Foreign Language Teaching

C 16 Foreign Language Learning: Discovering the World Through Drama, Poetry, Biographies and History
Ulrike Sievers | Saturday – Wednesday, 2.45 – 4.15 pm
Using the example of Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’, we will explore how to work with drama in the classroom. We will find out how poetry and images can help with the understanding of historical situations.  
We will see how the students can experiment with different forms of texts on their way of developing their own voices in the language.

C 20 Foreign Language Learning: Racism Now and Then - Portfolio Work in Class 10
Tatjana Pavlov-West | Saturday – Wednesday, 4.45 – 6.15 pm
Given that police violence against People of Colour still presents such an acute and urgent topic, not only in the US but worldwide, I wish to focus on the topic of racism and the possibility of working on a portfolio by looking at the novel Dear Martin (2017) by Afro-American woman writer Nic Stone. The novel offers the perspective of a young Afro-American who writes letters to his idol Martin Luther King in order to deal with his own experiences of racism in present-day America. Stone’s novel allows us to draw connections between the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter Movement today. I will also work with the following supplementary texts: Martin Luther King’s famous speech “I have a dream”, performance poetry from the 1960s to today, graffiti, contemporary music and the film The Hate U Give (2018) based on the novel of the same title by Angie Thomas. These texts will supplement the teaching of this important topic and will offer many ideas for 10th graders to work on a creative and informative portfolio where they can show their manifold language skills as well as their capacity to think critically.