Teaching Umwelt Across Instructional Levels: A Curriculum Module for AP® German Language and Culture 2010 Curriculum Module The College Board The College Board is a not-for-profit membership association whose mission is to connect students to college success and opportunity. Founded in 1900, the College Board is composed of more than 5,700 schools, colleges, universities and other educational organizations. Each year, the College Board serves seven million students and their parents, 23,000 high schools, and 3,800 colleges through major programs and services in college readiness, college admission, guidance, assessment, financial aid and enrollment. Among its widely recognized programs are the SAT®, the PSAT/NMSQT®, the Advanced Placement Program® (AP®), SpringBoard® and ACCUPLACER®.
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All other products and services may be trademarks of their respective owners. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. Table of Contents Editor’s Introduction. 4 Mary Ashcraft Umwelt Across the Curriculum.
5 Brigitte Rossbacher Materials and Strategies for Teaching Umwelt Across Instructional Levels. 18 Marita Cleaver About the Contributors. 52 AP® German Language and Culture Curriculum Module: Umwelt Introduction Mary Ashcraft University of Nevada, Las Vegas The documents in this module will serve as an invaluable aid for German teachers who wish to supplement the materials in traditional textbooks or want to develop their own content-based instructional units. Brigitte Rossbacher provides the theoretical base for choosing topics and activities that are rooted in the goals of the National Standards, and presents concrete examples of sources and desirable outcomes.
The step-by-step approach she outlines presents the procedure for structuring a unit around content and supporting that content with the necessary language tools. Marita Cleaver’s lessons are specific examples of how we can deal with the topic of Umwelt in every level we teach. Her activities offer models of planning and assessing meaningful interactions as students report on and react to information in a variety of modes. Her scenarios have students engaged in doing something with their knowledge of the Umwelt in German.
Marita’s lessons can be supplemented with listening and reading texts from children’s websites such as http://tivi.de/fernsehen/logo/start/index.html or Deutsche Welle’s http://www.de/ (see Appendix A), and the Rubistar site (http://rubistar. php) can make individualizing assessments an easy task. Whether we want to supplement a chapter in our German textbook, celebrate Earth Day or raise awareness of how a different culture deals with this international problem, Umwelt is definitely a topic that lends itself to recycling. We might even have students start their own Umwelt Portfolio in German I and add to it over the years as they progress toward a more sophisticated level in both their language skills and in their understanding of this complex global issue.
4 © 2010 The College Board. AP® German Language and Culture Curriculum Module: Umwelt Umwelt Across the Curriculum Brigitte Rossbacher University of Georgia Introduction Umwelt is frequently taught in German classes at the high school and college level, as beginning- and intermediate-level German language textbooks invariably address some aspect of the environment. Typical topics include the following: •• weather •• recycling, including, perhaps, recycling laws, packaging laws, der grüne Punkt, Einweg- vs. Mehrwegflaschen and Dosenpfand •• means of transportation and their environmental impact •• shopping (e., Einkaufstaschen and charges for plastic bags in supermarkets) •• energy use (e., carbon dioxide emissions, the greenhouse effect, wind energy) •• jobs in the environmental sector More advanced texts often recycle and expand on these topics.
For example, Anders gedacht, a popular intermediate- to advanced-level college textbook, includes a chapter on “Die Grünen und ihre Politik.” Beyond a focus on the Green political party and some of its more prominent figures, the chapter addresses such topics as environmental consciousness, environmentally friendly automobiles and renewable energy. The prominence of Umwelt in German curricula reflects the significant role that environmental consciousness plays in German identity. A survey conducted in 2006 by the University of Marburg showed the environment to be the second largest concern for Germans, with unemployment—which has risen sharply since the fall of the Wall— ranked as the top concern (http://www.de/0704-UWS-Umweltbewusstsein. The environment is also an issue of serious concern and interest in the United States.
Engaging in cultural comparisons between the United States and Germany and/or the other German-speaking countries, students can gain a greater understanding of global and local issues. A unit on Umwelt can promote learning about geographic and demographic factors that affect environmental policies; laws and state-sponsored programs related to the environment; and the roles of their own culture, region, school, family and individual actions in shaping the status and future of the planet. 5 © 2010 The College Board. AP® German Language and Culture Curriculum Module: Umwelt Teaching Culture and the National Standards There seems, then, to be professional consensus that Umwelt deserves a prominent place in German language curricula.
Moreover, technology (in particular the Internet) has made it much easier for teachers and students to access authentic materials. Yet the integration of culture in general still presents a challenge for many language teachers. In Teaching Language in Context, Alice Omaggio Hadley outlines three prevalent reasons for this (346–347): a. Curricula can be overcrowded and teachers don’t feel they have the time early on, often saving the teaching of culture until after the foundation of grammar and vocabulary has been laid (i., for a “later” that might never arrive).
