Photo Credit: Allison Bills

Photo credit: Carolyn Little

It’s been 18 years since I first stepped into a classroom and tried to figure out how to best engage my students, “Bonjour tout le monde! Je suis votre nouvelle prof de français!” A few years ago I realized that I was at a pivotal point of my teaching career, I could either continue to do things the way that I had been for over a decade and remain on the path of the known, or my students and I could embark on a journey to satiate our curiosity, and hopefully, light the fires of empowerment inside us both.

Bringing an explorer mindset into my French classes has revitalized my classroom and my teaching in ways that I never before thought possible. My classes no longer feel like they are siloed into the realms of verb conjugation and rote memory. Instead, we use the language to make connections to our world on the local and global scale. As we study the environment and geography of France and Minnesota one student inquired about recycling in French schools, which started a flurry of discussion as questions like, “Do French schools put the same emphasis on recycling that we do? Why or why not? Is it different if the school is urban or rural? Can they recycle different things in Europe than we do here?”

Many people assume that when you teach a world language that these connections just happen, but simply learning a new word for bread does not in itself expand our students world view. Instead, by cultivating the explorer mindset in both my students and myself, we have been able to dig deeper and examine not just our place in this great cosmos, but also how what we do affects the world we live in.

We look up at the stars now. After the super blood wolf moon students wanted to talk about seeing “l’éclipse lunaire”, especially how it was easier for some than others. This launched a discussion about light pollution which prompted several students to wonder what can be done to stop “la pollution lumineuse” in their neighborhoods.

Because bringing explorer mindset into our classrooms means getting our students to see our subject in the same way that the first pioneers viewed the night sky, with a combined mixture of wonderment, adventure and inquiry; while giving them the tools to solve the problems that matter to them.