Traditions and Transitions: Curricula for German Studies

By Wilfrid Laurier University Press

16

Mathias Schulze (University of Waterloo)

Mathias Schulze (University of Waterloo) reviews the mutual relationship between the academic fields of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and German Studies. He argues that, while CALL has long influenced teaching and learning German, its importance is still much overlooked. He then addresses continuing challenges and further curricular contributions of computers to German Studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Nov 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781554584673

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Traditions and Transitions

On Broadening the Visibility and Scope of Curriculum Inquiry for German Studies

John L. Plews, Saint Mary’s University, and Barbara Schmenk, University of Waterloo

Traditions and Transitions: Curricula for German Studies is a unique and timely collection of essays by Canadian and international experts in the field of German as a foreign or second language and culture education. It is devoted to wide-ranging discussions on why and how curricula for post-secondary German should evolve. The genesis of the book was the similarly titled conference Traditions and Transitions: German Curricula, held at the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, University of Waterloo, on 26-28 August 2010. The first of its kind ever to be held in Canada, this conference provided a unique opportunity to gather an emerging network of scholars for a focused exchange of ideas and to examine critically both long-standing and innovative approaches to curriculum thinking and program design for teaching German at the tertiary level in Canada and elsewhere. The conference aimed to broaden the visibility and scope of scholarship on curriculum for post-secondary German, particularly in Canada, by emphasizing the fundamental importance of curriculum development and curriculum understanding. Taking up the challenge set by the conference to mark a juncture in the field’s previously limited scholarly attention to curriculum, the contributors to the present collection explore various aspects of the conceptual or material foundations of traditional or new curriculum goals and orientations; content and materials selection and sequencing; syllabus or course design; curriculum enactment in the disciplinary interrelations between teachers and students; language, culture, and place; classroom pedagogy, interaction, and activities; and program evaluation and promotion.

Of Pastimes and Past Times

This collection of essays is unique, since curriculum, as a fundamental object of professional activity and academic study, remains under-researched, undertheorized, under-reported, often unacknowledged, and frequently even neglected in the field of German Studies. Most curriculum work in the field takes place informally in collegial conversation in department corridors, in the form of new course proposals based on a professor’s area of research specialization, or as revisions to the syllabuses of language classes made on the initiative of a language program coordinator attentive to the reconfigurations of new textbooks or new editions of old textbooks; of course, some colleagues also dedicate a considerable amount of time to authoring textbooks. This everyday curriculum work concerns the development of a single course or a brief series of courses; attention to intra-program articulation guarantees that the respective contents of existing and proposed courses do not overlap too much and that planned language acquisition proceeds according to distinct steps.

A broader consideration of curriculum development occurs when departments introduce specialized or alternative major or minor programs—something that has become a slight trend in recent decades (see Guse, 2010; Prokop, 1996; Schmenk, 2010; and below); here, various existing courses are grouped into particular academic trajectories, perhaps with the addition of an introductory course and specialized seminar or in combination with courses appropriated from neighbouring disciplines, or the language of the instruction and study materials is switched from German to English while the courses are made more broadly thematic and for general interest (see below). The planning and implementation of such development occur within the single departmental unit or language program and are tracked statistically, while critical evaluation is rare. Although this kind of curriculum—or, rather, course—development is often mirrored across institutions, any trans-institutional discussion and coordinated action would be unusual.

Meanwhile, curriculum scholarship is, on occasion, formally presented at national and international conferences, mostly in the form of overviews and reports. Some discussions are published in journals for teaching German or modern languages, albeit usually as solitary articles. Again, the focus tends to be on a single course, with outlines of classroom activities and assignments. The articulation of the course in the program, the program as a whole, student perspectives, experiences, and interpretations, and the theoretical, pedagogical, and critical underpinnings, are less explored in this scholarship. On the whole, more critical understandings of curriculum do not feature in the everyday operations of, program development in, or academic scholarship from the field.

However, aspects of curriculum—particularly learning goals or target competences—have very much been reflected either wholly or partially in larger modern languages initiatives such as the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 1999, 2001), the ACTFL Standards for Foreign Language Learning (National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project, 2006), the Modern Language Association (MLA) report Foreign Languages and Higher Education (2007; henceforth Report), and, of course, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001; henceforth CEFR). While the collective disciplinary reach of the more individually initiated course planning and related reports is likely minimal, the influence of these larger projects on the plane of the modern language disciplines per se is undeniably vast. Of course, it would be wise to temper any enthusiasm here, for the true impact of such projects at the level of the many scattered university and college language departments is still very difficult to ascertain. New, theorized, detailed, comprehensive, documented, and published curriculum development for German at the post-secondary departmental level—such as the Georgetown project (Department of German, n.d.)—remains very rare.

