Challenges Faced by African Immigrants in Paris

Challenges Faced by African Immigrants in Paris

Lesson plan created by Jen Bouchard

French culture lesson (English)

Note: This lesson was written for a class taught in English in an online format. It can be adapted to work in a face-to-face class as well.

Content Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to express the professional, economic, social, and geographic challenges faced by West African immigrants living in Paris.
• Students will use their knowledge of French culture to suggest possible solutions to the challenges faced by West Africans in Paris.

Multimodal Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to visually organize and communicate their thoughts using infographics.

Readings

Chrisafis, Angelique, “’Nothing’s changed’: 10 years after French riots, banlieues
remain in crisis,” The Guardian, October 22, 2015

Rodrique Ossebi, “Unfriendly Shores, African Immigrants in France,” Pulitzer
Center on Crisis Reporting, October 21, 2015

Activity/Assessment

Using Venngage, students will combine alphabetic writing and images to respond to the following prompts:

Imagine you are asked to give a presentation to an English-speaking working group tasked with alleviating the challenges faced by African immigrants in France. Create two infographics to address the following questions.

• Based on the readings, what are some of the professional, economic, social, and geographic challenges faced by West African immigrants in France? What are the social, geographic, and economic factors that have allowed problems in the banlieues to continue (and, in some cases, get worse)?
• Based on your understanding of French culture(s), what are some potential solutions or ways to alleviate these hardships and tensions?

Students will post their Venngage infographics (on the course discussion site or on Padlet) so that their classmates and instructor can see them.

Reflection

Students will post a discussion response to the following prompt:

• Describe your decision-making process regarding which elements to use in your  infographic (format, color, font, spacing, images, alphabetic writing, etc.)? How did these choices relate to your audience? What were some of the challenges you encountered while creating the infographics? How did you navigate these challenges/what did you learn from them?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.