This course is designed to help students acquire through various activities an in-depth knowledge of citizenship within intercultural situations and specifically French-speaking cultures.
The world is heading towards a multicultural society. This trend exerts a direct or indirect influence not only on big cities and cyberspace, but also on local life. In order to better understand the situation abroad, to enrich individual lives, to satisfy various needs, to think and make decisions on our own, and to realize the dreams and hopes of ourselves and society, we must understand the ongoing transformation of society and citizens and face changes in values.
The main purpose of studying foreign languages at university is to deepen our understanding of different lifestyles, social issues, language, historical facts, and thought through fieldwork and hermeneutic approaches. In recent years, not only the humanities but also the natural and applied sciences such as life history research and space archaeology have achieved remarkable results. It provides a fresh understanding of the origins and history of consciousness, language, gender, and religion. Christian asymmetric thinking (science, capitalism, globalism) is at the root of issues that are directly linked to the global environment (East and West, the light and conflict of civilizations, and the reality of modern society). In this course, we will work on these issues based on discussions in the French-speaking world. This activity is a big intellectual adventure, and this course aims to be a bridge for that.
Intercultural competences are not a simple complement in language and culture learning, and still less in learning itself. Through language activities, you acquire profound skills of critical thinking about differences and conflicts among views of life and death or among values, while exploiting your own experience on language learning and various alterities. From the perspective of research on people involved (“study of party”), this course helps students to understand in depth “citizenship” and “social majority”, and to develop self-reliance on language use in social life and face-to-face dialogue.