Annual Report of the AATF Commission on Advocacy
2009


In May of 2008 we had

state-specific web pages or sites for 22 states, with official advocacy connections in 37 states, Washington DC and the American Virgin Islands.

We now (6/09) have

We still have state-specific web pages or sites for 22 states, with official advocacy connections in 44 states, Washington DC and the American Virgin Islands.

Our available state-specific or territory-specific information is now electronically available by web or fact pack to over schools in communities representing nearly 97% of the US population.  we are missing

state                          popultaion
North Dakota            641,481
South Dakota            804,194    
Montana                    967,440
Alaska                       686,293
Connecticut               3,501,252
Hawaii                      1,288,198

Among the features offered by those state web sites which the chapters themselves make is the very interesting "Survey on the Status of French" produced by the Chicago/Northern Illinois chapter. We could use tech volunteers willing to create state web pages out of fact packs or to steal those I have had to make. I can show them how to make a page without spending a cent on web-making equipment. Their ISP's or institution's help desk can put it in a directory or show them how.


Our AATF national French advocacy site:

Ideas for French Language & Culture Advocacy in the US
http://www.utm.edu/staff/globeg/advofr.shtml

had a failure in a server-side include, causing it to lose approximately 15,600 in its count.. Adding this to what the count was one day before the failure, Adding this back into the count we count the number o hits at around 17,000 for the year.  This number of visits is not surprising since Google shows it linked about 120 times to the sites it spiders.  

Since there are no longer chapter sites in Michigan, I had to create

Michigan Needs French
AATF ADVOCACY FACT PACK FOR MICHIGAN

from a renewed fact pack

Our link in June of last year:

TBob. THE LANGUAGE OF THE STARS (June 2008)
http://www.utm.edu/staff/globeg/celebfrench.shtml

has been immensely popular. We have added a number of valuable links since last year:

Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System
http://nces.ed.gov/IPEDS/

Foreign Direct Investment in the U.S.: Financial and Operating Data for U.S. Affiliates of Foreign Multinational Companies
http://www.bea.gov/international/di1fdiop.htm


Articles, notes, etc. promoting the value of French, and value in advocacy

Brockmann, Stephen. "The Study of Foreign Languages Should Not Be a Zero-Sum Game." American Association of Teachers of French National Bulletin 34, no. 4 (April 2009): 17-18 [Though the article does address advocacy for a German program, its application is much wider]

Jensen, Anne. "Addressing the Cancellation of the French AP Literature Exam." The French Review 82, no. 3 (February 2009): 610-14.

Koop, Marie-Christine. "Message de la Présidente - Programmes de Français en danger." American Association of Teachers of French National Bulletin 34, no. 4 (April 2009): 3

Peckham, Robert D. "If The World Speaks French, Then It Must Be the Language of the Stars." American Association of Teachers of French National Bulletin 34, no. 4 (April 2009): 22 [famous French speakers].

Steinhart, Margot [AATF Past President]. "French Advocacy Kit Responds to Program Challenges." American Association of Teachers of French National Bulletin 34, no. 4 (April 2009): 13-14

Turan, Madeline. " QUICK FACTS FOR FRENCH TEACHERSQuick Responses to Common Misconceptions." [electronic pamphlet]

My thanks to the outstanding National Bulletin editor, Jane Goepper for her   willingness to rerun older articles and notes with highly pertinent advocacy information.


2009 French advocacy threads on FLTEACH

HELP! Possible cut of French III/IV
French ...stand up and now others languages
French students stand up and French teachers unite
Elimination of French BA @ UTMartin)
Wake up & smell the budget

Conferences presentations and workshops on the topic of advocacy

June 25/26, 2008: French Advocacy Workshop in Chicago: The Chicago/Northern Illinois Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF), the French Department and the French Interdisciplinary Group at Northwestern University and the Education Department of the French Consulate in Chicago invite educators to participate in the second French Advocacy Meeting to continue the work started on April 25th for the promotion of French programs in the schools (Northwestern University). The April 25th, sponsored by the French Consulate in Chicago, was held at the French Consulate.  Over 50 attendees from state governments, Francophone and Francophile groups, two AATF regional representatives, AATF officers, and French teachers.

Eileen Walvoord (Niles High School), Margot Steinhart (Past AATF President)  and Janine Spencer (Northwestern University) "Advocacy for French Teachers," Illinois Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Lisle, IL - October 2008.

Janine Spencer  (Northwestern University).  “Let’s Keep French in our Schools”, Federation of the Alliances Françaises’ Annual Meeting and Convention, Naples, FL, October 2008.