Specifically in Canada, all departments and programs represent their curricula in barest bureaucratic fashion in university calendars, providing course titles and brief descriptions and indicating that students will take a certain number of courses from those listed (or, rather, delivered) in order to satisfy degree requirements. Nowadays, this is replicated somewhat verbatim on departmental websites. Few departments publicly advertise their learning goals and ideal curriculum outcomes, though this information is provided to varying degrees and in segmented fashion on individual course outlines, reflecting university policy or an individual instructor’s conscientiousness. Of course, university calendars, with their limited space and particularized functions, do not permit detailed accounts of the underlying motivations and objectives of the curriculum, let alone explanations of when, how, and why such course lists originated or were inherited (cf. Batts, 1998; Plews, 2007 & this volume); thus, the brief course descriptions they contain prioritize content over desired skills, knowledge, and attributes or experiences. Likewise, websites or hardcopy program guides could afford to elaborate more on a given department’s curriculum, surely to positive effect in terms of program clarity and professionalization, profile building, and student recruitment and retention.

Beyond calendars and websites, the annual meetings of the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German (CAUTG) have regularly been the milieu for panel discussions on the discipline as well as curriculum work. Such discussions are often titled to reflect some crisis in the field; occasionally some have presented on specific course or program development (e.g., Enns & Joldersma, 2000). These brief events have initiated fruitful conversations, which often, however, die on the vine. Indeed, the field of German in Canada, while carrying on the everyday work of curriculum delivery, has largely eschewed curriculum scholarship (for exceptions, see Krause, Scheck, & O’Neill, 1992; see also Guse, 2010; Plews, 2007; Prokop, 1996).

This limited attention to curriculum thinking in the field of German has enabled traditional teaching and curriculum to persist. For what do we think of when we do not care to think about our curriculum? We probably conceive a structured course of study, that is, a sequence of courses. Certainly, the early use of the word curriculum referred to the sum of all the courses of one’s studies across a number of years, and not to any particular course or part or aspect of a course (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995, p. 71). In our field, this invariably begins with a numbered sequence of language acquisition courses from beginners’ through intermediate to advanced levels that are essentially transparent with the organization of the chosen language textbooks. Textbooks represent a default curriculum that is primarily a function of business, designed for profit by external experts riding the current bandwagon (Grittner, 1990), providing language that is controlled and controllable, and often portraying culture as singular moments in time that are frequently normalized, stereotypical, and uncritical (see Pinar et al., 1995, pp. 775-780); although teachers will supplement textbooks with other materials and both teachers and students alike will occasionally reinterpret, resist, or skip the assigned method as well as portions of the content, textbooks generally do not account for or encourage local or appropriate pedagogy (Kramsch & Sullivan, 1996; Widdowson, 1994; see also Schmenk, this volume). Our curriculum, then, likely starts life as a surrogate.

The sequence of language courses has then traditionally yielded—in terms of program or degree options as well as course aims, content, and materials—to a further selection of courses largely based on periods, genres, and authors comprising the literary canon (Batts, 1998). In fact, until very recently, it would have been fair to say in a universal manner that this lineal language-to-literary-history design for curriculum for post-secondary German, at least in Canada, has experienced little substantial change in its 150 years of existence (Plews, 2007); interest in German Studies, business German, applied linguistics, and Kulturstudien have been add-on innovations (Prokop, 2005, pp. 75-76; see also Prokop, 1996; cf. Guse, 2010). Furthermore, while the language segment of the curriculum can be defined in terms of dictated methodology, until most recently the separate literary curriculum has been distinguished by an absence of methodology: literacy development has been either taken for granted or simplified to a matter of choosing shorter and apparently easier texts (i.e., German short stories, novellas, short poems, some modern drama), followed by longer and more difficult ones (i.e., novels, epics, older drama, more complex poetry); we have tended to pay little attention to the nature of our students as bi- or multi-lingual readers (see Even & Dollenmayer, this volume); and the examination of form, syntax, plot, and genre have tended to be conducted for their own sake or for the sake of learning cultural-historical knowledge rather than for critical, reflective, creative, and self-expressive or self-critical effect (see, in this volume, Koerner; Kramsch; Fordham Misfeldt; Warner & Gramling); these latter facets are postponed for graduate school or indefinitely (e.g., drama is usually treated as a reading text and only rarely for performance).

