Vocation in the World Language Classroom

The language classroom provides ample occasion to cultivate vocational reflection. As a lifelong learner and educator with over 15 years of experience teaching French, I can attest to the ways in which language acquisition is inextricable from learning about ourselves, crafting our stories, connecting with others, and discerning how to live an intentional life. Take the example of a beginning language program, in which courses are commonly structured around topics of everyday relevance such as friends and family, education and professions, pastimes, and holidays and traditions. Self-reflection and self-authorship are embedded in the program because learning a language is, in effect, learning to live, communicate, and move in the world in and through this language.

Self-reflection and self-authorship are embedded in the program because learning a language is, in effect, learning to live, communicate, and move in the world in and through this language.

Beyond the gift of the content itself, language faculty can create opportunities for deeper and sustained engagement by consolidating attention on aspects of the curriculum that lend themselves to vocational reflection and by framing them accordingly. One way to do this is to center values, choice, and purpose when we structure activities. In some introductory language courses, a classic warm-up for reviewing the past tense is to invite students to share what they did over the weekend or during a break. We can orient this exercise towards vocation by expanding it to include the following:

1. something you did, and why;
2. something you wanted to do but did not, and why not;
3. something you did even though you didn’t really want to, and how you came to this decision; and
4. how you feel about it all.

Dedicating class time for reflective practice opens up space for students to consider multiple pulls on their time and attention as well as how various calls may or may not align with their goals and senses of purpose. It also highlights how lived experience and embodied knowledge can and should play a role in learning environments both within and beyond curricular benchmarks. It is perhaps worth noting here that brief but meaningful queries like these contribute to building rapport and getting to know students in educational settings outside of the language classroom, including mentorships. In the language classroom specifically, to pivot relevant lessons and assignments in this way habituates students to self-reflection and self-authorship, even though they may be constrained as their linguistic skills are developing.

To this point, I am of the mind that the gap between the immediacy of thoughts and feelings and the ability to articulate them in the target language is a rich site for vocational reflection. As students build proficiency, they need time and intentionality to draw on grammatical structures and vocabulary. These then establish a series of productive moments that afford language learners the wiggle room to sit with and reassess their narratives. For some students, feeling authentic in the target language is an evolving challenge; the process can be fraught, vulnerable, complex, and occasionally frustrating. Simply to exist in the presence of these tensions is a growth experience for many. Thus, grounding this work in opportunities for meta-reflection in English allows students to bridge their study of an additional language with the context and texture of their vocational journeys more broadly speaking.

As students expand their vocabularies and deepen their grammatical skills in the language classroom, the curriculum progressively integrates topics of sociopolitical and global relevance, which center the value of cultural competence and the ability to connect and communicate across differences in multilingual communities both in the U.S. and around the world. (For a primer, see ACTFL’s World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages.) Appropriately, in the latter portion of a beginning language sequence, we frequently teach units on the environment, migration, public health, and technology. Through this content, students and instructors engage with issues that impact the planet globally and locally. We encounter stories of individuals and collectives fighting climate change, the relocation and everyday joys and struggles of refugee families, and the social and economic realities of everything from the COVID-19 pandemic to the rise of social media activism and influencer culture. Of key importance in the language classroom is the incorporation of authentic cultural documents. As a language educator, my role is to amplify the voices of Francophones from around the world who speak, write, vlog, sing, and make art about their lived experiences and cultural ties. Given the volume of available materials, selecting texts through the lens of values, choice, and purpose invites students into conversation with the vocational trajectories of other humans across time and space.

This teaching-language-through-vocation-and-vocation-through-language approach naturally crosses over into intermediate and advanced courses. Indeed, a four-year language program offers an ideal framework to support students in vocational reflection throughout their undergraduate careers. So often, the language classroom is where our first-year students forge the most substantial friendships of their college years and where they gather three to four times each week to discuss their past, present, future, responsibilities, goals, dreams, favorite foods, and most dreaded chores. And it is to this space where they return to share enthusiastically anecdotes like “I got to use my French to help someone at my job at the pharmacy!” or “I FaceTimed my friend in France, and we talked for 45 minutes en français!” As our campuses and communities become increasingly multilingual, we ought to lift up the language classroom as a privileged space for vocational reflection where our responsibilities to the world, to each other, and to ourselves might crosspollinate in ways that honor our callings as much as they shape the future of language instruction.

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Kiki Kosnick is associate professor of French, Francophone studies, and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Their recent work on queer and feminist approaches to gender-inclusive poetics and language pedagogy has appeared in Modern & Contemporary France (2019), Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French-Speaking Classroom (2021), and The Modern Language Journal (2023). They are a NetVUE faculty fellow, having participated in the 2019 NetVUE faculty seminar, Teaching Vocational Exploration.