Chapter 15: A Redesign of Introductory German With a Focus on Social Justice

As the paradigm of language instruction has evolved from a focus on form to a more contextualized use of the target language in proficiency-oriented instruction (Shrum & Glisan, 2016), choosing big ideas and essential questions for unit plans and designing a curriculum around them opens the door for language classes to address topics of social justice in a way that was not possible in the grammar and translation era of language classrooms past. In order to address issues of inequality and help our students confront injustice in the world, these topics must be made accessible in the curriculum, even at the early proficiency levels. This work must be done intentionally, with expert scaffolding and not just on the occasion that the class discussion happens to go there. With this in mind, the faculty at a small, liberal arts college in the United States redesigned their German curriculum to take advantage of this paradigm shift by designing thematic units that integrated big ideas and essential questions into the learning process. Examples of some big ideas included immigration, climate change, historical memory, and the individual’s role in a pluralistic society. Essential questions included: Do you eat a healthy diet? What does patriotism look like? And how do architecture and public zoning affect your daily life? By reflecting on these ideas and questions and making cultural comparisons between their lived experiences and the information they learned about the target culture, students were able to have conversations around issues that contribute to social justice.