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The article details an “Ausflug” to a Mt. Angel, OR as a model for incorporating engaged learning into the German classroom as a way of enhancing not only students’ language acquisition but also to promote social justice learning. I offer both theoretical and practical considerations, informed by scholarship on teaching culture in the German classroom, critical language pedagogy, as well as recent changes in the institutional context of the German program at my home institution. In doing so, this work contributes to ongoing conversations about teaching culture in the foreign language classroom, and offers suggestions for incorporating high‐impact practices into German classes as a way of increasing student engagement with learning material. Although the “Ausflug” was developed for post‐secondary students of German, it nevertheless provides a model that can be of use to German teachers at all levels.

Through a discussion of the ways in which institutions foreclose or enable connections across disciplines, we argue that scholars in Indigenous Studies and German Studies can seek out strategic points of alliance with each other in spite of the divergent histories and commitments of the two disciplines. Drawing on the authors’ reflections on their collaborative relationship, the article describes possibilities for challenging and intervening in institutional power structures that seek to further align the values of higher education with the prerogatives of neoliberalism in a settler colonial and xenophobic state. The authors suggest that German Studies scholars draw on critical frameworks in activist disciplines such as Indigenous Studies as well as recent critical interventions within German Studies in order to reimagine and increase commitments to transformative scholarship and pedagogies.

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An interactive exhibit at a university's 'World Language Day' challenges systems of privilege that organize the study of 'foreign' and 'world' languages. Through discursive framing, participants' written responses reveal an alignment with hegemonic ideologies of race and nation that elevate English monolingualism as a proxy for a White, virtuous cultural order within which 'World language' education safely-and additively-finds its place.2 inflicted by racial comparisons, i.e., no one expects you to be able to change your color, but you are expected to change the way you speak radically to earn respect. (Urciuoli, 1996, p. 26, emphasis our own) Urciuoli and Zentella's provocative discussions of a language/race cartography, call attention to the political (and for Zentella, anthropolitical) nature of language diversity. But, suppose we view this cartography another way. If such diversity should find its inverse condition-perhaps its 'opposite' in the context of English monolingualism-where might that fit into the present U.S. context? Is English monolingualism mapped onto race? Are particular racial phenotypes (or ideas about 'race' or racializing characteristics) mapped onto imagined monolingual English speakers within the U.S.? Zentella remarks that Latin@s are expected to change the way they speak "radically to earn respect," since Spanish in the U.S. has historically been castigated for breaching racialized borders, criminalized as invasive of "white public space" (Hill, 1999, as cited in Zentella, 2007. Zentella asserts an explicit systemic relationship between particular speech and non-whiteness: "In English, persistent foreign accents and non-standard verbs… signal an unwillingness to assimilate and a lack of discipline that requires external controls, more so when the speakers are poor immigrants defined as non-white" (p. 26).As professors of Spanish and German (Schwartz and Boovy, respectively) within a larger World Languages and Cultures program, why would we be interested in raising questions related to the social, cultural, and political value of monolingual English? Part of our task as educators is to teach 'foreign' languages in order to address university policies (and their related unspoken presuppositions) that (1) Our students are-or identify with-monolingual speakers of English; And, that (2) learning a language like Spanish or German will eradicate or combat monolingualism for all of its seemingly inherent cognitive and cultural deficiencies (cf. Ellis, 2006). Yet, we also recognize that not having to acknowledge these assumptionswhether they are curricular decisions articulated by our university, or tongue-in-cheek expressions of our own personal ideological orientations-is reflective of how unspoken and unseen systems of power and privilege benefit some (us) and oppresses others (including many of our students, including bi/multi-lingual heritage speakers of the languages we teach and in which we claim "expertise").Our awareness of these often-unacknowledged assumptions was piqued in 2014 ...