TennesseeBob Peckham (University of Tennessee at Martin). "Foreign Languages at the Core of Success: An Advocacy Users Guide." Adventures in Advocacy: The Vermont Foreign Language Association Annual Convention, Middlebury, October 2008.

Jayne Abrate (AATF Executive Director) and Marie Christine Kop AATF President). "Advocating for French: Promoting Your Program to all Audiences," ACTFL 2008 - Annual Convention and World Languages Expo, Orlando, FL, November 21-23, 2008.

Margot Steinhart (Past AATF President), Eileen Walvoord (Niles High School), Samantha Godden-Chmielowicz, (Carl Schurz High School in Chicago), Anne-Emmanuelle Grossi (French Consulate in Chicago). "The Central States Speak French: Moving Advocacy to the Local
Level." Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Chicago, March 2009.

There will be an advocacy presentation at AATF in San Jose on the new "Advocacy Kit" and one at ACTFL in November in San Diego on cultivating allies

Individual Work to Save French Programs in Schools

In general, I will refrain from mentioning individual schools.  Since my last report, I have worked through over 400 emails, and some hand-written letters, sending out and researching facts, mobilizing witnesses for meetings for schools in Texas, Rhode Island, Kentucky, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, New York, West Virginia, Oregon, Arizona, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska. Ohio, Massachusetts, Alabama and Australia.  In some cases, helping schools find French teachers was it.

I was right that certain big issues would dominate the commission's efforts:

the aftermath of the AP French Lit. cancellation
the continued growth of poorly planned, but well heralded Chinese programs
massive cuts in state budgets in the face of severe recession.

This last will continue to worsen, and we should all keep track of what occurs in state budgets:

An Update on State Budget Cuts
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1214

In some cases, we saw students and teachers in healthy programs fighting against some of the most wrong-headed reasoning on the part of administrators that I have ever encountered:

    Save French!
    http://save-french.webs.com/

Our President , Marie-Christine Koop, sent lengthy letters (3-4 pages), along with the flyer form our campaign (The World Speaks French) to several schools and universities in New York, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Arizona.

Many of you were generuous with your time and effort, sending thoughtful letters to save French programs, including ours at The University of Tennessee-Martin



Report on the French Language Advoccy Kit Project

This was submitted by the project coordinator, Margot Steinhart (May 26, 2009);

Report on the French Language Advocacy Kit as an initiative of the AATF Advocacy Commission in 2008-2009


Release of the French Language Advocacy Kit and its products
The French Language Advocacy Kit will debut at the national conference in San Jose, CA, in July 2009, as a critical tool for French teachers who want to build support for their programs or who are experiencing a real or perceived threat to the continuation of their programs. The DVD, which will be included in the conference mallette, consists of a series of short video clips of individuals who value the study of French for a variety of reasons, but particularly for its role in their studies or careers. The video can be shown as 13 separate clips or as a one 30-minute movie. The print documents will be made available during the summer online at http://mmlc.northwestern.edu/advocacy/  

Premise of the kit and the kit’s contents
The kit’s creation is built upon the premise that the successful French teacher cultivates allies, especially parents, but also students, colleagues, guidance counselors, administrators, Board of Education members, and the community, in general.  In order to develop allies, communication with parents and visibility of French students and activities within the school community as well as in the larger community are essential. To reach that objective, sample letters, check lists, brochures, activities calendars, and newsletters are offered as inspiration for teachers to create their personalized documents. A series of bell-ringer exercises with a French connection has been developed for use in discipline-specific classes during National French Week, for example, to develop allies for French across the curriculum. A sample of a booklet for parents is also included.

A second section of the kit contains responses to program threats. Included are check lists, sample testimonials, sample advocacy letters, advocacy stories, a brochure, a list of reasons to study French, and articles on presentations and speeches to school boards and on using technology to support advocacy.  

A third component of the kit is a resource section. A series of articles which provide advice and reflections from the trenches related to creating allies, promoting the French program, understanding the dynamics of the Board of Education, communicating with parents, explaining the ease and difficulty of learning French, and responding to challenges to the French program are included, as well as resources offered by AATF and by the French Embassy.

The advocacy project complements the materials that have been developed through The World Speaks French campaign, the brochures and videos already available through the AATF Materials Center, and the work of the AATF Advocacy Commission, but the focus of the French Language Advocacy Kit is on what one teacher, one ally, and one advocate can do to support and maintain a French program.

Support for the French Language Advocacy Kit:
1.    French Cultural Services in Chicago and the French Embassy in the USA -- Initial symposium about advocacy for French programs, held in Chicago in April 2008, the assistance of a summer intern at the Consulate in Chicago for the June 2008 workshop at Northwestern, liaison with other agencies to provide data
2.    Quebec Government Office in Chicago and the Quebec Ministry of Foreign Relations -- $750 to reproduce copies of the DVD with video clips
3.    Multimedia Language Center at Northwestern University – filming, editing, and production of DVD master of the video stories (done pro bono)
4.    The Multimedia Learning Center at Northwestern University will initially host the print documents online. The duplication of CDs will come later.

