Learning, Culture, Language and "The Class"

I don't know about the rest of you, but I had so many thoughts while watching "The Class" that I can hardly sort through them all! While learning was arguably always going on because we learn new things all the time, even without meaning to, I would argue that "good learning" was a little rarer in some of these scenes. I found that what contributed to learning the most was respect. The students seemed more or less utterly disengaged in a much of the material François presented because so often he presented it in a way that did not make them feel respected as students or as individuals. As someone pointed out in class, conducting a vocabulary lesson by asking the students "which words do you not know?" is hardly a way to raise students' self-esteem or make them feel respected as serious scholars, which may have contributed to their behavior in the classroom. While I am not defending the behavior of the students, I do think that some of the ways in which class was conducted could have contributed to the problem.

To me, it seemed that learning was most often supported when the students felt that they were being respected both as students, and as individuals. For example, when François allowed Souleymane (I think that's who it was) to express his self-portrait in the form of photos with descriptions, he was able to flourish in the assignment because he was being treated as an individual and what he was interested was not only taken into consideration, but valued and respected and used to represent himself. Respect was also necessary amongst the students themselves, as was apparent when students were more willing to participate in the classroom discussion when they were given the respect of the entire class.

Conversely, learning seemed to be constrained when there was a lack of respect amongst both the students and François. Their insults to one another, ridicule for others mistakes and flat-out name calling seemed to stunt the intellectual growth and ability to learn a great deal. On multiple occasions, students would point out and laugh at others mistakes (such as when one student incorrectly conjugated “swim”), even when they themselves could not correctly answer either. Rather than trying to show the mistakes in a productive and respectful way, students were ridiculed, and thus discouraged from taking part in further classroom discussion.

I think a lot of the disrespect shown amongst the students and François in his classroom had a lot to do with the culture and language differences and the intolerance shown for anything different from what each individual was used to. During the soccer discussion, there were jabs made at students’ countries of origin based on whatever prejudices they held. There was also disrespect shown for the language differences that existed between the written and spoken French François was trying to teach, and the French the students were used to. This intolerance for linguistic differences stood as a huge obstacle for François in trying to get them engaged in the material.

While there were certainly other factors contributing to the students’ learning I found that respect had the most prevalent impact because if everyone would have had a mutual respect for everyone else from the start, I think things would have played out a lot differently.