Is that it for curriculum? Traditionally, yes, so long as the so-called four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing are portioned out in language classes and so long as sufficient periods, genres, and canonical authors are covered in the literature classes. Certainly, communicative language teaching of the past three or four decades has ushered in new fluency-driven, meaning-focused, and student-oriented criteria for learner competence. But it has not questioned—and may even have entrenched—the monolingual pretense upon which the first half of the curriculum has been structured. Likewise, when not left for graduate school, the structuralist, feminist, post-structuralist, queer, and post-colonial disassembling and decentring of former grand narratives have potentially infused literature and culture classes with urgent new questions and perspectives that have contested the national and monocultural reference point of German Studies, but they have not been used in the field to challenge the ascendency of the literary text in the other half of the curriculum; in this regard, film, as drama before it, has been integrated as literature of a kind. Nor have these two halves necessarily been brought into logical association (cf. Kramsch, 1993, 1995). Prokop (2005, p. 79) identified distance courses as a single noticeable change; Plews (2007, p. 10) found a smattering of non-standard courses on contemporary culture, media studies, gender studies, intercultural studies, Yiddish and Jewish culture, Holocaust literature, and research and literary theory, as well as credit-bearing study or work abroad. Yet for the most part, the language-to-literature curriculum trajectory that is textbook-driven and that recirculates the hand-me-down canon has endured; its taxonomy of courses has availed itself of respected Tylerian design principles of general learning objectives, content, organization, and assessment whose meanings are mythologically taken-for-granted (Cherryholmes, 1988). This is despite considerable changes in demographics, society and culture, technology and communications, the economy, social thought, and critical methodology globally in recent times.

Most German departments in Canada, however, have largely failed to notice that curriculum as a field of study has been undergoing a sustained reconceptualization since the 1960s (Pinar et al., 1995, esp. Chs. 1 & 4ff.). A growing awareness of the civil rights movements, of counter-, popular, and youth cultures, of globalization and neoliberal economics, and of information technology, as well as an engagement with changes in theory (including phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, neo-Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and autobiography), have brought a paradigm shift in curriculum scholarship: no longer is it merely a technical bureaucratic and developmental concern regarding how to work on certain ideas; it now requires scholars and teachers to critically, interpretively, and aesthetically understand why we work on certain ideas and what it is like for us and our students to do so in the ways we do (Pinar et al., 1995, Ch. 1). Pinar et al. explain that new curriculum theory focused on educational experience not as it was planned by technocrats, but rather as it is lived, embodied, and politically structured (p. 358).

No matter whether the curriculum for post-secondary German is an inheritance of unspecified origin, and no matter whether our curriculum work is an altruistic pastime, a singular response to a particular, real, or imagined circumstance, or, preferably, a sustained, perhaps collective and community-oriented mode of informed scholarly consideration, the phenomenon of curriculum endures as the intention, stance, and process through which we begin to arrange the working out of ideas that become a field of potential learning. As such, doing curriculum is a fundamental way for a field to communicate itself to future generations, that is, to represent, invent, and sustain itself. Perhaps the shortage of especially scholarly attention to curriculum for German in Canada, as elsewhere, is an effect of the field’s economy of symbolic capital: like all modern language fields, German still places its internal and public professional worth predominantly in the domain of published literary and cultural interpretation and, to a slightly lesser extent, linguistic and applied linguistic interventions (that is, ideas once they have been worked out, at least temporarily). Far from expressing contempt for or impatience with these disciplinary contributions, for the examination and (re)creation of the meanings of the forms, values, and modes of language, culture, and other symbolic codes constitutes who we are, we invite fellow practitioners to recognize in our curricula—that is, in our arrangements of ideas for learning, the potential of that learning, and the concomitant human relations of pedagogy—a further set of meaningful cultural codes that are worthy of critical interpretation, additional concepts, and rigorous revision. Like contemporary curriculum studies, we could dare to ask why and what is it like in regard to the people, content, method, goals, and outcomes represented and involved in post-secondary German. Indeed, many of the humanities and social science theories and approaches at play in cultural and linguistic analysis can and do work to great effect in second language education research (cf. Kramsch, 1998a) and could engender a critical curriculum studies specifically for German. It is the goal of this volume to start a dialogue between critical curriculum studies and German as a foreign language and to turn our intellectual consideration and activity to a reconceptualization and consequent opening up of our curriculum.

