Interrogation_Room_Hohenschoenhausen

“Challenge Statements”: One Sentence Writing Assignments

Years ago, I came across a syllabus on the internet that changed how I teach writing.  It was by Rudy Koshar, the distinguished historian of German History at the University of Wisconsin.  I was looking around for examples of how to structure a course in modern German history, but what I found instead was an elegant, simple assignment that I added to nearly every class that I teach: the challenge statement. The idea is straightforward.  Challenge statements are short, 50-word, single-sentence statements on course texts.  I give students a prompt on the day’s reading, and they must answer it in one sentence, 50 words or less.  They bring their sentence—typed out on a piece of paper—to class.  The prompts often ask them to summarize the main point of the text we are reading for that day.  In my modern Germany class, for example, I give the students prompts like these:

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Finding Germany in the Neighborhood

Like many institutions, my university is increasingly emphasizing engaged and experiential learning, where students get out of the classroom and learn and/or apply their learning out in “the real world” (for us, this takes the form of an “Engaged Learning” requirement in the University Core Curriculum). My department also offers a concentration in Public and Applied History, which asks students to consider the public uses of the past and challenges them to apply their skills of historical analysis in the practice of public history (e.g., the curation of museum exhibitions, the development of websites, podcasts). As someone who teaches German, European, and world history, my sites of history are not local ones, which can make on-site learning in the community challenging. While I periodically teach a Nazi Germany class that includes a Spring Break trip to Berlin, I find myself somewhat envious of my Americanist colleagues, who have easy access

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Escape from Grading Hell: How to Move Away from Grades and Focus on Learning

In recent years, many college instructors have begun to explore new ways of assessing students that shift the focus away from grades and toward learning.  Inspired by the work of Alfie Kohn, Susan Blum, and many others, this praxis can take many forms, from “ungrading” to “contract grading,” “specifications grading,” and beyond.  The reasons for making a move away from traditional grading vary, but often stem from a strong sense that traditional grading does not reflect real learning well and can even have harmful impacts on both students and instructors. What impact have these ideas had on the German studies classroom?  At the 2022 GSA conference in Houston, a group of Germanists (Nicole Coleman, Elizabeth Drummond, Eli Rubin, and Janice McGregor; Phil Keisman was unable to attend but has contributed his thoughts here) held a roundtable, sponsored by the GSA Teaching Network, to discuss their approaches to and experiences with

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Found in Translation

Editors’ Note: Kyung Lee Gagum and Patrick Ploschnitzki convened the seminar Found in Translation at the 2022 German Studies Association annual conference. Because the seminar explored pedagogical issues related to translations, the Collaboratory editors asked the conveners to write a recap of the seminar for Zeitnah. Lost or found in translation? We, the seminar conveners, identified that whether in German Studies research or pedagogy, scholars and instructors alike often encounter and interact with works that are only available, or accessible, in translation (partially or entirely e.g., movie or television subtitles). Other times, these texts are centerpieces of a highly relevant research or classroom context, but are unavailable in German, or only as a pivot translation (which lacks the source text at its foundation). In our seminar, we took translated works as a point of departure and sought to collect and explore examples of the effects, challenges, surprises, ambiguity, consequences etc.

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Incorporating German Colonialism into German Studies Classrooms

Editors’ Note: Katherine Arnold and Eriks Bredovskis convened the seminar Colonialism and German Memory Politics: New Approaches to Teaching Colonial Science and German Imperialism at the 2022 German Studies Association annual conference. Because the seminar focused on teaching, the Collaboratory editors asked the conveners to write a recap of the seminar for Zeitnah. Recently, the legacies of Germany’s colonial empire are featured more regularly on the front pages of German newspapers and in the foyers of brand-new museums like the controversial Humboldt Forum. While German historians and Germanists have been writing about Germany’s colonial empire, its legacies, and memories for years, these discussions usually remained within the academic sphere. With growing public—and student—interest in the legacies of European colonialism, we felt that there was enough interest to organize a seminar on the research and teaching of German colonialism. Our seminar (titled, “Colonialism and German Memory Politics: New Approaches to Teaching

