Thornton Creek in French

Several years ago we decided to try to integrate some aspects of the Thornton Creek project into our French III curriculum. We spent about 10 days on a project which had the following elements:

-an introductory talk by Peter Hayes about the watershed

-a field trip to Thornton Creek where students spent some time wandering by the creek and observing

-a "newspaper" edition inspired by our visit. This part of the project involved each student writing something, in French, about the watershed: these pieces included poems or descriptions inspired by their observations, articles about the history of Thornton Creek (source materials supplied by Peter Hayes), maps and pictures, essays about the environment in general. We "published" this edition and shared it with several other schools involved in the TCP.

While there were some interesting pieces written, this project seemed to be a somewhat awkward add-on to our French curriculum, rather than growing naturally from other work we were doing. This was the main reason for not repeating the experience in subsequent years. We do include articles and commentary about environmental issues as the possibility arises in the context of our readings and discussions in class, but we tend to be discussing, for example, environmental changes in Africa and their effects on the indigenous populations, rather than our local problems in Washington state. I would hope that this at least adds some perspective to the students' thinking about our stated goals for environmental studies, which aim for broad understanding of how the world works, and how humans influence the earth.

A specific example from the current French III curriculum is a story entitled "De tout à Gogo" (from Contes de la Saint-Glinglin by Robert Escarpit) where an impoverished village in Africa finds salvation by becoming a commercial center. One discussion question will be "what are the advantages and disadvantages of attracting more people to one's hometown?" and we will certainly talk about the problems caused by desertification and lack of water in many African towns.

Kit Maestretti