Challenging the Traditional Curriculum

This collection challenges the traditional curriculum principles and their underlying assumptions. The controlled acquisition of native-like grammar accuracy and communicative competence as well as the accumulation of literary-historical facts bound to a fixed notion of the nation-state for cross-or intercultural comparison are becoming ever more indefensible in light of continued and more far-reaching changes in ideas, technology, demographics, and economic principles. Recent post-structuralist and post-colonial critiques of Cartesian rationalism and of the assumed primacy of the Western metropole, the invention of virtual communications and information technologies, the increase in and greater ease of human mobility for work and pleasure, and, in particular, the neoliberal form of current globalization powered by borderless international institutions and the absolutism of business principles are setting the conditions by which as a species, we may be imagining ourselves in new ways, especially with respect to issues of identity and citizenship (Smith, 2003, p. 35). They are certainly transforming sociocultural life outside and inside schools around the globe (Matus & McCarthy, 2003, p. 73; see also Peters, 2001). The most immediate effects upon the academy, generally, have been the institutional focus on education management—with corporate-style administrations, offices of communication and public affairs, branding, business plans, and a preoccupation with rankings and statistical league tables—as well as internationalization, the digitization of knowledge and the teaching environment, knowledge transfer to the non-academic community and especially the business sector, and the greater integration of critical thought in scholarship and teaching. Such developments necessarily challenge many taken-for-granted ideas and approaches in post-secondary curriculum and instruction for German, since they have created distinct shifts in the linguistic and intercultural nature, needs, and interests of our communities and, of course, our students. A concern for just such conditions likely prompted a recent president of the CAUTG to suggest to the field in Canada that we should also examine our curricula (both on the graduate and undergraduate level) and to go on to ask these questions:

Are we giving our students the best possible training to be competitive on an international academic market? What should the focus of our course offerings be? The proclaimed transcultural and translingual competence? What kind of canon should we teach and test, if we employ a canon at all? Do we need more literary, cultural, or linguistic studies? Should these streams be separated or taught as one? How do we train and prepare our students for the kinds of courses they will definitely teach in their early careers, i.e., language studies? (Gölz in CAUTG, 2010a, p. 1)

Certainly, despite the cultural wealth and scholarly acuity of the field, our traditional approaches and offerings seem inadequate or obsolete if they are meant to prepare students for the academic or non-academic workplace, let alone to enable them to create a place for themselves in the contemporary world as critically reflective multilingual individuals.

For post-secondary German, neoliberal globalization has resulted in a number of specific accommodations. First, there has been a noticeable resurgence in the discipline’s reference to its own state of affairs as a crisis. In Canada, this is typified by the CAUTG panel discussions mentioned above. Kramsch, Howell, Warner, and Wellmon’s (2007) discussion of frameworks for German as a foreign language education in the United States was similarly motivated by "the current crisis in the teaching of German at American colleges and universities (p. 151; italics added); in this case, the onus of that crisis was placed as much on the long-standing tension between humanistic and instrumental models of education as on enrolment figures. Skidmore (2010) has traced the enduring discourses of crisis and threat" in North American Germanistik in almost a century of professional literature, and thus during times we might now be inclined to look upon as symbolically, if not also statistically, more prosperous. Indeed, symptomatic of the contemporary conviction of crisis is an obsession with enrolment numbers. The CAUTG alternately rejoices and laments the ups and downs of yearly enrolment figures from across the country; positive statistics for one area of programming are accompanied by regrets for declines in another and gloomy predictions for the future (see, for example, Gölz in CAUTG, 2009b, pp. 1-2). But emphasizing the failures of education institutions over their successes can be viewed as a key feature of neoliberal principles in action (Smith, 2003, p. 38).

The second accommodation by the discipline is in keeping with the Anglo-American foundations of globalization: it has switched more and more to teaching in English, which, of course, is especially ironic for a field focused on the representation, communication, and production of all things in a language other than English, one that can also be regarded as an international language. Canadian German programs offer courses in English on German cultural history, aspects of literature and culture, film, popular music, media, visual culture, political culture, the Holocaust, linguistics, and—again sparing no irony—how to research German culture; at several institutions, expertise in literary interpretation is gained in English, not German (Plews, 2007, pp. 8-11). Perhaps the most pronounced example of this shift is the German Studies minor now being proposed at the University of British Columbia that will not involve a language component but instead will comprise German literature and culture, including film and media studies, taught in English (CAUTG, 2010b, p. 12). Clearly, contrary to Batts’s (1998, p. 177) concern that advanced German language acquisition will become unnecessary should the traditional literature and culture content curriculum shift to more German studies through history, sociology, and politics, it appears that it is the emphasis or re-emphasis on the study of culture as the ultimate and exclusive goal of German programming—and not recognizing that the context of language learning and teaching is already culture (Kramsch, 1993)—that has taken the German out of German Studies. Co-opting foreign language culture as part of a—theoretically speaking, Anglo-American—cultural studies program for the sake of teaching an Other’s socio-cultural discourses without attending to the foreignness—to the student—of the context that is the original foreign language of the Other both cancels the fundamental interculturality of the field and maintains the authority of the Anglo-American cultures embedded in the instructive English language; it reinforces rather than queries the pretense that another culture is clearly knowable through one’s own.

