German Studies Grad Students and Faculty Develop Open Educational Resources in Collaborative Project

Sept. 26, 2019
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Current and recent graduate students from the UA German Studies program - Sina Colditz, Patrick Ploschnitzki, and Chelsea Timlin - have recently been invited to showcase their open educational resources for teaching language and culture as part of a project sponsored by two national foreign language resource centers. The materials, which were reviewed by experts in language teaching and learning, have now been published as part of the Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday (or FLLITE) project. The project is led by German Studies faculty, Chantelle Warner, together with Carl Blyth (University of Texas, Austin) and Joanna Luks (Cornell University). FLLITE takes the literary in the broad sense as a concept for thinking about the creative, non-conventional, often playful ways of using language that can help learners to become aware of everyday ways of saying things in a new language and culture. Reflecting on the lesson that she developed and taught in a fourth-semester German course at UA (German 202), Sina Colditz described what this looked like in that particular course. "What made this particular text such an interesting literary text especially compared to the traditional fairytale or poems we discussed in this course is that it combines traditional with a lot of vernacular but also contemporary aspects...I had a lot of fun engaging the students in different activities and teaching them about the genre itself as well as cultural references within the text." Previous lessons have also been published other German Studies graduate students.

The lessons and more about the project can be found at the FLLITE web site - fllite.org.