A free webinar presented by Rick Kern (University of California at Berkeley) and Vesna Rodic (University of California at Berkeley).
Friday, May 15, 2026, 9:30 am – 11 am MST (UTC -7).
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Abstract:
This webinar will describe an intermediate-level French curriculum designed to enhance students’ creativity, cultural awareness, and community engagement through inquiry-based activities related to environmental sustainability in French-speaking contexts as well as within their UC Berkeley campus community. The curriculum incorporates analysis of primary sources (legal documents, literary works, visual images, maps, and films) to study a range of environmental issues, both contemporary and historical. The curriculum has also involved videoconferencing exchanges with students at the Université Aix-Marseille, leading to collaborative recommendations for holding “eco-responsible” events on campus. Students are trained in question-asking techniques; phases of the research process; and the critical analysis of cultural, literary, historical and societal topics in a French context. The study of sustainability in L2 further allows students to apply and express knowledge through creative projects that often involve experiential and project-based learning. Through the example of sustainability, we show how the language classroom can be a space of genuine inquiry, enabling gateway experiences connecting language students to university resources, stimulating intellectual curiosity and fostering a sense of belonging and possibility among students. The webinar will include suggestions for extending the study of sustainability across beginning, intermediate and advanced levels. Participants will learn ways of structuring student engagement with texts, see examples of students’ work, hear about challenges as well as successes in implementing the curriculum, and learn about resources to develop their own sustainability-themed curricula. We have found that, if students are introduced to this disposition of inquiry early on in their studies, they encounter more positive, engaging discipline-specific research experiences in upper-division courses.
This webinar uses examples from French curriculum, but it can be applied to other languages as well.
The presenters of this webinar are co-authors of a chapter, “Toward the Greening of the Intermediate French Language Curriculum,” in De La Fuente, M. J. (2021) Education for Sustainable Development in Foreign Language learning. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003080183.
Bios:
Vesna Rodic is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the French Language Program at UC Berkeley. She teaches a wide range of undergraduate courses, trains graduate students in language pedagogy, and coordinates the second-year French language program. Her research and teaching interests include: second language acquisition theory, writing theory and pedagogy, multilingualism, as well as modern and contemporary literature, art, and culture, and environmental humanities. Recent publications include an article on the role of cultural networks and experiential learning in the study of literary works in intermediate French courses in Contextes Didactiques, Linguistiques et Culturels (2025); an article on the role of a discovery-based pedagogy in the construction of community and agency in L2 (in CDLC 2024); and, a chapter co-authored with Richard Kern, in a volume titled Education for Sustainable Development in Foreign Language Learning (de la Fuente, ed. Routledge, 2022). In 2023, Dr. Rodic was awarded the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Sustainability Award for her work in curricular innovation, teaching, and instructor training.
Rick Kern is Professor of French at the University of California at Berkeley and served for 16 years as Director of the Berkeley Language Center. He teaches courses in French linguistics, language, and foreign language pedagogy, and supervises graduate teaching assistants. His research interests include language acquisition, literacy, and relationships between language and technology. Professor Kern’s most recent book is Screens and Scenes: Multimodal Communication in Online Intercultural Encounters (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with Christine Develotte, and in 2015 he published Language, Literacy, and Technology (Cambridge UP). Earlier books include Literacy and Language Teaching (Oxford UP) and Network-Based Language Teaching (Cambridge UP), co-edited with Mark Warschauer.
This is the final event in a three-part series on Sustainability and Global Citizenship in Language Education:Research-Based Curricula and Practices. See the series details here.
Participants attending this webinar live can request a certificate of attendance for 1.5 hours of Continuing Education in a request form that is shared at the end of the event. CERCLL will contact them after the webinar about how to request a digital badge.
Participants who require closed captions or an ASL interpreter during CERCLL’s events should make this request at least a week in advance by emailing CERCLL at cercll@email.arizona.edu.