Permanent contributors to the French Language Advocacy Kit

    Randa Duvick
    Eileen Walvoord
    Donna Czarnecki
    Kristin Aswell
    Samantha Godden-Chmielowicz
    Margot Steinhart (coordinator)


Still some very important economic reasons to study French

2008 trade statistics

4 countries where French is an official language figure among our top 15 trade partners for 2008. The export revenues are represented in billions of dollars:

Canada:                                              261.4
France                                                 29.2
Belgium                                              29.0
Switzerland                                         22.0

total Francophone                               341.8
total from top 15 trading partners        924.2

nearly 37% of all the revenues from our top 15 trading partners.  Why is this important?  Even after our recovery, the US consumer, more cautious about credit card debt, and no longer using the house as an ATM machine, will never again represent 70% of our GNP, but we can have and expand on foreign markets. There are nearly 30 countries where French is an official language. We need to train more people to speak French.

According to 2006 non-bank foreign direct investment figures from the US Department of Commerce, the big investment dollars come from European and Canadian firms.  In 2002-2006 employment by non-bank US affiliates of foreign industries, figures for European companies outweigh those for Asia and Pacific, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America combined. Looking at the seven countries used to represent Europe, I note two Francophone:  France, employing 496,600 American workers, and Switzerland, employing 416,100. Canadian Firms employ 457, 400. In viewing these figures, we must not overlook the fact that Belgian Investment in the U.S. amounted to about $ 19.5 billion as of 2007 and that their subsidiaries supported 132.000 US jobs.  Foreign subsidiaries pay higher salaries then US companies, and yet their sales have not fallen of as quickly as those of local businesses. We will always need this kind of "insourcing".

There are over 3,700 American companies in France employing around 750,000 people. The USA is the leading source country of foreign investment in France.

Finally there are millions of French-speaking tourists who visit the US every year. There are millions of French-speaking residents.


some helpful things do happen

We continue in our gratitude for the support that led to

The French Language Initiative
http://www.theworldspeaksfrench.org/

I am grateful for the list of members who have indicated an interest in  the AATF Commission on Advocacy for this membership year, which Jayne emailed me, and which I am incorporating into the core  advocacy mailing list.

At my institution, the Vanguard Theatre group presented Molière's "The Learned Ladies" during French week:

http://www.nwtntoday.com/news.php?viewStory=18634

Best laid plans of mice and commissions

Encourage the AATF to work with other organizations which promote French language, francophone cultures (like the French Meet-ups).  I am beginning to work with Mark Snyder (Pittsburgh French Meetup)


University of Tennessee at Martin nearly loses its French program

Our French program has had its share of talented and even famous graduates, but nothing in the past is solid food for either the present or the future.

What the state of Tennessee does for its residents is almost entirely funded by sales tax, since Tennesseans have a philosophical objection to income tax. For a long time consumer habits seemed to support this philosophy, but Tennessee lead the nation in its rate of personal bankruptcy filings, and the recession brought sever cutbacks to higher education. Even though my institution's Modern Foreign Language Department was scheduled to lose its department status, its travel and equipment budget, its searches, both our Spanish and French majors were declared "underproductive" by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. There were other programs in a similar situation. A local committee for program "discontinuance" was convened to decide our fate. They told me there was not much I could do.

At this point, I should say that this threat, though sudden, was not exactly a bolt from the blue. Since I am not a program administrator, I tend to focus on promotion, rather than the advocacy strategy I have been trying to teach my AATF colleagues of looking for weaknesses.  Though we were down in enrollment, we had attracted a number of new minors. Our big weakness was in our diminishing number of majors. A number of majors simply left our program when the tuition for our chief summer immersion program went up 133%. Since, immersion is required, students simply said they could not afford to be French majors. This was not all. Since 2001, I have been teaching half time, because of the intensive effort required to manage the Muriel Tomlinson Language Resource Center, the busiest multimedia lab on campus, serving 1100 student practice hours per week.  I did not give enough thought to the mathematical reality that since historically 60% of our majors did not come from upper-division starts, but rather from lower-division success stories, and we had been offering two fewer of those courses for long enough to hurt ourselves badly.  I drew up a whole plan focusing on program building, including a renewal of co-curricular activities, more recruitment in local high-schools. I found a very attractive candidate replacement program for our expensive Quebec summer immersion program. I sat down with my colleague to discuss some curriculum adjustments. At this point I decided that even if our program were cancelled, I wanted to spend my time in the classroom with the students I had, so I wrote a letter announcing my intention to resign from the directorship of the lab and return to full-time classroom teaching (17 hours/week). This will add 33% more sections to our schedule.

