Espace: A French Writing Center
Alison Levine, French
2008 TTI Fellow
This project is aimed at revitalizing French 331, our first serious writing course and a gateway to the French major. I would like to make this course one of the most memorable, by encouraging each person to find his or her individual voice and to take pleasure in writing in French. Writing in a foreign language can be a delightful opportunity to explore modes of expression that are not available to the writer in his or her native language. It can provide an opening towards a kind of freedom, buoyancy, and experimental spirit. It is this spirit I would like our students to take with them into the major and beyond.
I would like to take advantage of available technologies to cultivate this attitude, on the part of the students and the instructors. For the students, I aim to develop an online class environment that will encourage them to explore their own imagination and poetic expression through creative writing assignments that push the limits of what writing is. For the instructors, my goal is to bring a collegial and collaborative energy to the different sections of the course, by creating resources that all can use while preserving the individual creativity of each instructor.
I plan to develop tools for facilitating student writing in innovative online formats (such as social networking in French, self-created online video content in French, blogs, and podcast creation), grammar aids that will replace traditional grammar practice, and a collaborative resource site for instructors. In the long term, the site will become a comprehensive writing center that will serve all of our upper-level courses and that will make the UVA French Writing Center the reference site that French professors everywhere can use in their own teaching.