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Rethinking the Survey Course

Editors’ Note: In the coming months, the German Studies Collaboratory will publish a series of blogs related to teaching and pedagogy. We’ll begin with some contributions recapping discussions at the 2022 German Studies Association conference in Houston, the first of which is about a GSA Teaching Network roundtable about “Rethinking the Survey Course.” At the German Studies Association annual conference in September 2022, the GSA Teaching Network organized a roundtable that asked participants to share their experiences and/or frustrations with survey courses. Traditionally, survey courses have aimed to give a broad overview or serve as an introduction to a field of study. They have also been used to try to attract students into our programs to pursue a major or minor. However, the current academic climate of shrinking enrollments and tightening budgets has forced many programs to radically alter these approaches. We discussed questions such as: What do survey courses

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Steal This Assignment! Reflections on the Teaching “MakerSpace” at the 2021 GSA Conference

What if we stopped just talking about teaching innovations at the German Studies Association annual meeting and actually used the conference as a way to carve out time and space to integrate these ideas into our own courses? That was the question that led the two of us to propose and convene our 3-day seminar at the most recent GSA conference. Under the somewhat unwieldy title, “Steal This Assignment!  Hack your German Studies Course with the Teaching MakerSpace,” fourteen masked Germanists gathered in a room at the Indianapolis Marriott Downtown in early October to participate in the experiment.  We organized the seminar around three different assignment formats which the Teaching Network had highlighted in panels at previous GSA conferences: (1) online social annotation (Perusall, Hypothes.is), (2) digital mapping (Clio), and (3) Avatar projects — an umbrella term for various historical role-play/learning simulations. The first day was devoted to introducing each

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A New Collaboratory Feature: “Grants, Fellowships, Internships & Teaching Assistantships in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland for Undergraduate & Graduate Students in North America”

On March 13, 2020, I received the surreal news that Macalester College would move the 2020 study away program in Berlin & Vienna online. As the 2020 program director, I had been busy for several weeks in Vienna, reconnecting with old colleagues and meeting new ones, planning the theater course I would soon teach, and keeping one eye on the spread of COVID, particularly just over the border in Italy. Students had arrived in Vienna on March 1st and were settling into their dorms and their courses, figuring out how to navigate the sprawling Uni Wien campus and the wider city. But within a week of their arrival, the university moved classes online, stores and theaters closed, masks appeared, toilet paper disappeared, and everyone struggled to try to maintain two-meter distance in the Öffis. My students and I returned hastily to the U.S. or other homelands. The students’ dreams of

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How I Hacked My Syllabus: Experiments in Teaching

“It’s in the syllabus!” Students hear this refrain from frustrated faculty everywhere when they ask questions about a course. But are we surprised that students don’t read syllabi that look more like “terms and conditions” agreements than roadmaps for learning? Or when students disengage from courses that are more focused on policing students than engaging them? A number of years ago, I began a process of rethinking my syllabus and my entire approach to teaching – a process that has been transformative for me as a teacher and, I hope, for my students. Along the way, I benefited from conversations with colleagues and discussions of pedagogy online (including Twitter), and I adopted approaches and assignments from others – the kind of sharing and collaboration embodied by the German Studies Collaboratory.  Like many faculty, my syllabi developed over the years into ever-longer documents, with pages and pages of black text on

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Teaching & Interrogating German Cultures Beyond Monolithic “German” Studies

