The French Connection: Catherine Wiebe

Wiebe's use of multimedia gives her students "a window into France"

Joyce Winslow
jwins@uoregon.edu

Catherine Wiebe's students are lucky. Wiebe's French courses are almost like getting a trip to Paris--and when her students actually do set foot on French soil, they will be well prepared.

"Thanks to technology, my students and I may now know more about France than my French family!" laughs Wiebe, a Parisian native whose relatives still live in the City of Light.

Wiebe's secret for engaging students, to give them, as she says, "a window into France," is her creative use of multimedia.

Wiebe currently oversees curriculum development for French courses taught to more than 250 students each term, but her dedication to enriching the curriculum is not new. It began more than twenty years ago, when she was still a graduate teaching fellow at the UO. Even in those early days of technological innovation, Wiebe availed herself of whatever new teaching tools came down the pike, taking full advantage of the tech support offered by the Knight Library's New Media Center (now known as the Center for Educational Technologies).

In 2006, Wiebe received a grant from the Instructional Technology Resident Fellowship Program to create a multimedia component for her French courses. Her goal was to enrich the curriculum by immersing students in French idioms, diction, and culture. Incorporating radio, video, and photos was her way "of engaging students and bringing the language to life." She knew that offering diverse media options would also give students lots of interesting ways to develop their language skills interactively outside the classroom.

Wiebe's grant and additional monies from the Romance Languages department helped fund essential upgrades to her computer equipment, including a DVD burner, DVD player/recorder, and backup storage drive. She also purchased Apple's iLife suite to streamline the management of her photos, videos, music, and web pages.

Her early experiments with multimedia lesson-building software were an arduous trial-and-error process that required her to master video editing, Photoshop, and web design techniques. She spent weeks trying--and then rejecting--various approaches before she finally found one that worked. Along the way, she had invaluable assistance from Yamada Language Center Director Jeff Magoto. "He gave me endless support and encouragement, and whenever I have a technical question, he has the answer," she says.

Although she ultimately had to scuttle all her work with the new course-building software, there was, as she says, "a silver lining." These early struggles laid the foundation for greatly enriching her Blackboard site in a way that incorporated all the multimedia resources she'd originally intended, and she really sharpened her skills. "I can now capture French TV segments, edit photos and MP3 files, and make them available to students in no time!" she exclaims with evident satisfaction.

The reward for her labors is a multifaceted Blackboard site with a rich set of resources that engage and instruct her students in diverse ways. Video clips from French television news (www.TV5.org), amusing skits illustrating French idioms such as "chanter comme un casserole" ("to sing like a saucepan," meaning to sing out of tune), an audio collection of French songs, French recipes that formed the basis of a cook-and-tell session, and Powerpoint presentations ranging from grammar lessons to cultural discovery--these are only some of the components that Wiebe employs to bring French language and culture to life.

On the day we visited Wiebe's French 201 class, the lesson theme was the influence of the media. To illustrate ways of exploring French media, Wiebe opened a rich French website and clicked through some of the links. Then she showed several video clips from TV5 and asked students to answer a short series of questions about what they'd just viewed. Serendipitously, these news clips were particularly relevant to a previous class discussion and reinforced the textbook information. As a follow-up, students were asked to visit the website on their own time and write a one-page report on two video clips of their choosing. The lesson not only gave students a sense of current events, but also put the day's vocabulary lesson into context.

Wiebe has frequently used video clips of student oral presentations in her teaching. For these assignments, students work in pairs to produce a video of an original French language skit which Wiebe then posts on Blackboard. Another project required students to listen to audio clips of French songs about Paris and then write a similar song, in French, about Eugene.

A discussion of France is hardly complete without mentioning food. In one of her classes, students could open links to French recipe sites Wiebe had posted on Blackboard and cook something for extra credit, taking a few minutes to talk about their experiences in class. Wiebe notes that this assignment produced some perks: "Students usually brought me a sample--which was a good way to have free lunch!"

Wiebe's students are not the only ones who benefit from her tireless quest to enrich the curriculum. The Yamada Language Center posts some of Wiebe's class clips on its Virtual Language Lab site, and Wiebe has made numerous DVDs of her video documentaries and French TV clips widely available to her colleagues. Her vast clip collections of French news, profiles, music videos, and short documentaries are also shared with all second-year French students and GTFs on a central Blackboard site.

What's next on Wiebe's agenda? She may venture into podcasting. "I'd like to create and post a collection of narrated, animated mini grammar lessons for students of all levels," she says.