The third accommodation that post-secondary German has experienced in the time of neoliberal globalization concerns the very real pressure from university administrations for departments to put undifferentiating accounting principles before site-specific pedagogical wisdom or need. Universities have not necessarily singled out foreign languages for harsh treatment, but the often comparatively small size of programs and the pedagogically appropriate smaller student-to-instructor and student-to-student ratios of courses in second language acquisition and culture in the target language have compelled modern language departments to answer obligingly to demands to rightsize by accepting reduced capacity in terms of faculty and course allocations, raising caps on single-course enrolments, squeezing students into fewer sections of courses, cancelling or cutting lower-enrolment courses, reducing degree options, or relinquishing the German program entirely. Of course, such measures eliminate the human, material, and structural ability of small programs to generate the sizable statistics necessary to compete in the intra-university departmental league tables that are used in the first place. And so it will continue. In Canada, the most recent casualties have included the graduate and major programs at Queen’s University, the major at Mount Allison, and the major at Saint Mary’s.

The fourth accommodation in the discipline is the compulsion to join the tertiary education sector’s internationalization activities. Universities’ first phase of internationalization, the overseas recruitment of international students for the lucrative differential tuition fees they pay, has recently been joined by a second phase as administrations have realized the domestic marketing potential of programming for preparing local students to become global citizens. This second phase involves two specific areas of curriculum development and design. The first is the promotion and delivery of international study experiences, an area in which German, like all modern languages, has an established and successful track record (for a Canadian example, see Fordham Misfeldt, this volume) and, as mentioned above, has recently developed more credit-granting options. However, overseas offerings that do not require knowledge of a foreign language remain by far the most popular choices for North American students and as such garner the most attention from administrative offices. Thus, the current focus even for a German program is to offer new travel study courses in English (e.g., University of New Brunswick, n.d.). The second area of curriculum development for educating the global citizen has been often university-wide initiatives to identify, expand, and advertise intercultural aspects in existing courses. In this regard, the fundamental interculturality of German and other modern languages has curiously often remained underutilized, leading to valiant pleas for inclusion (see, e.g., Skidmore, 2005). Yet Warner (2011, p. 15) also cautions that we should be using our expertise to critique strictly utilitarian discourses of internationalization and to complicate myths of language and culture.

Besides accommodating the conditions of globalization, post-secondary German has responded in ways that are potentially more sustainable, sensitive, and even resistant (cf. Smith, 2003, pp. 41-43). German, as a subject area and body of scholarship, and especially as a group of scholars, has been central to the composition of both the MLA Report (2007) and the CEFR (2001; see also Schmenk, this volume), not to mention the development of computer-assisted language learning and digital technologies (see Schulze, this volume). While each of these may still be influenced by the functionalism of dominant neoliberalism,¹ they have also drawn on contemporary humanities, social sciences, and education discourses—particularly post-structuralism and cultural studies, second language acquisition theory, and socio-cultural and ecological theories of language—to propose and further critique potential guiding notions of communicative, intercultural, and transcultural competence and pluri-, multi-, and translingualism. This has led some scholars and departments in Canada and the United States, for instance, to examine and redesign their teaching and curriculum with a focus on intercultural studies (Dueck & Jaeger, this volume) or genre-based literacy (Byrnes & Maxim, 2004; Department of German, n.d.; Ryshina-Pankova, this volume; Swaffar & Arens, 2006). Still others suggest a critical pedagogy frame (see Kramsch et al., 2007).

