A moment of wonder in February 2016 during a Year 7 French class in a Catholic secondary school in Metropolitan Melbourne. “Bonjour” was the greeting we used when crossing the “magic line” that separates the French classroom from the corridor. Thus, the French class started with students trying out greetings in French.
Why learn French in Australia ?
I could hear “Bonjour, comment ça va ?”
These were the new sounds and new utterances of a new language: a second language, or even a third, for some in the class. We began to discuss languages: the language used at home, the role and place of second languages and the “valid” reasons to learn French as presented on the France Diplomacy Website. We learnt that French is spoken on all five continents, that there are 275 million French speakers and an expected number of 550 million by 2050, mostly in African countries and in the country from which I came, Mauritius. Lastly, we talked about the role and place of French in the school curriculum within the Australian context of education and how French is presented as a language of diplomacy and for travelling, of culture and elegance, of fashion and goods of luxury, movies, music and gastronomy.
The conversations bubbled along until Gisele (pseudonym), a new Year 7 student, asked: “Why do I need to learn French?” We gave more reasons but no explanation seemed reasonable enough to silence her doubts.
Central to the question that had been asked was the “I” that highlighted the subjectivity and agency of the student and questioned the visible signs of the general purpose — the reasons to learn a second language and French in particular. Despite repeated attempts to rephrase the reasons to learn French, Gisele kept asking the same question.
If to Gisele, there seemed to be no justifiable, valid, or verifiable reason why she had to learn French in Australia, her comment had, however, brought a pause and a need to reflect on the ordinary that had suddenly met the extraordinary in a French classroom. Indeed, experiencing that question in a Year 7 French class suddenly created a sense of wonder for me, a French-speaking teacher who had migrated to Australia a few years before. In a jeu de miroir, I chose to look at the phenomenon of teaching French as part of the second language curriculum in Victoria and to understand what it means to teach French in Victoria, Australia. For six years while working as a secondary school teacher, I explored the meaning of teaching French in Victoria, Australia as part of the Ph.D Program on a part-time basis at Monash University.
Teaching French in Victoria, Australia
Voices of Teachers. Teaching French in Victoria. To explore what it means to teach French in Victoria, Australia, the Ph. D research at Monash University (2024) uncovered the dimensions of the everyday pedagogy of the eight participants from different educational sectors in Victoria, Australia and who were at different stages of their careers.
The phenomenon thus tapped into the lived experience of the participants to uncover their personal and professional sides inside the classroom and outside in the social and cultural, material and technological world, the dynamic, discursive intentions of their teaching in their relations to their school context and beyond. It eventually provides a statement about the complexity of teaching French inside the classroom and outside in the social and cultural, material and technological world and shows the transformational and transformative teacher identities of the participants across time and space.
The latter indeed described what they do and feel, the struggles they meet, the resistance they offer, and the values they believe in and share with others. They revealed a dynamic intentional identity through the passion the French teachers experience, the perception the latter develop of themselves and of their subject, the creative responsive strategies used within new sites of teaching when teaching online and the possible prospects of teaching French.
The teacher’s identity unveiled
In the words of the participants, uncertainty has become le maître-mot in that they could not always fully gauge the nature of the necessary changes needed to teach French now and into the future. They were, however, confident that teaching French means adapting, changing, risk-taking, finding solutions and ideas daily, trying novel teaching strategies, developing creative thinking, and flexible teaching skills. Hence, this study demonstrates how important it is to listen to teachers’ voices in the current challenging and disruptive times for the profession of teaching after the lifting of Covid restrictions and with new issues on the horizon, such as AI.
Consequently, while teaching French the participants proved that a French teacher is called to be a leader. For the participants, leadership is practiced and exercised daily in their classroom while remaining mindfully centred on their French students’ unique needs and the caring relationships they build with them through their pedagogical thoughtfulness and tact. Hence, they explained, that leadership is the need for teachers to create favourable conditions for students despite the numerous demands of a system too often lacking in vision and purpose. Leadership is not, according to them, to be equated to a form of personal agency or a constant need for self-determination but is accomplished through quotidian practice within the community of teachers at school and beyond. It is, furthermore, exercised with mindfulness in the ordinary times as well as the disruptive times when faced with challenges.
Based on their comments, the project eventually moved to reclaim the term, “leader teacher” used in Australian standards for teachers (AISTL), and to change it into that of “teacher leader” by focussing principally on the teachers’ identity and not on the positions of responsibility they might hold or not. The implications of such findings pointed directly to the need to include Teacher Identity in Language Teacher Education to allow teachers to establish the foundations of their personal understanding of a philosophy of education suited to their needs and that of their students.
Using van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenology as a philosophical method thus provided an opportunity to openly listen and let things speak and be just as they are. Through their voices, the participants uncovered a form of leadership that links the heart, the mind and the act of what is it like to teach French, and more broadly a second language.
Conversations
The research project aims henceforth at creating a broader forum for conversations about the lived experience of language teachers as well as the stakeholders in the education sector work together to improve and implement bridges between policy, theory and practice in Australia and elsewhere.
Aujourd’hui que la thèse est terminée, les nombreuses questions soulevées continuent à m’interpeller, que ce soit dans mon vécu de prof de français à Melbourne ou à travers les conversations qui se tissent parfois de façon inattendue autour de la thèse ou tout simplement autour de l’enseignement et de l’enseignant.e. Ainsi, tandis que nous dégustions un délicieux poisson grillé, Pravina Nallatamby et moi avons repris notre conversation jamais interrompue depuis plus de dix ans sur les réseaux sociaux mais qui cette fois nous avaient conduites toutes les deux dans notre ile natale. Merci Pravina, d’avoir suggéré l’idée de cette présentation dans les colonnes de Forum afin de lancer une conversation avec d’autres acteurs du monde de l’enseignement.
