Filtern
Dokumenttyp
Sprache
- Englisch (13) (entfernen)
Volltext vorhanden
- ja (13)
Gehört zur Bibliographie
- ja (13)
Schlagworte
- USA (6)
- United States (4)
- Interkulturelle Erziehung (3)
- American Studies (2)
- Englischunterricht (2)
- Immigration (2)
- Social Media (2)
- Teaching (2)
- Amerika (1)
- Amerikaforschung (1)
While information still carries the connotation of facts and truth, a severe shift in the media landscape has taken place with the emergence of social media. Driven away from mainstream media into filter bubbles and echo chambers, communities and societies have lost a common ground of what once was perceived as a shared reality and, to some extent, shared values. The egalitarian utopia where everyone can be heard, where each individual can contribute to a common public discourse for the sake of consensus, which shapes the identity of a nation, has long given way to a dystopia where everyone hysterically demands to be agreed with. This article explores the historical and economic context and the key players in media and politics responsible for a public discourse that seems to be, as of 2021, shattered beyond repair.
This article explores the foreign language learning potentials that selected digital tools hold with respect to teaching about U.S. structural racism. Teaching complex topics like structural racism in online learning environments requires highly competent foreign language teachers and high-quality online learning materials. These demands and resulting digital teaching innovations have a significant effect on how university-based (foreign language) teacher training should be structured in the future (Amhag et al., 2019). To address these demands, we have integrated distance teaching as a mandatory element in foreign language teacher training at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Stadler-Heer & Böttger, 2021). This article presents exemplary online lessons on the topic of structural racism which were developed, tested, and evaluated by pre-service teachers in two remote university teacher training courses. Drawing on the principles of task-based language teaching, the presented digital lesson materials aim to foster secondary school students’ intercultural communicative competence.
Moving images are increasingly integrated in English as a foreign language teaching, as streaming platforms allow for an easy (class) access to audio-visual content. TV series, as an example of popular culture, can be used for a variety of purposes, including teaching the foreign language itself but also talking about cultural topics and critically analyzing media discourses. To talk about TV series, teachers can rely on existing methods and techniques for teaching movies, which aim at discussing how meaning is conveyed in moving pictures in a learner-oriented environment, encouraging students to negotiate different interpretations of a given scene or movie. This article illustrates the potential of TV series for the EFL classroom by concentrating on The Americans, which features the lives of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, two Soviet secret agents in the United States during the time of the Cold War. The series appears particularly suitable for foreign language contexts as it mixes facts and myths about the Cold War, depicting the life of deep cover agents at the time and allowing viewers to relive 1980s life and popular culture.
This article is about teaching civil disobedience and conspiracy theories – two complex, sensitive, and emotional issues. By linking theory and practice in the form of a lesson sequence, it will illustrate that teaching is about empowering students in their development of skills toward independent, reflected, and critical thinking skills. The teacher only orchestrates the process by purposefully providing valuable input and offering a wide array of perspectives and strategies, which support students on their way to forming their own opinions and developing competences that last and make them capable individuals in and – most notably – outside the classroom.
This piece of work presents a flashback that contains parts of self-reflective analysis of the author and her research as a female Viet-Austrian graduate student in Vietnam and Austria. This paper stems from a research project of the author’s dissertation entitled “Two Worlds One Origin – A Comparative Study Of Vietnamese Women Living In Vietnam And Abroad”. It is about unexpected challenges, difficulties and surprises the author had to struggle with while conducting narrative biographical interviews with female participants from Vietnam, and Vietnamese women living abroad. Overall the graduate student of the University of Innsbruck conducted 54 interviews with women between 18 and 59 years: 33 interviews in Vietnam and 21 outside of Vietnam. This article also addresses different perspectives the author experienced being an “insider / outsider” during the process
of conducting research.
When the first American Naturfreunde/Nature Friends groups were founded in 1910 and 1912, among German and Austrian immigrants they were latecomers, but their socioecological profile gave them a rather unique hue. Their history is here discussed using the examples of two major clubhouses: Camp Midvale in New Jersey and Muir Woods in California. In their first decades, their programs across the nation united political progressivism, leisure time activities, and environmental sustainability. Due to the politicization of the 1930s, their practices forked out in two ways. Camp Midvale remained more fundamentally political but in the 1950s had to succumb to anti-communist pressure, whereas Muir Woods to this day thrives on a combination of German-Austrian cultural traditions with nature sports and nature preservation. These approaches also represent examples of differing models of how to tackle the socioecological problems of our present.
In my master’s thesis (2010) I studied the school choice strategies of parents in Vantaa, Finland. In 1998 school choice became a central
theme in school policy in Finland, as the new School Act enabled communities to take over the main organization of comprehensive
schooling. Local school policy in Vantaa is directed towards equality and the reduction of disparities. Taking into account these aspects,
the behavior of parents in school choice plays a big role. Especially the relationship between local school policy, parents’ educational strategies and school choice is interesting. This article discusses the theme of social justice in Finnish comprehensive schooling.
Enacting America in the Classroom: Introducing Drama Workshops into Pre-Service Teacher Training
(2021)
Besides gaining in-depth knowledge in the fields of linguistics, literature, and culture, pre-service teachers of English need to be trained in intercultural competence and reflexive processes, as well as communicative and performative teaching approaches. Heeding the performative turn in cultural studies and drama pedagogy, the article introduces an educational project that was conducted at the Pädagogische Hochschule Vorarlberg (University of Teacher Education Vorarlberg) and that was designed to offer students both a holistic and aesthetic-practical learning experience. Over the course of the semester, students developed the skills necessary to write a scholarly paper and process the insights gained in the drama workshop. From an evaluative discussion with workshop participants, we infer that the combination of discussion-based seminar and drama workshop provides an ideal setting to explore literary texts and cultural-societal questions, as well as performative skills. The article encourages and enables university teachers to carry out similar projects.
The United States prides itself on being a nation of immigrants, one of diverse backgrounds that came to the country seeking a better life. While this representation of the United States remains a strong pull factor for immigrants, public debate has been contentious and has been further dividing the political spectrum. Re-imagining immigration in a country of immigrants involves examining positive perceptions of early waves of immigration in the United States to the present-day climate of minoritization: from the melting pot to the border wall. As a nation of immigrants, does the melting pot ideology accurately reflect the cultural diversity of Americans today, or does multiculturalism better describe the nation? Considering the future faces of the United States, is the American Dream within reach for immigrants? This article discusses implications for classrooms glocally to foster empathy and skills of critical cultural awareness in evolving intercultural relations in education.
Looking at recent examples of hashtag activism as collaborative storytelling practices and digital political communication, this article argues that sharing – in the sense of collectively held beliefs and grievances and their potential for creating narrative and social movements on social media – can be seen as operating on an educational level as well. Drawing on Ruth Page’s concept of the shared story and an analysis of the #MeToo movement, the article positions hashtag activism as a case study for sharing ideas, experiences, and skills, and the acquisition of information and media literacy. By extension, the paper provides an example of adopting an interdisciplinary approach in higher education that aims at enabling future teachers to retell, adapt, and remix stories and skills for their work in the EFL classroom.