Unterrichtspraxis-Teaching German最新文献

Environmental issues have received significant attention in German Studies for a number of years, leading to innovations in both research and pedagogy. More recently, attention has focused on applied pedagogical practices such as service-learning projects and bilateral exchanges related to environmental sustainability. While these initiatives offer numerous potential benefits, as shown in research on high-impact practices, and while the topic may attract students to learn German, these forms of teaching entail a range of challenges and questions for educators that are distinct from the work traditionally carried out in German language pedagogy. This co-authored article offers resources for working through these challenges and introduces a collection of free online materials currently in development. We suggest a model of critical environmental thinking in the classroom that asks students to use the target language to reexamine familiar concepts and daily practices connected to the environment and apply their knowledge of other cultures to multimodal projects.

Film courses are now standard offerings in collegiate world language programs, but instructors have only begun to consider the unique benefits of teaching a television series to engage language learners in meaningful communication. As series have become the entertainment of choice for today's students, educators should consider the opportunities in developing course materials around extensive viewing tasks. Following a literacy-based approach, this article presents an intermediate language course designed around the hit German-language TV series Babylon Berlin (Sky/ARD 2017-present). Extensive viewing can help students develop critical interpretative skills and visual literacy while also addressing the need to target students' listening skills. This article situates this course within research on teaching with film and television and highlights how teaching with a series can provide rich cultural content as a backbone for course design that motivates intermediate learners to learn more about interwar history, culture, and politics. The article also offers reflections on the benefits and challenges of using television as a primary text and provides sample classroom activities, assignments, and assessments.

This article explores the intersection of international collaboration and community-engaged learning in the context of a curriculum development project focused on sustainability in German-speaking cultures. By closing the loop in international exchange between partners abroad and local community organizations, students in German Studies programs can streamline their engagement with sustainability and benefit from active use of their intercultural skill sets. However, significant difficulties arise when trying to simultaneously teach skills traditionally emphasized in German Studies programs, develop successful projects with local community practitioners, and collaborate effectively with international partners. This article discusses an upper-division course, taught primarily in German, in which students develop group projects by working with peers at a partner institution in Germany. The article provides reflection on three key areas of focus: bolstering students' intercultural abilities to engage with partners abroad, training students to leverage their intercultural skills through virtual exchange, and articulating how cultural context is relevant for ongoing local sustainable development projects. Strengthening these skills allows German Studies students to demonstrate the value of interculturally sensitive collaborators while using their cultural knowledge to benefit local sustainable development work.

To facilitate a more affirming classroom, this article highlights the implementation of culturally relevant and critical pedagogies of language learning to address issues related to social awareness in the language classroom. By appealing to cultural backgrounds of students and cultural backgrounds of diverse German-speaking populations, students learn more about social and cultural realities in the diverse world around them. In a culturally relevant classroom, educators increase opportunities for social awareness and meaningful dialogue about social issues by making German classrooms sites of diversity learning and relevant places for critical exchange. This article shares one component of our ongoing efforts to make our entire degree program more diverse by using culturally relevant pedagogy.

We are delighted to share with you a wonderful collection of articles in this fall issue of Die Unterrichtspraxis. Not only does this issue contain five regular articles, but we also present a special section on “Sustainability and Community Engagement in German Studies,” co-curated by Kiley Kost, Dan Nolan, and Seth Peabody.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are the focal point of Franziska Schweiger's article, a topic that recurs throughout the issue. Schweiger examines the intersection of contingent faculty labor and institutional diversity and offers four concrete steps for how German teachers and professional bodies can address systemic structures. The article by Karin Wurst proposes to tackle reforms in undergraduate and graduate education in tandem, being mindful to maintain student interest while also preparing graduate students as the faculty of the future. Joshua Brown presents a culturally relevant approach to food customs in the German curriculum, an article co-written with two former students, Tristan Devick and Connor Zielinski. It highlights the implementation of culturally relevant and critical pedagogies of language learning to address issues related to social awareness in the language classroom. Next, Kathryn Sederberg introduces an intermediate language course designed around the hit German-language TV series Babylon Berlin, including sample classroom activities, assignments, and assessments. The course follows a literacy-based approach, developing students' critical interpretative skills and visual literacy while also addressing the need to target students' listening skills. The last regular article by Kerstin Kuhn-Brown demonstrates how a genre-based textual analysis of Karin Bloth's narrative Stark und ohnmächtig zugleich (2004), through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics, can serve as a useful methodology for advanced learners of German to support their analyses of GDR texts and materials. The six contributions in the special section are introduced by the co-curators in their section introduction.

As always, we close with a big thank you to our authors, reviewers, and Editorial Advisory Board for their dedication to our profession, particularly in these ongoing tumultuous times. All articles are doubleblind reviewed by a minimum of two expert readers. Please consider adding yourself as a reviewer to our database at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/up and sharing your manuscripts. We especially welcome contributions on flexible models of language instruction, language for professional purposes, education abroad, and collaborations between K-12 and college instructors. If you are interested in writing a book or software review for the journal, please contact the book and software review editor Dr. Dan Walter.

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This article reports on an initiative to enrich the German curriculum at all levels via “Climate Stories,” a student-centered learning project that capitalizes on the encouraging strides being made in German-speaking countries to combat global climate change. Students identify a real-life “climate story” in the news in German that features a solution or important insight into an environmental issue. After digesting three articles, students create original artwork (visual art, collage, podcast, play) which they present to their peers. The project makes valuable cross-disciplinary connections to popular sustainability courses and is articulated vertically in the German curriculum, starting in general education and moving upward to each level within the German major. It also connects with an initiative in climate-focused pedagogy in the sustainability community that is active on campus and nationally. German students share their art and the “stories” behind the art, contributing insights and expertise from the German-speaking world to undergraduates who cannot access these stories themselves in German. In the general education curriculum, the project provides evidence of global learning. In the upper-level curriculum, projects are more complex, with oral and written components increasing in difficulty as students' proficiency grows.