Spotlight on FACULTY
Kathryn Stewart Helps Open the World to OCC Language Learners
Kathryn Stewart is a dynamo. OCC’s high-energy French professor truly
enjoys teaching students
at the Orchard Ridge Campus and considers herself a coach who helps students
learn not only how to speak a beautiful language proficiently, but also how
to understand more about the customs and history of the French people.
She arrived at her chosen field in a rather roundabout way. After high school, Stewart’s parents wanted her to take practical secretarial courses. That didn’t fit into her game plan, so instead Stewart enlisted in the Army, figuring that at the end of her stint, she’d use the GI Bill to pay for college. She chose a perfect year to join up, 1976, the year America celebrated its bicentennial. “I’d been playing the flute since I was nine years old, so I joined the Army Band,” Stewart remembers. Although getting through basic training was certainly not the “Girl Scout camp experience” recruiters promised, she made it. Army music school followed, and then the real work began. “To mark the bicentennial, any community or organization that wanted an armed services band for a parade could request one. I think we played 500 ‘gigs’ in a row that year,” she laughs.
Once her tour of duty was completed, Stewart attended Michigan State University (MSU) using the GI Bill. That meant you had to take a certain number of credits each term to get your funding. “One term there was nothing I could take except a French class,” she said.
It got her hooked. Before graduating, Stewart went to France, hoping to enroll in the Paris Conservatory to continue her musical studies, “but they told me I was too old,” she says. So she went back to MSU and completed a bachelor’s in French. The following year she taught English in a French high school, then it was on to graduate school at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee where she completed a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) in French.
Stewart’s been at Oakland Community College since 1990, sharing her love of the French language and French culture with hundreds of students over the years. She admits her classes are a lot of work, but students say the rewards are worth it. Not long ago, Stewart received an email from Patrick Corbett who took her classes eight years ago. Corbett says: “I have recently gotten a great job with EDS On star, answering the phone for calls from Quebec in French. I really love it and have gotten a few comments on how nice my French is…merci beaucoup.”
Along the way, Stewart’s students acquire far more than proficiency in speaking French. She provides an immersion into French culture, sharing French films, music, art and history with her students.
A French Club and study groups augment student learning. Field trips to French restaurants in Windsor or to French art exhibits at the Detroit Institute of Arts often find their way into the curriculum. And for many of Stewart’s students, the highlight of their French studies is a trip to France – a trip that’s crammed with sights and sounds and is as high energy as Stewart can make it.
Whatever a student’s age (and Stewart’s had them from 18 to 78 at OCC) and whatever the motivation for taking language classes, she says one thing holds true: “Learning to speak another language and learning about the culture of the speakers of that language literally opens up a new world to students.”