Everything about my teaching starts with my students. Their stories and aspirations are the backbone of my work in the classroom. I have taught at both public and private institutions in the US, at a Goethe Language Center in China, and as a volunteer in Germany. Among the learners in my classrooms there were the Iranian refugees who struggled to keep up with their children’s German, spouses of Chinese migrant workers who longed to reunite their families, and college students eager to immerse themselves in German music. As a teacher of contemporary German culture and language, I regard the synthesis of my student’s stories into a community of learners as my primary task. I strive to make my classroom a space where students of diverse racial, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds, gender identities, and ages succeed by exploring their motivations, aspirations, and hopes through innovative and inclusive teaching materials. To achieve these goals, I regard the pillars of my teaching to be the design of cooperative and creative classroom activities as well as assessments that are integrated into the students learning progression.
The ability to cooperate on a variety of levels is central for offering students an enriching learning experience in the humanities. As a teaching assistant for the class The German Idea of War, I organize collaborative writing groups in which students mutually read their work, give peer feedback, and exchange their ideas, challenges, and best practices when it comes to academic writing. (You can find a PowerPoint file here: writing_workshop_paragraphs.) When discussing literature, art, and film, my classes aspire to be a space for students to share their own thoughts and ideas with each other and develop complex arguments about the issues at hand. In their evaluations, students comment that I “made sure that each student was heard” and “encouraged discussion among students,” which many found “extremely beneficial to [their] learning.” (You can find examples of feedback from my students here.) Concerning the threshold for students to engage difficult texts, I challenge students to approach them creatively. For example, while teaching the movie Oh Boy in an advanced German class, I asked students to write the main character’s diary in order to emphasize with a cinematic language that they initially regarded as distant.
Creating problem-oriented activities that range from very simple tasks to complex teamwork assignments is central to my teaching. Some examples from my language classes might illustrate this. Students in my intermediate German class at UNC work on multiple projects that explore the past and present of East Germany. In one particular lesson, they learn about environmental protests in the GDR in the 1980s by planning their own protest march, using posters inspired by the images and videos we watched. (PowerPoint: ddr_umwelt.) My advanced students at Duke incorporate different roles—administration, faculty, and students—to debate whether a controversial speaker should be allowed to appear on campus. The result is a compromise that students would not necessarily agree on in real life. Beyond these assignments and activities, my students apply their cooperative skills to discuss contentious issues among themselves. When discussing the movie Tschick, my students found the depictions of female characters highly problematic, while others did not share these concerns. I challenged the students to bring their often-practiced discussion tools to the table. My class grew closer as my students realized that together they facilitated an exchange of ideas about contentious issues in a respectful and cooperative manner.
Creating authentic situations that demand cooperation and acknowledge the diversity of con- temporary German-speaking societies is a challenge that is particularly important to me. My students’ success relies on their and my own creative investment in recreating such situations. I am particularly excited about the potential of digital education tools like social media, digital archives, podcasts and other sound-based applications to lower students’ affective filters and motivate them to engage with authentic materials. In an intermediate class at UNC, my students post images and short texts to a shared social media account. At the end of the semester, each student chooses a favorite post and shares their reasoning in a short video, combining pronunciation exercise and the exploration of German language social media. Digital media are also extremely important for amplifying voices from marginalized groups. As a Bass Digital Education Fellow, I develop podcast-based lesson plans that introduce students to a wide array of German-speaking media producers from marginalized communities. By exploring their biographies, my project encourages my students to regard themselves as members of a diverse group of German speakers and to create their own recordings based on their individual stories. While tailored toward the German language classroom, I plan to expand this projects in my future teaching and make podcast-like recording projects part of my teaching of the arts, film, and literature. (You can download lesson plans and materials here.)
Language learners and students of literature need constructive feedback. I consider individual, precise, and clearly formulated evaluations of the students’ work as an essential part of the cooperative spirit I hope to instill in students. For every assignment, I address their strengths and weaknesses, identify their progress, and suggest next steps. Students often mention the quality of my feedback in their evaluations, remarking that I “always gave timely corrections and advice from [their] works and kept in touch with students to make sure [they] can see the advice he was giving us.” Assessments, however, are not simply tools to grade students, but components of the learning process. My advanced German class at Duke which focuses on German youth and pop culture asks students to complete three successive writing assignments. They move from writing an argumentative essay that asks them to adhere to a very rigid structure to an open film review with an emphasis on clearly formulated judgment statements. For these essays, students receive feedback on textual organization, grammar, and word choice. They also rewrite parts of their essays to incorporate my feedback. The third assignment—a personal essay highlighting the influence of popular culture on my student’s life—builds upon my students’ attention to structure and clarity gained from the first two assignments. Not only do my students excel in writing a personal essay, but they also express our cooperative spirit through this individual assignment, as most students wrote about the effects communal experiences had and have on their lives.
My teaching is driven by my commitment to help students discover and articulate their interests, desires, experiences, and values, and to challenge and advance their critical thinking and collaborative spirit through learning a new language and engaging both creatively and critically with literature, art, and film. To continue to serve my students, I see my continued education in pedagogical ideas, specifically those related to diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice, as a cornerstone of my future professional development. I especially look forward to extend my collaboration with colleagues, in German and other disciplines, and to share ideas on how to create a welcoming and caring environment, in particular for students from marginalized groups.
Course descriptions of some of the courses I have taught so far, as well as courses I plan to teach in the future, can be found on this page.