A French Perspective on Living and Working in the Bay Area

A French Perspective on Living and Working in the Bay Area

By Tara Giddings 

Growing up in an idyllic village in the French countryside, near Nice and Marcé, Ariel Shannon (37) did not plan on one day teaching French to American college students. She now lives in the East Bay, but she considers France her home as she recalls memories of days running around with her childhood friends, blackberry juice all over their faces innocently telling their families they weren’t hungry for dinner. 

An adjunct professor in USF’s Department of Modern and Classical Languages for the last 5 years, Shannon teaches French and Italian. She also teaches in the French department at Cal, Berkeley, where she attended college. She describes her career path as one where “honestly I just fell into everything”. 

Shannon went from teaching one section in Italian to helping to develop the Italian studies department at USF. Her goal for the future is to create a minor in Italian. Shannon recently started teaching an Italian literature class and she says it’s “exciting to teach some literature” while also showing the administration student’s interest in Italian Studies. 

Born in San Francisco, Shannon’s mother moved back to France to raise her 6 month old daughter around family. When Shannon was 9 her mother decided to come back to SF for a work opportunity. Due to visa issues they moved back and forth between France and the US for the next few years. 

Shannon attended Lyccée Francais de San Francisco, allowing her to stay in the french education system. She faced difficulty leaving her beloved village, saying “I did my time in school and then I went home” to France during vacations to see the friends and family she missed. 

Shannon then attended University of California Berkeley, her mother’s alma mater, to stay close to her family in the Bay Area. She dropped out after her first year due to “culture shock here in the US” and lived France for a year before returning to Berkeley to study psychology. She began studying Italian, taking a class on the Devine Comedy with Rugero Stephanni, leading her to realize her passion for Italian. She graduated with a double major in psychology and Italian undergrad at Cal in 2003.

After graduating, Shannon worked in the world of wine with Robert Mondavi who “was one of the first to open a winery in Napa south of Calistoga”. She took people who didn’t know anything about wine and gave them tours and wine tasting experiences, eventually going on to work in Tuscany. 

UC Berkeley then offered her a scholarship to the graduate program in Italian Studies and she decided not to pursue becoming a sommelier, instead earning her MA. “I never had that vision of this is what I want to do” she says, “ I just always ended up doing things I enjoyed”. She later earned her PhD in Italian Studies from Cal in 2012. 

As she was finishing up grad school in 5 years ago Matthew Motyka, the language coordinator at USF and a friend, offered her a job teaching Italian. Shannon describes him saying “We have no one else. It’s you. We start Monday.” Shannon enjoys her job saying “your job really is your interaction with your students” not a lot of research or work with other faculty members.

 She describes being an adjunct as “from a university perspective” the advantage of adjuncts is “you don’t have to provide the same benefits, you don’t have to guarantee the same course load”. Shannon also says it’s “increasingly hard as an adjunct to find actual tenured positions”. 

In response to the current issues surrounding the new contract for full-time USF faculty Shannon, who as an adjunct professor is not personally affected by the vote, says “in teaching everyone insists on security a lot more, but no other job has that security”. But, “I do think financially it should be something that gets more respect”. After the full-time faculty voted yes on the 6 year contract and a workload provision for new hires, Shannon says she appreciates how at USF the “faculty stand together”.

Though she once struggled to feel comfortable in the Bay Area, Shannon says “It took going home a few times and realizing that as French as I feel here, when I go home I feel very Americanized.” She returns home to France, where she is a dual citizen, saying “I have so many memories there and that’s kind of magical”. 

Shannon lives in Lafayette where she enjoys the outdoors and finds her move from the city “really helped…to create a middle ground” feeling closer to “the elements of that country life I had growing up. She now says “I love living here” as she chooses to stay in the US for her family and work. 

Shannon says “I ended up doing something I loved.” Following her passions led her to teaching at USF.