Empowering French Drama and Dance Educators
By Tessa Lofthouse
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Visit the CODE website for dance and drama resource sin French:
code.on.ca
Teachers feel there are not adequate resources for units, different subject matters that need to be taught in French ( i.e., social sciences, math), and for using technology in French. Teachers might create their own resources but there are no official channels for sharing them. Some teachers resort to paying out of pocket for resources at “Teachers Pay Teachers”, described on its website as an “online marketplace where teachers buy and sell original education materials.”
Commissioner of Official Languages of Canada, p.9.
This summer, directed by the vibrant and relatively new French Sub-committee of the CODE Management Board, I embarked on a mission to manage the translation of 40 existing CODE resources. We were driven by the belief that language should never be a barrier to artistic discovery and that French educators deserve access to high quality Drama and Dance resources that are classroom ready.
This project has been my dream since joining the CODE Management Board. I grew up in a small town where the only French-speakers I encountered were my teachers, but I loved the language right away. My core subjects as a student in an English-language school were taught using great resources and a variety of instructional methods. Some of my favourite teachers taught history using process drama or taught English literature using readers’ theatre. I have been an immersion educator for 9 years and one of the biggest obstacles to good teaching in immersion is the time needed to find great resources already in French or to make existing resources ready for student use.
Finding existing French resources that fit with the Ontario curriculum is a unique challenge. With English as the global lingua franca (Mauranen & Vetchinnikova, 2021), the English-speaking world consists of seemingly endless perspectives to draw on. Many of the former French colonies are still using an education system modeled after the colonial French school systems (Salhi, 2002, p. 320). The educational culture of French-speaking regions often does not align with its English counterparts. In my experience, this seems to be the case most often with social justice education and resources to support it.
To make existing English resources ready for student use, I often interpret picture books in real time so that I can share them with students, adapt English versions of learning materials with white out and a photocopier, and so on. With CODE resources, it was always easier to adapt for students, as there is often less paper or physical text involved with drama and dance, and I know that these resources will often create spaces for exploring our shared humanity. However, I still imagine a teaching landscape where teachers do not have to do the double labour of finding great materials and resources, and then translating them for use with their students.
The French curriculum lists Intercultural Understanding and Competence as a substrand for every strand of the curriculum. One of the challenges with this as an educator is that the term “culture” has over 164 recognized definitions (Lussier, 2011) and these definitions are never neutral. The curriculum document uses a definition, and offers examples, that are dehistoricized and depoliticized. Sorrels (2023), a critical interculturalist, calls for educators to “account for the ways historical and current conditions and relations of power are layered and stitched together amid multiple pandemics and the crises of neoliberalism” (Sorrells, 2023, p. 238). In a traditional French-language program, the emphasis is so often on linguistic and intercultural proficiency that there is little attention paid to the ‘why’ of certain tasks; many of the predominant thinkers that have proposed action-oriented tasks as the approach for language-learning have identified dramatic learning as a way to develop proficiency. However, this engagement in Drama is involved in uncritical role-taking and tasks that sanitize cultural interactions as transactional (e.g., ordering a pizza). While this was not the only focus for our team, this thinking informed choices about some of the resources that we selected for translation which explore historical contexts and the role of students as political agents for social justice, such as Clowning for Change (class), Sowing Seeds (environmental sustainability), Re-imaging our Relationship to Space/Place/Land (decolonization).
photo: Sheena Robertson, Kick Start Arts
The project itself was a joy. The translators that were part of the team were wonderful. Their questions and insights around how to make the resources accessible for French teachers were reflexive and thoughtful. They were curious about how to navigate French gendered pronouns, and provided suggestions for improving the existing resources related to student identity and an anti-oppressive lens. I believe that translation is the act of rewriting something for the audience – including their cultural expectations, their needs, and their assumptions.
