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Sustainability and environmental justice are connected concepts; however, environmental justice serves as a foundation to an approach to sustainability that moves beyond conservation and preservation of resources for current and future generations to explore issues of equity in terms of access to resources and protection from environmental hazards. Examining environmental conditions for communities from an environmental justice lens uncovers disparities that suggest connections between lower socioeconomic status and exposure to environmental issues. This article addresses the need to integrate environmental justice across the German curriculum and demonstrates a case study approach for intermediate‐ and advanced‐level German classes. The first case study presents an Instagram job application for environmental justice projects in Berlin‐Neukölln, and the second case study deals with a blog about Schimmelwohnungen or apartments with mold in the city of Bremen. This article illustrates how case studies can be embedded in both a genre‐based approach and how case studies on environmental justice can be integrated in courses across the German curriculum.

The creation of pedagogical activities in line with genre‐based approaches has substantially shaped world language curriculum design and instruction, as seen in Martin (2002a), Crane (2006), and Maxim (2004); however, an insignificant number of principled guidelines suggests exactly how to achieve these pedagogical goals (Kubota, 2016; Ryshina‐Pankova, 2016; Schleppegrell, 2019). To this end, this article demonstrates how a genre‐based textual analysis through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) serves as a useful methodology for advanced learners of German at the university level. It introduces a unique online venue for exploring the GDR and selects Karin Bloth's narrative Stark und ohnmächtig zugleich (2004) from this website to conduct an SFL‐informed analysis regarding its generic structure, interpersonal meanings, and participant voices. The findings about the narrator's inner conflict as well as the social functions of language are directly applied to specific suggestions for pedagogical activities. The article concludes with a discussion of the benefits and implications of this methodology as a tool for world language educators to support their analyses of culturally relevant materials in order to develop content‐ and language‐integrated pedagogical activities.