Contemporary theories are enabling second language education scholars to promote greater instructional and curricular awareness of not just the functional-analytical but also the interpretive, critical, affective, and creative needs of students. They are expanding the premise of the foreign language classroom and informing a redefinition of the foreign language student. Peck (1985, p. 51) some time ago suggested that if traditional foreign language literature classes were rethought so that they adopted a more post-structural/post-colonial understanding of the nature of text as well as a more imaginative role for students, the study of literature could shift away from interpreting texts to a more cultural studies understanding of how they are created within the intertextual spectrum of ‘past significance and present meaning’ or in a variety of cultural and institutional contexts (cf. Warner & Gramling, this volume); this would enable students to study various discursive activities in a productive rather than a reproductive environment. Dissatisfied with the fraudulent traditional monolingual and monocultural nation-bounded foundation (Forsdick, 2003, 2005) of studying German as a foreign language and culture, several other scholars (e.g., Cheesman, 2007; Gramling, 2010; Mani, 2007; Mani & Segelcke, 2011; Spokiene, 2007) have proposed widening inquiry and teaching to include the inter- or transcultural perspectives of minority writers. Closing the circle around the canon, Taberner (2011) encourages us to find and explore the transnational contexts and transcultural perspectives assumed to be characteristic of minority literature also already in much majority or nonminority literature. In light of transculturality—and returning to Peck’s point—instead of privileging one side or the other of the majority/minority binary, our curricula might rather investigate their dynamic relation and the constructedness of the seemingly arbitrary division.

Similarly reassessing the foreign language student, Kramsch (1998b) has argued that the language learner is no longer to be regarded simply as someone who acquires grammatical-lexical knowledge but rather is to be understood as someone who must know the rules of interpretation by having knowledge and experience of language and language use. She elaborates by identifying such a learner as a multilingual subject who develops symbolic competence, that is, someone who comes into being by establishing a distance vis-à-vis one’s usual habitus and explicitly reflecting upon it through a judicious use of contextualization cues […] that highlight the complex and contradictory nature of the [intercultural] context (Kramsch, 2009, p. 116; see also Ch. 7 of the same). This further intercultural dimension of symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2010, p. 363) heralds a potential paradigm shift in foreign language teaching and curriculum, enabling us to reinterpret the learning of foreign languages as not gaining a mode of communication across cultures, but more as acquiring a symbolic mentality that grants as much importance to subjectivity and the historicity of experience as to the social conventions and the cultural expectations of any one stable community of speakers (p. 365)

Ever sublating the traditional language and literature curriculum divide, Kramsch (2009, p. 195) suggests supporting foreign language students’ development as multilingual subjects by assigning creative and self-validating encounters with the works of specifically multilingual authors, that is, already existing symbolic spaces that show how the subject is fashioned by her/his languages and also uses those languages to fashion a self.

In contrast to the accommodations of crisis talk, Englishing over the study of foreign language culture, program pruning, and utilitarian internationalization, approaches informed by interculturality, foreign language literacy development, and/or critical, self-reflective, and creative transculturalism place the pedagogical relationship between the student of German and the German language and culture at the heart of our curriculum thinking. The resulting curricula for German studies would of course include the known entities of communicative and cultural sensitivity or knowledge of how to participate in the target speech community, a nuanced lexicon, the rules of linguistic conventions, pragmatics, metalinguistics, translation skills, and critical thinking skills; they would surely also promote students’ reflexivity and creativity with language for their own sake by encouraging them to consider the nature of language, of literary narrative, of cultural assumptions and intertextualities: what was said, and what was not said—both in the text and by the students (Kramsch, 2010, p. 363). While our curriculum development has recently often been focused on managing or raising the enrolment caps of our language classes and converting knowledge of German culture for consumption in English, the above responses suggest rather that we change tack in order to rethink and attend to what is happening—or not happening—in our language classes: To what extent are students learning that practically everything they do in a German language class is not transparent, fixed, and unproblematic, but rather already cultural or transcultural and potentially complex and creative (see Kramsch, 1993, 2010)? What would happen if a conceptual foundation of our design and implementation of curriculum were that students’ encounters with Otherness must necessarily remain unfinished? What would then be the nature of discussions in class, and what would be the interest garnered for further courses in the target language?

There are already some signs of countering the above-cited backward-looking lament. For example, bucking the trend toward German in English, at the University of Winnipeg, the Department continues to offer the 3- and 4-year B.A. in German Studies, but the program’s curriculum has been extensively revised. Beginning in September 2009, it [has emphasized] the study of language, linguistics, and culture in courses taught primarily in German (CAUTG, 2009a, p. 15). Similarly, Ottawa has introduced a new major in German language and culture that requires one semester of study abroad (CAUTG, 2011, p. 35), and there is a new international joint M.A. in Intercultural German Studies at Waterloo and Mannheim (CAUTG, 2011, p. 44) and a further joint Ph.D. between Alberta and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Particularly innovative is the example of the German curriculum developed at the Collège international des Marcellines, a private post-secondary institution in Montreal, in conjunction with the Goethe-Institut. Using the Content and Language Integrated Learning approach to language teaching, the college offers five semesters of German: after an initial intensive language course, the second through fourth semesters focus on content learning about German arts and culture, history, and Landeskunde and current affairs, with a final semester devoted to preparation for the Goethe-Zertifikat B2 or C1 (see Kugler, 2011). These examples show that the fear that we think our students have of taking a content course—or even the majority of a program—in the target language need not be complemented by an inability on our part to imagine offering them just such courses that enable critical and creative access to and self-expression through foreign language and culture—that is, precisely neither German exclusively in English nor nostalgia for teaching literary history in German. Certainly, our innovative responses of textual and critical diversification to explore different questions and of reidentifying the foreign language learner in her/his own image correctively challenge the arbitrary and discursive nature of our existing curricular structures; they in no way put our departments or discipline at risk (cf. Rosello, 2003).