The rise of communicative language teaching and the over-emphasis on personalization and communication of one’s own thoughts and perspectives has often resulted in a narrowing of our pedagogical materials and deepening bifurcation of language programs. At its most extreme, this bifurcation results in lower-level courses on conversational German based on a textbook and upper-level culture courses featuring extensive reading of authentic (and, traditionally, literary and cultural) texts, which craft an artificially homogeneous “German” culture. Yet, in our classes, we found ourselves wanting more depth on history, politics and society — and the contradictions and disjunctures therein —  in order to appeal to a broader range of students (often double majors in political science, international relations, history, economics or bench sciences). This frustration was the beginning of Ekstase und Elend, a German-language cultural history book and accompanying multimedia open educational resource. This book is targeted to learners who have completed the

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Shaming and Insulting in the German Empire: Bringing podcasting into the digital workspace

In the German Empire, practices of shaming and insulting were common in political dispute. In the summer of 2020, students were given the opportunity to gain practical experience in researching and analyzing historical examples of these practices and then to present them in a podcast. Their findings contributed to an ongoing research project that is currently based at the Technische Universität Dresden, the collaborative research centre 1285 “Invectivity. Constellations and Dynamics of Disparagement.”  They also raised awareness about the effects of shaming and insulting on the political order – a topic that is currently part of discussions about the stability of western democracies. A historical perspective can contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon. The seminar was divided into three blocks to structure the research as well as the production process. First, students got familiar with the concept of invectivity and the political landscape of the German Empire to

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Black Lives in Germany: Resilience, Art and Hope | Film + Talk from October 2020 to April 2021

February 22, 2021 Following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in spring 2020, the DEFA Film Library team—made up of faculty, professional staff and graduate students—began a series of discussions about how best to stand in solidarity with the growing Black Lives Matter Movement in ways that would both leverage our resources and acknowledge past shortcomings. In the 1990s, thanks to Professor Sara Lennox, the Program in German and Scandinavian Studies at UMass Amherst became the first well-known program for Black German Studies in the U.S. Over the years, the DEFA Film Library—which is based in the same program and primarily focuses on East German cinema—worked closely with Lennox on Black German Studies projects, as well as on exploring the experience of BPoC in East Germany and developing a transnational and post-colonial approach to GDR studies through our scholarly Summer Film Institutes. The first program the team planned

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German Studies and the Challenge of Outreach to Schools and School Teachers: A UK Perspective

November 20, 2020 The global health crisis caused by the covid-19 virus has given rise to unprecedented challenges in all aspects of our lives. Not least of these challenges lies in the realm of teaching. Those of us responsible for bringing German studies to school and university classrooms have been forced to move the bulk of our activities online. Students who might previously have had easy access to libraries and archives are now in many cases dependent solely on electronic sources. Public events that previously brought practitioners and academics face to face have had to be cancelled or moved to Zoom and its equivalents.  As outreach and schools liaison officers for two UK-based Higher Education organisations, the Association for German Studies and the German History Society, we have also struggled in these conditions to develop our outreach programme to school teachers, particular those at the senior ends of teaching (‘A’

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E = MC2; or, Einstein’s Monumental Correspondence

September 23, 2020 I never expected Albert Einstein to figure into my scholarship. Like most people, I suspect, Einstein evoked two images for me. First, E = mc2, the mass-energy equivalence published within his Annus Mirabilis papers of 1905. Second, the iconic Arthur Sasse photo of him sticking out his tongue in 1951. But, much like the clouds that snake through the Maloja Pass in his (and my) beloved Rhaetian Alps, Albert Einstein quietly crept up on me and now occupies a considerable—and delightful— place in my work. I joined the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech in June of 2019. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE) presents the first complete picture of Einstein’s considerable written legacy in printed and digital format, based on a collection of over 100,000 pages housed within the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To date, CPAE covers Einstein’s life from his

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Teaching “German” Film in the 21st Century: Critical Media Literacy

September 17, 2020 Most programs in German Studies or German Language offer some form of “German” survey film courses, often taught in English and with high enrollments. These courses often reinforce a limited understanding of what “counts” as German film production and ignore the transnational realities of filmmakers, film production, and film theory. Occasionally theory is even limited to pieces from the German aesthetic tradition. We suggest a different approach: to consider teaching media and film in part in relationship to critical media literacy. The approach is very much in line with cultural studies’ emphasis on relationships of power, but we borrow this term from research on education, which uses it to refer to “how the print and non-print texts that are part of everyday life help to construct knowledge of the world and the various social, economic, and political positions they occupy with it” (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999,

