A teenaged Shannon Swann (pictured right) prepares to leave for Saint-Brieuc, France with the IU Honors Program in Foreign Languages.
Shannon Swann visited France for the first time when she was 15 years old.
This was no ordinary vacation. Swann lived in Saint-Brieuc, France for a summer as part of the IU Honors Program in Foreign Languages. She stayed with a host family, studied French literature and culture, ate French food, explored French cities, and spoke only French for seven straight weeks.
“I’m telling you, the IU Honors program changed my entire life,” said Swann. “When I came back from Saint-Brieuc, all I wanted to do was go back to France. That’s when I decided to major in French.”
Today, Swann teaches French at University High School. She has a bachelor’s degree in French (and political science) from Purdue University (plus a master’s degree in foreign language teaching). She’s studied in, lived in, and visited parts of France countless times in her adult life. But she’s never been back to the place that got her hooked on France more than 35 years ago.
Until now.
This summer, Swann will return to Saint-Brieuc as part of the same program that took her there when she was 15.
Swann and University High School Spanish teacher Moises Gómez-Pastor were selected to be teachers with the IU Honors Program in Foreign Languages this summer. Swann will teach French culture to students in Saint-Brieuc, and Gómez-Pastor will teach Spanish literature in Oviedo, Spain.
Like Swann, Gómez-Pastor has a personal connection to his country: he was raised in Alicante, Spain. He visited Oviedo as a child, but he doesn’t have many memories of the visit. Oveido and Alicante are on opposite sides of the country.
“I’m very excited to be in Oviedo this summer,” said Gómez-Pastor. “It’s a very different city compared with the part of Spain I’m from. It’s very green and kind of rainy – almost like going to Ireland in that sense. Where I’m from is very touristy, by the beach, and has nice weather most of the year. I’m looking forward to seeing a different part of the country.”
The IU Honors program manages eleven program sites in Austria, Chile, China, France, Japan, Mexico, and Spain; Saint-Brieuc and Oviedo are two of them. University High School has a strong history of students participating in the seven-week program. Rising senior Jasper Baltz will spend his summer in León, Spain as part of the program.
Approximately 30 high school students are selected for each site of the cultural and language immersion program – neither students nor teachers are allowed to speak English while overseas. In addition to literature and culture, which is what Gómez-Pastor and Swann will teach, respectively, each site has classes that cover conversation, grammar, and linguistics/phonetics. Students take classes all day, but their evenings and weekends are free for excursions, which teachers plan, and spending time with their host families.
Each site has four teachers, and each cohort of teachers has met for orientation and team bonding this spring. Many of the teachers in the program are graduate students, but Swann and Gómez-Pastor are two with vast high school teaching experience. Even though teaching high school students is something they do every day, they’re both excited to experience teaching in a different context this summer.
“For me, the idea of getting to know students in a different context is very exciting to me,” said Gómez-Pastor. “The kids I’m going to be teaching this summer, once they’re done with classes, they’ll go home with a host family, so they’ll be experiencing the culture we talk about in class every day. That they’ll come back to class and make connections between what we’re talking about and what they’re experiencing at home, that’s something I’m really looking forward to seeing.”
“I don’t know of any other program like IU Honors in the country,” added Swann. “How lucky are we that it’s right here in the state? Part of the reason I’m as confident as I am is because I spent an entire summer when I was 15 years old away from my parents. This program gave me confidence in myself, and I think that’s what it does for a lot of kids.”