Modern languages professor Dr. Réjeanne LeBlanc has a very interesting academic year lined up. Starting in October she will be in Angers, France, on what may be StFX’s first ever professor exchange, to teach at Université Catholique de l’Ouest (UCO).

Her UCO counterpart, Marie-Noelle Cocton, will spend the year teaching at StFX.

“It will be a very interesting professional opportunity for me,” says Dr. LeBlanc. “This will give me an opportunity to see what kind of methodologies, books, and approaches are being used in France and hopefully bring some of the expertise back with me.”

She is also excited that her course load in France fits so well with her scholarly background.

Along with teaching a master’s course, Dr. LeBlanc’s main work will be at UCO’s Centre International D'Étude Française (CIDEF), which has a mandate to teach French as a foreign language to people from all over the world and at all different skill levels.

“I have two master’s degrees and one is in teaching French as a foreign language, so this is really directly related to my field.”

Dr. LeBlanc also holds a doctorate in linguistics.

The year-long adventure will be a true exchange. The professors will swap houses and cars as well as jobs. Both will keep their status at their universities and will continue to be paid by their respective universities.   

Dr. LeBlanc says the idea for the exchange originated with Prof. Cocton.

Every year, StFX sends four or five students to UCO as part of its junior year abroad program. A few years back, a delegation of UCO professors came to StFX, and while here started talking about how interesting it could be to have a professor exchange. This year, Prof. Cocton wrote the StFX department to see if anyone was interested in investigating the possibility.

Dr. LeBlanc expressed interest, and soon had the approval of both StFX’s Dean of Arts and the Academic Vice-President.

Coincidentally, Dr. LeBlanc will get an early taste of Angers life when she travels there in June to present her research at a previous scheduled conference at UCO, La femme dans la francophonie mondiale.

Along with Dr. Irene Bernard in StFX’s Faculty of Education, Dr. LeBlanc has been working on a research project collecting life stories of Acadian women in Nova Scotia aged 75 and older. They have interviewed a number of Acadian women to gauge what life was like while they were growing up and what it was like to grow up French.

The exchange year will also open up a new avenue of research connected to this project. Poitou and Chatelleault, two areas near Angers, are home to relatively important Acadian populations. Dr. LeBlanc says she is hoping she will be able to interview women from these communities of a similar age and compare the data.