as well as the instructor, and the occasional obstacles to hearing online, which may in turn evoke more intense coaching, may also present a silver lining, in that one is obliged to learn to speak that much more clearly and correctly in order to be understood.

In my Advanced Composition and Conversation course, writing with peer review and drafts continued with few differences, though I used the "review" function in Word with drafts, rather than coding by hand, with the final version uploaded in Canvas for comments and evaluation. The main adjustment made in this class was in the way students...