With the support and help of colleagues in the AATF and TFLTA, of current and former students, of administrators in the ADFL, and others, we were able to save the program, partly be making a good argument in committee meetings. Another key was that we made a program compromise, to allow our degree that name "BA in Foreign Languages with a major concentration in French". We did the same thing in Spanish, but this brought up a problem within the department. Our chair, an outstanding teacher, scholar and administrator, was against the name change, since he had seen a number of mediocre programs with this nomenclature. Though I was unable to get his vote, I was able to persuade colleagues in Spanish because of letters from chairs associated with the ADFL, demonstrating that so many excellent departments had made this compromise recently, the name change was near meaningless, and that even if Spanish were saved tit would soon fall victim to the same budget axe.  The compromise position with a combined number of Spanish and French students along the knowledge that we had a sound plan to increase our numbers on several fronts were instrumental in our victory. We are by no means out of the proverbial woods, and we will run headlong into a problem with the language lab (essential to our program). We are energetic in recruiting, unafraid to recruit from the pool of Spanish students who cannot find a place after enrollment limits are met in Spanish. The crisis has taught me a lot by experience about  advocacy, has brought me a lot closer to my colleague in French and has brought a renewal of energy to our program. Incidentally, we are projecting a sharp increase in lower-division enrollment. It will take a while for this to effect upper-division, but we have already begun to add majors and minors to the program.

Subsequent to our challenge, UTM's Spanish and French program both went through Tennessee Higher Education Commission  program evaluations and passed with room to spare, though the issue of the number of graduating majors did not do away.


Goals for this time next year

Pert of what I do will be the learning process of recovery after the severe challenge to our program. I am keeping a record of my experience in order to pass it on.

Again I remind all of you that we have no coverage, no advocacy representatives, no advocacy fact packs in Alaska , Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, states with a collective population of 7,888,858, who need to know through our state-specific research, just how important French is to their turf.  Though I stand ready to research advocacy FACT PACKS for them, once these coordinators step forward as volunteers or appointees.

I will incorporate the new list of advocacy volunteers into the "advocacy" mailing list.

Continue to encourage the AATF to work with other organizations which promote French language, francophone cultures (like the French Meet-ups).

Write one or two advocacy articles for the national bulletin.

I will continue tracking the "high-school redesign" movement to see what effect the recession is having on plans for enlarging the language requirements in public schools.


I do hope to have some solid statistics about the growth of Chinese programs in American schools. I have been tracking this in Tennessee schools. In addition to the number of programs, and because Chinese is a level-five language (for time required in mastery), I am very interested in depth-of-program issues: FLES, Middle-School, College and Immersion programs

I have an enormous amount of information about China, Chinese and the forces that drive the current passion for offering Chinese. I do need to work more closely with school systems where Chinese is competing with or has replaced French to complete a useful report on this issue. I will keep an eye on Asia Society, Hanban, and Confucius Institute initiatives, as well as state councils of Chinese schools.

Never got aound to the "Tour de la Nouvelle France" an amateur biking randonné between cities with French names in a state, with étapes for overnights and appropriate receptions by members of municipal historical societies, co-sponsorship with them, with state amateur biking.  This is still a good promotional idea

This and a number of other projects were nipped in the bud, because, ironically the AATF advocacy chair almost took a really bad spill. Our French program nearly disappeared, and though I was able to defend it, I still consider it very much on trial.  Here is the story.

Here are the names of national volunteers who regularly correspond with me:

Anita Alkhas, David Graham, Brenda Benzin, Margot Steinhart, Will Thompson, Jackie Thomas, Joyce Beckwith, Randa Duvick, Sharon Shelly, Richard Shryock

We all deeply regret the loss this past year of my inspiration for advocacy, Barbara Ransford. There are also state/chapter contacts and the additional national volunteers on the list very recently mailed to me.


Budget:         

Much of what the Advocacy Kit grooup has done has been paid for by sponsor funding and assistance. Any expenses for duplication of copies of DVDs, labels, etc. will be determined later.

I am sorry for the length.

Respectfully submitted,



Robert D. Peckham, Ph.D
Professor of French
Chair, AATF Commission on Advocacy
Director, Globe-Gate Intercultural Web Project
Director, Andy Holt Virtual Library
Department of Modern Foreign Languages
Univ. of Tennessee at Martin / Martin TN 38238
Email: bobp@utm.edu