PGR Teacher Conference: Digital Archive
Recording
Adam Agowun
Spaces within spaces: Teaching French culture from a British-Mauritian perspective and its relationship with GTA liminality
The Higher Education workplace context encourages lecturers transitioning from a school context to hold on to their identity and credibility as schoolteachers. Similarly, GTAs, particularly within the context of Warwick’s SMLC department, are encouraged to shape their teaching based on their personal heritage and cultural experience.
As a British-born GTA with strong Mauritian roots, I often draw on my hybrid background to inform how I teach first-year students about French culture. This paper will explore how I use conversations about my own culture to teach about others, with a particular focus on how I taught two weeks on Maryse Condé’s Le cœur à rire et à pleurer, a text where Condé examines her own identity through a series of short vignettes.
I will argue that using my own experiences allows students to unpack and take a more empathetic approach to the postcolonial issues posed through the text, as well as encouraging students of a similar background to my own to use their own cultures as a lens to understand this text and others on the module.