Current Scope

The scholars in this edited volume tend to work in four particular academic subfields—second language acquisition, second language education, critical applied linguistics, and cultural studies—and have drawn on the various critical and methodological perspectives of these areas in order to establish new dialogue and consolidate and expand on ideas, theories, and emerging practices regarding curriculum development and understanding in the field of post-secondary German as foreign/second language and culture. Some chapters propose more theoretical engagement with the curriculum for German, while others provide explorations of new course, curriculum, or program policy or foundations, design, methods, materials, and assessment. Some focus on specific contexts or on technology and new media, while others examine learners’, instructors’, or speakers’ curriculum relations and experiences. As a whole this collection questions standard structural practices and perspectives in traditional second language curriculum design and thinking and seeks greater attention to student needs and interests. Though it is far from exhaustive, we hope this volume will encourage the continued discussion of curriculum for German and perhaps even other similar volumes.

The opening chapters discuss the imagination, passion, and subject positions of speakers between languages. In Chapter 1, Claire Kramsch (University of California, Berkeley) theorizes and illustrates the imaginative dimension of translingual and transcultural competence necessary for curriculum thinking and design for foreign language teaching. She focuses on the imagination in teaching languages as a cognitive and social process in the construction of meaning, essential to the goal of mutual understanding. In Chapter 2, Alice J. Pitt (York University) draws on personal narratives and psychoanalytical theory to reflect on the emotional dimensions of the language learning experience. Her account reveals how the language learner does unpredictable, passionate things with the target language that go against the pedagogy and curriculum of linguistic mastery and fixed representations of culture. In Chapter 3, John L. Plews (Saint Mary’s University) uses post-colonial theories to analyze Canadian Germanistik as system of social organization that supports certain relations of power. He then proposes rethinking the subject positions of professors and students of German in Canada through post-colonialism in order to intervene in institutional and pedagogical structures.

The next two chapters examine the theoretical foundations and pedagogical reality of textbooks. In Chapter 4, Barbara Schmenk (University of Waterloo) analyzes the transition from a North American to a European textbook for teaching beginners’ German at a Canadian university. She critically accounts for the decisions, implications, and challenges involved in implementing a curricular shift from guidelines set by ACTFL (1999, 2001) to those set by the CEFR (2001). In Chapter 5, Dietmar Rösler (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) questions the theoretical and practical innovation and consistency of the so-called communicative turn in the foreign language curriculum planning and teaching of the past thirty years. Using German-as-a-foreign/second language textbooks, he identifies the pitfalls of communicative language teaching in regard to form, content, and educational development.

The next three chapters focus on the role shared by the first and target languages in teaching pronunciation, speaking, and reading. In Chapter 6, Mareike Müller (University of Illinois at Chicago) examines pronunciation training as a realm in German-as-a-foreign/second language curricula where the model of the native speaker has persisted. In light of the intelligibility principle and analyses of student beliefs about pronunciation learning, she proposes the intercultural speaker as an alternative basis on which to reframe pronunciation teaching. In Chapter 7, Grit Liebscher (University of Waterloo) discusses the roles of students’ first and second languages in the classroom enactment of the language acquisition curriculum. Drawing on research on multilinguals’ language use and data from the language classroom, she proposes a framework for curriculum research that embraces learners’ awareness of their bilingual or multilingual identities. In Chapter 8, Susanne Even (Indiana University) and David Dollenmayer (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) argue for the use of bilingual texts in the transitional third semester of a language program in order to develop students’ second language literacy in a way that attends especially to language awareness and cultural knowledge. Their analysis of using bilingual texts includes an explanation of Voll Easy, their own bilingual novel invented for the classroom.

