Diversity, Social Justice, and Accessibility in Grenzenlos Deutsch: Reflections on Digital Curation

Abstract:Grenzenlos Deutsch (GD) is an open educational resource (OER) that functions as a digital archive. Considerations of equity, social justice, and accessibility inform decision-making and workflow at all stages of fashioning the GD curriculum as a no-cost alternative to traditional beginning German textbooks. In this essay, six members of the GD team reflect on digital curation, considering how the team’s collective identities, values, and instructional goals intersect with the processes of creating and curating the curriculum, particularly the production and preservation of audiovisual material such as images, interviews, and videos as learning objects. Although these learning objects constitute a public archive, they also mark events of personal and collaborative significance in the private and professional lives of the GD collective, whose members played varying roles in producing these instructional materials.