One of the most interesting parts of the project for me was attempting to develop a shared language for technical vocabulary in Drama and Dance. Teaching in immersion as an anglophone means constant research of appropriate terms. One of our translators was based out of Montreal and regularly teaches dance in French-speaking spaces, so her insights were invaluable. For Drama, I ran into the challenge that the approach used in French-speaking regions is often heavily theatrical compared to the Ontario Arts Curriculum, and the French-language Arts Curriculum in Ontario does not map directly onto the English-language version, so the glossary terms still lean heavily towards theatre in that document. I scoured the glossaries of other provinces, some of which were bilingual, and used translation tools, forums, etc. to try to find the best equivalents. For example, I could not initially find anything for “an acting beat or unit”. I first encountered this term as an undergraduate student in Drama in Education and because of its relationship to acting, I thought it might be relatively easy to find a translation. It was not. I had to search various translations of the term “beat” to find one that seemed to align with the spirit of the English term, and then work with that to develop something that might be representative. I landed on “rythmes ou unités d'action” – rhythms or units of action – but I’m still not sure if that would be acceptable to someone teaching drama in a French-speaking region.
In some ways, this project felt like more than just a translation of resources. It felt like a translation of Drama in Education and its underlying philosophies – the value of process, the flexibility to improvise different endings, the doing and reflecting spiral, and so on – for French language educators. Emphasis on process through creative drama forms subverts the performance of learning for an outside gaze. This subversion is essential in language-learning settings where students re-create the world through their words. It is important that they begin language learning knowing that they are not repeating the words of someone else and that they do not need to participate uncritically in the adoption of a colonial language.
Since releasing the resources, the feedback has been incredible. French Immersion teachers in Facebook groups desperately seeking ideas for drama are directing each other to the CODE website; school board support for teacher memberships has increased; beginning French Immersion teachers are willing to spend time at a CODE booth of a general conference to talk about how the resources might suit their needs; and Core French teachers are making use of the warm-ups and games translated on the website. I imagine, like me, they came from watching critical pedagogy in English-language classrooms being supported by a plethora of resources that I then had to spend extra time translating. I imagine, like me, they devoted their time to delivering translated versions to their students at the expense of their time for teacher reflection, professional development, and growth.
I hope that CODE’s efforts are contributing to a critical reimagining of the pedagogy of language teaching and learning in French Immersion classes where students engage in rich contextualized drama and dance learning experiences that demonstrate their agency to them. I hope that the teachers engage in integrated and embodied learning more often, interrupting Enlightenment-era and colonial approaches to schooling that separate the mind from the body. I hope that the schools where these educators work shift toward arts-integration and arts-centered learning as the default. I hope that the educators find a sense of community that supports critical engagement with language-learning.
Finally, I hope that our next project will involve creating or translating materials that support deeper critical engagement with language-learning and the Intercultural components of the curriculum.
References
Commissioner of Official Languages of Canada. (2023). Accessing opportunity: A study on challenges in French-as-a-second-language education teacher supply and demand in Canada
Lussier, D. (2011). Language education as the entry to intercultural communicative competence (ICC). Canadian Issues/Thèmes Canadiens.
Mauranen, A., & Vetchinnikova, S. (2021). Language change: The impact of English as a lingua franca. Cambridge University Press.
Salhi, K. (2002). Critical imperatives of the French language in the francophone world: Colonial legacy – postcolonial policy. Current issues in language planning, 3(3), 317-345.
Sorrells, K. (2023). Re-imagining Intercultural Communication Amid Multiple Pandemics. In T. K. Nakayama & R. T. Halualani (Eds.), The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication (pp. 227–247). John Wiley & Sons.
Tessa Lofthouse is an experienced teacher with a passion for using process drama to facilitate learning, particularly about social justice perspectives. She is currently a full-time Grade 1-5 Drama and French teacher in the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB). She is also currently Vice President of the CODE Management Board. Tessa is a professional curriculum writer and translator, having written elementary lessons for HWDSB's Reimagining Wellness curriculum and Mental Health and Wellness Week, incorporating drama and dance. Tessa has written elementary lessons that added arts extensions to the existing social justice/equity lessons for the HWDSB’s Learn. Disrupt. Rebuild. curriculum in 2021. In the same year, she wrote drama and dance resources for CODE's Grounded in Space and Place Writing Project. Tessa has developed, written, and facilitated professional development workshops for various school boards and organizations, including ACPI where she was the 2019 Laureate du concours des professionels créatifs.
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