Teachers fear that their own cultural knowledge might be lacking. Teachers might avoid teaching culture because it encompasses student values, attitudes and beliefs, putting teachers in what might be perceived as a vulnerable position. Yet most teachers also know that what students will remember most from their language courses is not dative case adjective endings but rather something about culture. It is therefore important to include meaningful cultural content from the very beginning of language instruction and to strive to make culture the context through which grammar and vocabulary are learned.
Instructors who fear that they might not know enough can inform themselves about German issues easily on the World Wide Web, an excellent information source for teachers and students alike. Regarding student attitudes, teachers must recognize that the learning of culture, in particular attitudes toward cultural difference, should be viewed as a process. We have to confront students with difference in order to help them move from initial attitudes (“Why don’t they just do it like we do? How stupid!”) toward an understanding of the target culture’s practices, products and perspectives from within its own cultural system (see also Lange, 70–77). The National Standards project, Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century (1999), stresses the interrelationship between culture and language.
As an attempt to reflect a professional consensus about what we think students should know and be able to do (rather than to reflect what they actually know or what language teachers actually do in the classroom), the standards encourage teachers to make the teaching of culture a priority. Looking at the topic of Umwelt from the perspective of the five goals of Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons and Communities can help us to formulate content objectives. Communication: This goal underscores the importance of communicative competence while encouraging teachers to consider the role of context and content in the communicative language classroom. Through its focus on the three communicative modes — interpretative, interpersonal, and 6 © 2010 The College Board.
AP® German Language and Culture Curriculum Module: Umwelt presentational — it asks teachers to consider interpretation of written and spoken language; interpersonal exchanges and the exchange of information and opinions; and the presentation of information, concepts and ideas in speech and in writing. For a thematic unit on Umwelt, students can read a variety of German-language texts available online, ranging from questionnaires that calculate one’s ecological footprint and highlight environmentally sustainable and unsustainable behaviors, to Article 20a of the German Basic Law that elevates the protection of nature and animals to the state’s responsibility. Interpersonal exchanges can include comparing the results of the above- mentioned questionnaire with others, interviewing students about their own behaviors and actions in respect to the environment, stating opinions or discussing everyday environmental issues with a German e-mail pen pal. Cultures: Umwelt is an excellent topic through which students can understand the relationship between the practices, perspectives and products (the “3 Ps”) of German-speaking countries.
If we take the topic of recycling, for example, students can work to understand the cultural practice of recycling (what is recycled, where and how) to gain an understanding of how recycling is viewed (why recycle?); and to examine concrete products related to recycling such as der grüne Punkt, Einkaufstaschen, Einweg- and Mehrwegflaschen, Altpapier, the meaning of the various colored recycling bins and the purpose for the gelbe Sack. Another possible topic is the marketing of small cars in Germany (for example, see http://www.de/auto/aktuell/0,1518,537010,00.html), which can be contrasted with the parallel situation in the United States and spark discussion of myriad issues about population density, gas prices, commuting by car and the viability of alternative means of transportation. Connections: This goal emphasizes connections between disciplines and the recognition of culturally distinct viewpoints. Umwelt is often taught in the general education curriculum in both Germany and the United States.
Students should be encouraged to draw on their knowledge from other disciplines such as math, science, geography and social studies. There is often even an environmental science course offered in the high school curriculum. Teachers can guide students by providing the necessary vocabulary, structures and tasks. Even at the beginning level, students can learn how to convert temperatures from Celsius to Fahrenheit (and vice versa) in order to learn about the weather and climate change.
Concepts from science can be introduced in German to help explain global warming, the greenhouse effect and the depletion of the ozone layer. Since factors such as geographic location, neighboring countries and population density impact environmental issues, geography plays a significant role in our understanding of Umwelt. Many schools celebrate Earth Day or have an environment club, and students could draw on knowledge gained from cultural comparisons to create posters or a performance staging these differences. 7 © 2010 The College Board.
AP® German Language and Culture Curriculum Module: Umwelt An additional aspect of the Connections goal is the acquisition of new information and perspectives. A sample progress indicator of this goal (Standard 3.2) for students in grade 12 is: “Students use a variety of sources intended for same-age speakers of the target language to prepare reports on topics of personal interest, or those with which they have limited previous experience, and compare these to information obtained on the same topics written in English” (Standards, 56). As discussed later in the “Defining the Topic” section, several excellent German Umwelt websites, such as http://www.de/, are geared toward youth. These can be compared with environmental sites targeting a youth readership in the United States.
Comparisons: This goal focuses on understanding the nature of linguistic and cultural comparisons of the target language and culture with one’s own language and culture. The topic of Umwelt can stimulate discussion of similarities and differences on both the national level of policies and the individual level of attitudes and behaviors. While some comparative statements might seem anecdotal, the perception that the average German cares more about the environment can be substantiated by facts. For example, regarding the level of CO2 emissions, a Globus graphic shows that the per person CO2 emissions for the United States in 2007 were 5,769 million tons or 19.1 million tons per person, whereas the CO2 emissions for Germany were 798 million tons or 9.7 tons per person (http://www.de/archiv/09/daten/g3123.