The Educator’s Guide to Non-binary French: Queering the French-Language Curriculum

Hosted by the Humanities Center and featuring graduate fellow, Elsie Campbell.

Prescriptive tradition dictates that French adhere to a strict binary gender system: masculine, and feminine. That’s how French is often taught: all nouns are gendered along this binary, and student-facing materials tend only to center white cis-hetero-male-Catholic perspectives. Campbell’s project addresses a lack of materials and training, specifically at the intermediate and advanced levels, on how to incorporate LGBTQIAP+ perspectives into the French-language classroom. A mixture of teaching portfolio, queer and trans theory, pedagogy, and personal reflection, their project—like all queer research—is deeply personal and political. At a time when trans folx, and particularly trans folx of color, are being dehumanized and killed, they offer one small but meaningful way we can show up for our students and our community.

Respondents include Ever Osorio Ruiz from English + Dawn E. McCormick, Department of Linguistics, Teaching Professor, TESOL Certificate Advisor, English Language Institute, Director, University of Pittsburgh. This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer. Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two prior to the event.