AATF Annual Report (2012-2013)

20 Jan AATF Annual Report (2012-2013)

Meetings
The Executive Board held its annual meeting on May 19, 2012, in Charlottesville. The annual meeting of the chapter, followed by a luncheon, took place at the FLAVA conference in Williamsburg on October 6, 2012. The minutes of the meetings are available on the AATF-VA website.

Awards
Three members of the chapter received awards at FLAVA:

• Laurel Maughan, French teacher at James River High School, was named FLAVA Teacher of the Year and received the David E. Cox – Excellence in Teaching K-12 Award.
• Amy DeGraff, who has been teaching French since 1978 at Randolph-Macon College, received the Helen Warriner-Burke Award for Distinguished Service.
• The 2012 Best of FLAVA Award went to Fabrice Teulon from Virginia Tech for his presentation on “Antonin Carême: When Cooking became an Art.”

Presentations
Members of the chapter have presented the following papers:

• Karine Boulle (Ste Anne’s Belfield School): Crafting Bilingual Storyboard/Play + Turn your Students into Magazine Editors
• Zac Neumann (Larkspur Middle School), Les Misérables: Teaching Culture, History, and Listening Skills
• Isabelle Jayat-Reeves (Ste Anne’s Belfield School): Teaching Film Shorts in the Language Classroom: Demain la veille, a Case in Point + New AP French Language and Culture Exam Swap Shop!
• Fabrice Teulon, (Virginia Tech), Antonin Carême: Quand la cuisine devint un art
• Alison Levine and Rebecca Glasberg (University of Virginia), Teaching Film and Filmmaking
• Wade Edwards (Longwood University), Les hommes, les femmes, et les origines misogynes des Jeux olympiques
• Jamie Favazza (Norfolk Public Schools/Retired), Increasing Languages Skills Through telling Stories

Workshops

• Enrica Piccardo from the University de Toronto offered two workshops: Pathways Through Assessing, Learning and Teaching the CEFR (Part 1 and 2).

Visit of Director /Screenwriter/ Actor Slony Sow sponsored by AATF-VA
After completing a tour of Virginia that took him to St Anne’s School (Charlottesville), Randolph-Macon College (Ashland), VCU (Richmond), Lynchburg College (Lynchburg), and Virginia Tech (Blacksburg), director /screenwriter/ actor Slony Sow presented his latest short movie, Grenouille d’hiver starring Gérard Depardieu, at the annual luncheon of the AATF-VA in Williamsburg on October 6^th 2012.

Videoconferences in the Classroom
In Spring 2013, Fabrice Teulon organized at Virginia Tech a series of videoconferences with French directors/actors/screenwriters Mathieu Simonet and Slony Sow, and French director/actress Julie Voisin as part of his Introduction to French Literature class (FR 3304). Students had previously completed several assignments on two movies and had prepared a series of questions prior to the videoconferences.

5^th French Film Festival at Longwood University
This year again, Longwood University hosted its 5^th French Film Festival under the direction of Wade Edwards with the help of the AATF-VA on March 11^th and 27th 2013. The movies presented at the festival for free included Ma vie en rose, Les Intouchables, and À bout de souffle. A showing of the short movie Prunelle et Mélodie was also organized for a younger audience and was followed by a morning of French conversation and a lunch. Longwood University has been very active in promoting the French Film Festival for the last several years and has offered to the public an excellent choice of French movies, including Coco avant Chanel, Potiche, Entre les murs, Le fils de l’épicier, and many others.

Teaching Guide
The Teacher’s Guide to accompany the short movie by Julien Lecat and Sylvain Pioutaz, Demain la veille, created by Amy DeGraff (Project Director) and Isabelle Jayat-Reeves (Assistant Project Director) is proving very successful. The Teacher’s Guide + film is available for $ 25.00 (shipping included) or $10.00 for just the Teacher’s Guide. Please contact Amy DeGraff (adegraff@rmc.edu). The same team is now working on a new Teacher’s Guide to accompany Mathieu Simonet’s short movie with Julie Voisin, Prunelle et Mélodie, about the moving story of a young blind girl and a young deaf mute girl.

Le Grand Concours
This year 2149 students participated from 52 schools with 70 teachers. Seven students were gold medal winners, 10 were awarded a silver medal (2^nd place), and 21 were awarded a bronze medal (3^rd place). Two hundred and twenty six received a Lauréat National Certificate, 97 an Honneur Certificate and 542 a Réussite Certificate.

• Lauréat national certificates: National ranks 1-10 percentile
• Certificat d’honneur: students in the top 80^Th percentile
• Certificat de Réussite: students in the top 50^Th percentile