Bonnie Youngs

Early on at CMU my focus was on course development and refinement, and articulation among our third year courses through to our fourth year courses. When the class of ’93 arrived at CMU, the courses were taught according to skill: conversation, grammar, writing… Subsequently we changed to content-based courses: Introduction to French Culture, The Francophone World, and French in its Social Contexts. Since their creation, these courses have gone through many iterations based on who teaches them and global changes, and they remain our core and required courses for the minor and major.

I have enjoyed teaching fourth year content courses on topics such as, for example, a Senegalese filmmaker, an extended look at the development of France from Antiquity through to the Renaissance, the settling of North America and Pittsburgh by the French and their current influence in Pittsburgh, and the reading of paraliterature, which is to say fiction novels in the thriller, horror, and science-fiction genres by modern French and francophone authors.

And of course, teaching first and second year courses is vitally important. It is always amazing to me how students who know no French on the first day of a semester, can function in what was, a short three months prior, a foreign language. Carnegie Mellon students are extraordinary when it comes to challenging themselves and making as much progress as they possibly can in the time they have.