The following four chapters address curricular concerns for the reflectivity, creativity, affectivity, and institutional positioning of language students. In Chapter 9, Allison Cattell (University of Waterloo) draws on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as phenomenology to explore the transition from methods-era curricula to post-method approaches to foreign/second language and culture teaching. Wittgenstein’s concepts are used to help overcome educational practice as a skill or institutional service separate from practitioners and to realize the truly reflective teaching that is essential to post-method practices. In Chapter 10, Morgan Koerner (College of Charleston) proposes using Roland Barthes’s theory of the writerly text as a basis for curriculum design and implementation for German language and literature. He takes issue with formal approaches to literary study and illustrates how to enact a curriculum for reading and writing German through parody that is more participatory, more open-ended, and more creative. In Chapter 11, Kim Fordham Misfeldt (University of Alberta) describes the curricular motivation for reading a complete novel as well as using specifically drama pedagogy in the context of an intensive, short-stay, German immersion program. While including literature coheres with traditional domestic curricula, the location of immersion and use of drama pedagogy diverge considerably from formalist or even critical approaches, enabling different kinds of intercultural knowledge and self-knowledge. In Chapter 12, Chantelle Warner and David Gramling (University of Arizona) explore the pedagogical–analytical stance of Contact Pragmatics as a collaborative approach for teachers and students to go beyond standard historical contextualization for competent literary interpretation in advanced language classes. They propose analyzing the institutional pragmatic position of second language readers in regard to the foreign language texts they read, that is, the rule-governed affective-experiential space of interpreting (and misreading).

The next two chapters examine curriculum development and design based on sequenced genre literacy and a cultural studies approach for intercultural learning. In Chapter 13, Marianna Ryshina-Pankova (Georgetown University) draws on a functional view of language and language learning to theorize a genre-based curricular progression for the development of advanced German-as-a-foreign-language literacy abilities. Such an approach realizes the integration of language and culture in extended instructional sequences. She illustrates the progression by analyzing texts on the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Chapter 14, Cheryl Dueck (University of Calgary) and Stephan Jaeger (University of Manitoba) document curriculum development in a German program at a midsize university that follows the trend from traditional Germanistik to a cultural studies orientation of German Studies that includes literature in translation and emphasizes intercultural learning. Qualitative assessments reveal the importance of the subjective, biographical relationship of students to content as indicative of motivation and curriculum success.

The next three chapters turn to technology in the curriculum by reviewing the role of computers, digital participatory culture, and blended learning. In Chapter 15, Mathias Schulze (University of Waterloo) reviews the mutual relationship between the academic fields of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and German Studies. He argues that, while CALL has long influenced teaching and learning German, its importance is still much overlooked. He then addresses continuing challenges and further curricular contributions of computers to German Studies. In Chapter 16, Glenn S. Levine (University of California, Irvine) critically examines the theoretical issues and practical dilemmas of integrating digitally mediated communication into foreign language teaching. Seeking to reform curriculum for German, he identifies a disconnect between traditional pedagogical uses of technology as augmentation and the digital participatory culture of today’s youth, who see it as an integral vehicle for learning. In Chapter 17, Gillian Martin, Helen Jane O’Sullivan, and Breffni O’Rourke (Trinity College Dublin) review a blended learning project between Irish students of German and German students of English designed to promote pragmatic awareness and intercultural competence. Using an activity theory approach, they consider potential added communicative complexity, whether virtual contact enhances intercultural learning, and factors impacting course success.

The final two chapters concern the current economically driven curriculum integration of skills development and awareness and extracurricular networking and recruitment. In Chapter 18, Deidre Byrnes (National University of Ireland, Galway) describes the curricular goals, content, design, delivery, and assessment of a Legal German course. Given the significance of the economy and employability in academic choices, as well as the drive in language teaching toward holistic approaches, the course focused on using language in a specific professional setting while fostering transferable skills. In Chapter 19, Elizabeth A. Andersen and Ruth O’Rourke Magee (Newcastle University) recount the development of an extracurricular student ambassadors initiative to promote university modern languages programs in schools as well as its subsequent integration into the post-secondary curriculum. They analyze the success of the initiative for current and future students in terms of motivational effectiveness and employability.

Viewed collectively, the contributions to this volume reveal a particular set of current emphases for curriculum work in the field of German. Of course, technology and economy feature as important considerations. There is also critical engagement with identity and subjectivity, the binaries or dichotomies of native and non-native speakers, and the concept, influence, and use of interculturality. But perhaps most significant, after decades of bureaucratic, rationalistic approaches to modern language curriculum and instruction, is especially the resurgent interest in imagination, embodied practice, and affect. As such, past structural curriculum development, predetermined organization of ideas, and tracking of students may just be making room also for curriculum understanding and the shared experience of and creative engagement with ideas.

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