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Habits of Mind, Habits of Heart: Cultivating Humanity Through a Decolonized German Studies Curriculum

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Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies

Abstract

This article outlines the stakes and practical considerations for initiatives to diversify and decolonize German Studies curricula. Despite educators’ increasing awareness of the field’s complicity in reifying systems of injustice and their efforts to reflect the diversity within the German-speaking world, German curricula often still project a monolithic and exclusionary image of “Germanness.” To diversify topics and texts without interrogating the social stratification implied in the ways that “Others” of the German-speaking world are presented (or not) is not enough; German Studies must be concomitantly decolonized. That is, where diversifying curricula entails recognizing and engaging the internal diversity and complexity of German-speaking societies, decolonizing entails recognizing, questioning, and destabilizing the hegemonies implicated in the construction of cultures, canons, and curricula.

This essay is a shortened version of my blog post, Randall (2017). For their comments and suggestions during the preparation of the original blog post and of the present essay, my heartfelt thanks go to Wendy Allen, Katherine Arens, Janet Swaffar, Ervin Malakaj, and Regine Criser.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Bernhardt and Berman (1999), Byrnes (2002), Byrnes and Kord (2002), Swaffar and Arens (2005), Swaffar and Urlaub (2016).

  2. 2.

    Quoted in Ryshina-Pankova and Byrnes (2017, p. 424).

  3. 3.

    Research networks include the Black German Heritage and Research Association (http://bghra.org/) and the German Studies Association networks for Asian-German Studies and Black Diaspora Studies (https://thegsa.org/interdisciplinary-networks). On the teaching side, two new beginning-level textbooks—Grenzenlos Deutsch (open-access) and Impuls Deutsch (Klett USA)—are designed with the express intent to integrate diverse identities within the German-speaking world.

  4. 4.

    Consider the sequestering of diverse identities in the final chapter, entitled “Kulturelle Vielfalt,” of the beginning-level textbook, Neue Horizonte (Cengage, 8th Edition), or the ethno-national image of Germany reflected in fictional main characters of Kontakte (McGraw-Hill, 5th Edition).

  5. 5.

    Recall here Vicki Galloway’s adaptation of Claude Lévi-Strauss: “It is the assumption of sameness that triggers facile interpretation, immediate judgment, and turgid culture-ranking criteria” (Galloway 1999, p. 152).

  6. 6.

    Today the training, research, and teaching of Germanists extends from the traditional core of language and literature into all disciplinary directions—from film and media studies to STEM and all configurations of cultural studies and social sciences. See Halverson and Costabile-Heming (2015) and the GSA Fortieth Anniversary Issue of German Studies Review (Hake 2016).

  7. 7.

    On the implications of the humanities crisis for foreign language departments, see Berman (2011).

  8. 8.

    While debates about the value and role of the humanities in US higher education have their roots in the 1970s/80s, the political climate surrounding the 2016 presidential election has infused the discussion with a new urgency to move past the discourse of “crisis” and toward actionable imagining of ways forward that recall the traditional mission of humanities education while also recapturing them for a new set of social and political realities. See Newfield and Strickland (1995), Newfield (2016), Nussbaum (1997, 2010), Smith (2015).

  9. 9.

    See, for example, Asger’s analysis of Jürgen Habermas’ critique of Bildung (2015) and Justin Stover, “There Is No Case for the Humanities” (2018).

  10. 10.

    See, for example, Eric Adler, “When Humanists Undermine the Humanities” (2017).

  11. 11.

    See, for instance, Tania Lombrozo, “The Humanities: What’s the Big Idea?” (2015).

  12. 12.

    Examples include the University of Rhode Island International Engineering Program and Northern Arizona University’s Interdisciplinary Global Programs. See also the STEM/MINT initiatives of AATG (www.aatg.org/group/MINTDaF) and the Goethe-Institut (https://www.goethe.de/de/spr/unt/kum/clg.html).

  13. 13.

    A perusal of ACTFL convention German contributions on diversity, inclusivity and social justice reveals an increasing dedication to integrating these topics into curricula and pedagogy. The same can be said of contributions to Die Unterrichtspraxis, beginning with the 1992 special issue on diversity.

  14. 14.

    For a reflection on the notion of higher education as good for the public and a public good, see Newfield (2016).

  15. 15.

    Incidents of discrimination on college campuses is increasingly well documented in media reporting and on public and private online message boards. Advocacy-oriented entities such as the Harvard University Voices of Diversity project and The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education contribute analyses and documentation of cases and trends.

  16. 16.

    For an account of the events at St. Olaf College and links to media documentation, see Randall (2017).

  17. 17.

    On the concept of language ideologies, see Bauman and Briggs (2003), Bourdieu and Thompson (1991), Kroskrity (2003).

  18. 18.

    Bloom (1956), Bruner (1960), see also Anderson and Sosniak (1994) and Lee (2014).

  19. 19.

    See Footnote 4.

  20. 20.

    On proficiency-based instruction, see the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (2012) and the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements performance indicators (2017).

  21. 21.

    On genre-based instruction, see Byrnes and Sprang (2004).

  22. 22.

    On the multiliteracies approach, see Kern (2000), Swaffar and Arens (2005), Paisani et al. (2015).

  23. 23.

    See, for instance, Redmann and Sederberg (2017), Hammer and Swaffar (2012).

  24. 24.

    Foundational texts include Clifford and Marcus (1986), Marcus (1998), and Marcus and Fischer (1986).

  25. 25.

    Ryshina-Pankova and Byrnes likewise emphasize the need for meaningful curricular change to be a program-level effort: “To respond effectively to the external societal and internal institutional pressures…changes cannot be limited to a specific course taught by a specific faculty member, no matter how exemplary it might otherwise be…. Rather, change will need to occur across these three fundamental and interrelated areas of educational practice: (a) a programmatic mission statement that is anchored in collegiate humanistic learning, (b) an intellectually stimulating content- and language-integrated curriculum sequenced to enable the attainment of the specified goals over the 4 years of the program, and (c) language- and content learning-oriented assessment to provide publically available evidence for student achievement and advocacy for the program” (2017, p. 425).

  26. 26.

    On the “third space” in postcolonial theory and in foreign language education, see Bhabha (1993) and Kramsch (2009, p. 239), respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, USA

    Amanda Randall

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  1. Amanda Randall
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Correspondence to Amanda Randall .

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  1. Department of Languages and Literatures, University of North Carolina Asheville, Asheville, NC, USA

    Regine Criser

  2. Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Ervin Malakaj

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Randall, A. (2020). Habits of Mind, Habits of Heart: Cultivating Humanity Through a Decolonized German Studies Curriculum. In: Criser, R., Malakaj, E. (eds) Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34342-2_3

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