FRE390:Languages and Cultures Course description Languages and Cultures


"Languages and Cultures" is probably unlike any other course offered at Oswego. It is being planned to provide students today with an experience of what future college courses may be like as we embark upon the electronic age and travel more extensively (and more easily) on the information highway. Students will work in teams and will do their investigations and explorations of the course's topics primarily with the assistance of the products and processes of the information highway. Homework will be done using email, collaborative writing software, educational international MOOs, and Web pages and gopher entries. The professor is transformed from the proverbial"sage on the stage to guide on the side" as students explore the world and their chosen topics primarily via the resources which the world provides us electronically.

"Languages and Cultures" class meetings will be coaching sessions, launching sites, and touch base and sharing meetings designed to assist students both with their searches and the communication of their findings. Students will find in "Languages and Cultures" an opportunity to use knowledge and skills from their majors (from art to zoology!) or their interests and hobbies to explore selected topics for the course. The course has only one basic requirement for each of the modules: there must be a principal link with some area of the French-speaking world. Since francophonia is comprised of countries from almost all of the inhabited continents---regions like France, Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Polynesia, Ivory Coast, Togo, Zaïre, Algeria, Vietnam, even the United States!---this link is broad, far-reaching, and challenging.

Since the course is an integral part of "Culture, Technology, and the Human Experience," an Auxiliary Services sponsored Project 2000 for SUNY-Oswego, students will also have a unique opportunity to consult international television programming via SCOLA (on campus channel 11) twenty-four hours a day and will be able to present and discuss the results of their work in the course as special participants in a day-long conference on April 13th in the Hewitt Union. Additional supporting and enriching events and activities will be scheduled sporadically throughout the Spring Semester.

In short, "Languages and Cultures" will offer rewards and challenges to any student specializing in any major across the college curriculum. The brief Module descriptions which follow form a partial listing of the opportunities offered by this course. The course syllabus details the structure of the course and course assignments

Course Modules


The Annotated Francophone Cookbook
A Cross Cultural Examination of Sports
Tahiti: From Art to the Atom Bomb
Caribbean Creole: Music Song and Dance
Flora and Fauna of the Francophone World
The City: Metaphor, Myth, and Market
Media and Markets
Public and Private: Religon and Politics in the Francophone World
Multiculturalism North of the Border
French Vietnam in Literature and Film
The Self under Siege: Racism and Sexism in the Francophone World

"Languages and Cultures" has no pre-requisites and may be taken as FRE 390, an upper-division course conducted in English or as FRE 490 (or 590), an upper-division (or graduate) with a French language component. Through the Languages Across the Curriculum Program (LAC), students in the English section who have a course background in French may do some of their readings and research in French.

Whether you are a cyberpunk or a techno-phobe--- this course will instruct you, amuse you, challenge you, and fascinate you throughout the semester. It will be the one course you look forward to every week as you explore the connections, electronic and human, which unite the global village in the information age.



For further information:
email fichera@oswego.edu or call Dr. V. M. Fichera at 315-341-2468. Welcome aboard!

Special thanks to Dave Sammons, Webmaster, Spring 1996