Decolonizing German Studies While Dissecting Race in the American Classroom

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.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

A Culturally Relevant Approach to Food Customs in the German Curriculum

Brown

Devick

Zielinski

2021

“…Layne's “Decolonizing German Studies While Dissecting Race in the American Classroom” (2020), Merritt's “A Question of Inclusion: Intercultural Racism, and the North American German Classroom” (2020), and Reinhart Byrd's “Supporting Graduate Students of Color in German Studies: A Syllabus” (2020) provide excellent examples of antiracist analysis and strategies. Layne (2020) provides an example of her class, “Germany and the Black Diaspora” that centers blackness and comparative study of racism in Germany and the United States in a historical context, in order “to recover marginalized narratives, decenter whiteness, and offer students multiple perspectives on Germany and on Black cultures” (p. 84). Merritt (2020) focuses on the negative impacts of an “intercultural approach” (p. 177) that in spite of the name is “a white Eurocentric model” (p. 179) to teaching German language and culture on “Students of Color and other students who have not acclimated to Western university culture” (p. 177) and encourages us to rethink in critical terms “not just what we portray when we teach, but also how we teach and whether our methods foster inclusivity rather than perpetuate stigmas and stereotypes” (p. 178).…”

Section: Selected Practices and Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextualizing DEIA in the German language classroom: Terminology and history, DDGC and recent developments, and practices and resources

Tarnawska Senel

2023

This paper takes a closer look at diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in the context of German Studies and the language classroom in the United States. The first part of the article examines the terminology, provides a general history of DEI/DEIA in higher education in the United States, and traces the development of DEI practices and language to include accessibility, belonging, and anti‐racism. The second part of the article focuses on the scholarly collective Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum and its self‐reflective and self‐critical stance toward our field, solidarity efforts to create networks of tangible support and empowerment, and its foregrounding of activism. This leads to a discussion of the intersections between current political events and classroom practices. Finally, the last section details three DEIA practices in the classroom—positionality, social justice framework, and antiracism—as well as resources for their implementation. It also points to new promising developments, for example, new outcomes and assessments for the language and culture classroom and pedagogy of care.

“…With the exception of a few articles (cf. Layne, 2020), a discussion of what types of activities an instructor can use in the classroom to foster agency for the students in the target language has been absent. In this article, we present a project for an upper‐division writing course that fosters student‐centered learning.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Wild Zeitung—Translanguaging above and below the fold

Arnett

Jernigan

2023

Many discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion recognize that language students from underrepresented groups often do not see themselves mirrored in the target culture. In addition, they may not see themselves represented, except in a course on multiculturalism in German literature, in the language classroom. Recently, there have been a number of articles and studies designed to address this issue (Anya, 2020;Criser & Malakaj, 2020;Von Esch et al., 2020) and many instructors are actively working on the issue of inclusion. With the exception of a few articles (cf. Layne, 2020), a discussion of what types of activities an instructor can use in the classroom to foster agency for the students in the target language has been absent. In this article, we present a project for an upper-division writing course that fosters student-centered learning. We aim for the students to be able to envision themselves as successful participants in the target culture. This can be accomplished through translanguaging (cf. Canagarajah, 2020). TRANSLANGUAGINGTranslanguaging research is popular in the fields of Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) and bilingual education, but the concept has only recently been transferred to the teaching of foreign language writing (Yang & Fan, 2022). Translanguaging refers to the process by which speakers use more than one linguistic code to make sense of and interact with the world around them. Vogel and García (2017) argue that rather than speakers having autonomous systems for each dialect or language, they have a unitary linguistic repertoire, which they use strategically to navigate their environment. In and outside of the classroom, students are encouraged to use their full linguistic repertoire without regard to the social or political dominance of one language variety over another (García & Wei, 2014). In this manner, translanguaging has been successfully used to address decolonization in the foreign language classroom, particularly the issue of language discrimination. Translanguaging provides an opportunity for students to express their varied identities and view their backgrounds as a resource to construct meaning as they encounter the multifaceted target culture(s). Further, translanguaging frees the students from the pressure to conform to the idea of a monolingual native speaker of the standard language (Milroy & Milroy, 1985, p. 19), a goal widely deemed unrealistic, impossible