Abstract
As a part of a long historical arc, educators are increasingly recognizing the critical impetus to engage with gender in expansive ways. Despite a proliferation of general resources, a paucity of training and materials for French language educators persists. This chapter builds upon broad starter-kit approaches to address continued challenges in applying trans knowledges to the everyday by guiding readers through a series of concrete pedagogical choices that span a semester-long, intermediate-level course, beginning with the syllabus and continuing on through myriad moments where gender is or can be made relevant to teaching, learning, and using French.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this chapter trans is used in its broadest possible sense to denote people who flout cisnormative ways of thinking and being in the world, including but not limited to people who use trans (either in connection with a grammar of transition or as in the Latin prefix meaning across, beyond, or on the other side of) or culturally specific terms (e.g., two-spirit) as well as those who may or may not self-situate under trans as an umbrella term (e.g., nonbinary people) or in a trans/cis dichotomy. For more on the limits and challenges of existing terminology, see Knisely (2020b, 2021).
- 2.
This includes any relationship an individual may have to gender, including the absence of having any particular gender, being neutrally gendered, having an unknown or undefinable gender, and/or not caring about gender, among infinite other possibilities.
- 3.
Herein reading and texts include all possible modalities, not only written language.
- 4.
- 5.
All translations and glosses in this chapter are the author’s.
- 6.
- 7.
Pronoun sharing should never be obligatory for anyone, instructors included.
- 8.
See Knisely (2022b) on the ways that pronouns gesture toward, but are not inherently indicative of gender. This de-coupling reminds us that we know very little about the genders of the people in our classrooms and that we are, nonetheless, able to unscript gender in our classrooms. See also Nicolazzo (2019).
- 9.
- 10.
For example, I often take a jigsaw-inspired approach to homework, wherein students choose one of various multimodal texts. In the following class, students are placed in groups with those who engaged with the same material to refine their understanding. Then, students are re-grouped with others who have engaged with different material to collaboratively negotiate shared understandings about the collection of texts via guiding questions.
- 11.
This entails gender, race, class, national origin, and a myriad of other identity fractals. On intersectionality in applied linguistics, see Paiz and Coda (2021).
- 12.
We regularly engage in collaborative syllabus revision throughout the semester as a part of our shared ownership of the course.
- 13.
Orally: “Avec une autre personne” [With someone else].
- 14.
Orally: “Avec quelqu’un de nouveau” [With someone new].
- 15.
For assignment, course content, and other ideas, see Knisely (2022a, b). For sample handouts, see krisknisely.com
- 16.
Herein singular they is used as a gloss for iel. This may obfuscate important differences between these terms (see Knisely 2020a).
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Knisely, K.A. (2022). Teaching Trans Knowledges: Situating Expansive Possibilities in an Intermediate French Course. In: Bouamer, S., Bourdeau, L. (eds) Diversity and Decolonization in French Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95357-7_11
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