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Towards an Atlas of German Studies

September 8, 2020 My interest in maps goes a long way back. But its most recent incarnation happened more than a decade ago when I realized I didn’t understand a map: ironically the first accurate map of Germany, the “Romeway Map” of Erhard Etzlaub, published in 1500. I didn’t understand its southern orientation—but that was easy to clear up. What caught my eye was that in its colored version, nations were set off from other nations. I had fully accepted the notion that nations were constructions of a later period. Nationalists make nations, not the other way around, Ernest Gellner famously asserted. But Etzlaub was no nationalist and the year was 1500. And yet here nations were being pictured on maps. Clarifying this problem for myself brought me down a path that led to Germany. A Nation in its Time. Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000. I immersed myself in

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“Not typical news for Wyoming”: A Digital History Project for the COVID-19 Era

August 28, 2020 The global pandemic has placed considerable demands on faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students. Among the most challenging issues are of a curricular and pedagogical nature. From lecturers with extensive instructional experience to those at the start of their careers, we all face steep limitations on what many of us love most about this profession — teaching.   Please, therefore, count me as one of the many grateful academics who celebrates the German Studies Collaboratory (GSC). In rapid fashion, it has evolved into a space where I have found fresh inspiration, as well as new assignments, readings, and interactive classroom practices. Since my time as a graduate student, I have benefited considerably from pedagogical discussions with peers at German Studies Association meetings and during research summers in Berlin. Such reunions are especially important for those of us who serve as the only Germanist or modern Europeanist at an academic

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Why We Need a Teaching Collaboratory

August 19, 2020 The demands on college professors for curricular development are extreme. Having held positions at both a small liberal arts college with a unique instructional plan, as well as a large state university where we have multiple faculty in German Studies who can divide labor, what is clear to me is that university and college administrators underestimate the effort required for quality curricular design.  Over the three years that I held a Visiting Assistant Professor (VAP) position at a small liberal arts college, I designed sixteen courses. These included all levels of the language program as well as eight 300-level courses designed for majors and minors in German Studies. The sheer quantity of new curriculum development pushed me to the breaking point in terms of workload — and required so much input that I began to resent teaching. Thankfully, this emotional experience was short lived. I really enjoy

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Emergency Teaching and the Power of Networks

August 11, 2020 How do we deal with an emergency?  We rely on our networks — family, friends, and neighbors — to see us through.  The same, it turns out, is true in academic life.  What I didn’t understand until this spring and summer is that our professional networks expand when we engage them during a crisis.  I learned this from the German Studies Collaboratory. Like many academics, my semester took an unexpected turn in March of 2020.  The coronavirus hit New York — and the state school where I teach — hard and fast.  One week I was traveling to campus each day to teach three seated classes, sitting in circles with my students discussing texts in crowded classrooms.  Two weeks later I was sitting alone at a desk in our guest room at home, talking to students through a laptop perched on top of several thick cookbooks.  This

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Wir sind dabei!

August 1, 2020 Over the course of the summer, for a couple of hours every Friday afternoon, we came together as a team via Zoom to plan and plot out the Collaboratory. There were many questions. What should it do? Who is our audience? How can we address our disciplinary differences and represent the field of German Studies both broadly and equitably? Most of all, how can we make the Collaboratory of use? It has been a long and winding road! Along the way, we’ve learned about new ways to organize collectively as a group, drawing on some snazzy new digital tools, like Trello. We’ve stared down some difficult questions about sources that might not best represent the times in which we live. We’ve discussed the demands of and differences in our various corners of the discipline, with rich conversations about how our colleagues do their work. Fundamentally, and with

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