There is a close interrelationship between my scholarship and my teaching. I have developed several new courses and seminars in foreign and second language education, in curriculum theory, in research, and in Women's and Gender Studies, and I extensively reviewed previous courses. They are innovative in their content and pedagogy, dealing with issues I see as most interesting and critical to those fields, and which I explore in my research (description of courses).

In all my teaching, I am attentive to my students' diversity, and concerned with raising their own awareness of their very individual unique potential, to develop it and to use it in their learning and teaching. As an educator of future teachers and future scholars in education, I strongly foster a critical approach to learning and teaching. I encourage my students to question what they perceive as taken for granted assumptions or see as established practices in teaching and learning. My goal is to foster a classroom community which welcomes and supports this questioning, as well as that of their own beliefs and practices, and prompts them to open to new ways of thinking and doing. My goal being to practice in my own teaching what I advocate in my instruction, I encourage my students to reflect on what just happens in class, on what teaching or learning practices I engage them in, and on what kind of teaching and learning goes on and why. Inherent in this approach is a very individualized attention to each student in his or her uniqueness and diversity, with regularly scheduled individual meetings, open and frequent communication through e-mail, an office door always opened, and meetings when necessary (see students' comments from their course evaluations).

In foreign and second language education, the focus is on project pedagogy and on teaching based on content, children literature, interdisciplinarity, cooperation, collaboration, integration of culture and heritage legacy, and integration of multimedia technology. Several projects developed in these courses have been posted on the web, have been implemented in classrooms K-12, and have been presented at conferences and teacher workshops. I have developed and offered my first compressed video course in 1999, and received several Board of Regents grants to establish a national on-line resource center for French immersion (Co-PIs Robert C. Lafayette and Bernard Dubernet) and to create interdisciplinary workshops via compressed video, the last ones in cooperation with the LSU Museum of Natural Sciences (Dr. Sophie Bart Warny).

In curriculum theory, my courses closely reflect my research interests in educational socio-political and responsibility issues. It is also an opportunity to bring to my students and colleagues attending these courses some of the most recent French texts and authors not yet available in English. Several students, individually or in collaboration, have submitted their final course papers for publication or presented them at conferences such as the annual Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, The Writers' Conference, the annual Women's and Gender Studies Graduate Student Conference (which I created in 1996), the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, and the International Learning Conference.

Several of the courses I teach focus on research and assessment. In these courses, my objective is to familiarize the students with all available approaches, regardless of individual ideologies. I see it as an ethical issue and a responsibility that students should be sufficiently informed about the benefits and pitfalls of all the various research approaches available to them in order to be able to critically read and understand research, and to make educated choices as to the best fitted approaches to the problems and questions they want to explore as researchers.

Above all, teaching and working with students of all ages remain for me highly enjoyable, enriching, and professionally rewarding and I see those as essential elements in any teaching philosophy. I shall conclude with a quote from one of the most celebrated teachers, Tolstoi: "The best teacher will be [the teacher] who has the ability of inventing new methods . . . [and] the best method would be . . . not a method but an art."