Teaching Philosophy

In my first year as an undergraduate, I entered lab class and was given a simple assignment to “find the soul.” Sat before a dissection table covered in frogs, our instructor walked us through a homework assignment on Aristotle and asked us to imagine that we ourselves were ancient physicians categorizing the organs we would discover, tasking us with hypothesizing the origin, development, and purpose of each one as if we had no modern knowledge. To help the immersion, the instructor prodded us forward with a tongue-in-cheek assignment to locate the seat of the soul and find where it had gone. My experience at St. John’s College, a small school with one of the last surviving Great Books curricula in the United States, not only taught me valuable knowledge but created a space for me to teach myself through the freedom of exploration. No matter the subject or context I find myself in, I aim to reproduce a similar environment for my students by motivating them to take the initiative for their learning. The foundation of my teaching style is therefore always the establishment of a classroom setting that emphasizes instructor-student as well as student-student cooperation, the formulation of good questions, and a sincere sense of discovery.

Students of my German as a foreign language courses quickly learn that my role in their learning is as an ally on a similar path of self-development. This has been effective in both the private and public university atmospheres I have taught within. Students have remarked on the approachability of my persona and materials in evaluations, describing me as one who “emphasizes how learning is [a] constant and active process” and “a passionate instructor who makes complex ideas and topics very accessible to students.” This close association with my students and their level of need has helped me tailor my language courses as guided tours through the various challenges non-native speakers of German will face in the real world. Nevertheless, while I structure courses in this way, my emphasis on student initiative comes through in always allowing students to first follow their instincts. In this vein, one student remarks on how my breakdowns of language helped them “play with it in order to create a more complex conversation.” In short, my understanding of the learning process and my refusal to underestimate student ability has contributed greatly to keeping my Beginner, Advanced Beginner, and Intermediate German-language courses simultaneously creative and enlightening.

Good rapport with students is a major concern of mine no matter the topic, but it is especially useful when encouraging students to inhabit the role of a non-native speaker via communicative approaches. By keeping my lessons lighthearted and personal, I aim to satisfy all the global requirements of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, but especially the requirement that students be able to describe their backgrounds, experiences, and aspirations. All of this I effect with the communicative approach in the hypothetical context of being a non-native speaker in a German-speaking country. Walking my students through the colloquial phrases and structures we feel best cohere to their individual personalities and registers, I produce German-speakers who make the target language their own much as a native speaker would. Due to my focus on the practicality of speech and my motivation of student speaking, my students cite me as one who “tries to relate the course material to real life situations,” mentioning also that my “lectures are very engaging and they make you feel comfortable with messing up,” and that I “truly kn[o]w how to reach each student.”

While simply speaking is important, I ensure that my students are always aware of the relationship between their backgrounds and German, Austrian, and Swiss cultures. The development of a metacognitive awareness about cultural differences is a cornerstone of my methods, as it plays a massive role in testing student initiative and ability to be understood in the target language. History, mores, diversity, and genre-based explorations all play a major role in the design of my lesson-plans even at the Beginner level, creating a classroom that cares about context and its relation to the self. While assessing cultural knowledge can be somewhat difficult, I explain to my students that it is a major aspect of appropriate language-use on a day-to-day basis while in a foreign country. My students know to value cultural differences inherent in major concepts such as the differences between German notions of friendship, relationships, and authority. It is always a joy to watch students grasp the difference between “Wie geht’s?” and “How are you?”, as well as to explain to them minor cultural traits such as the need to flag down service staff or respect Ampeln. An example of this combination between culture and language fitting into my lessons is provided by teaching materials I helped construct that have been published on the Evia Learning website for the 4th Edition of the textbook Auf Geht’s.

As a result of my methods, my students’ initiative manifests itself in my classroom through genuine interest in German culture as well as through sincere attempts on the students’ parts to treat language as part of culture and personal identity. No small degree of my success in this respect is due to the experience of planning lessons alongside colleagues who bring their own native and outside perspectives on German culture into the curriculum. Outside of the classroom context, I have seen several of my students take their practice further, for example by asking for book recommendations within their level of understanding or by attending the German conversation coffee hour, Kaffeestunde, which I have led as part of departmental service at UNC.

My students appreciate the possibility of exploring German according to their own initiative. By working with them on their level, maintaining healthy rapport and a casual atmosphere, and reminding them of their individual role with respect to larger cultural contexts, I create learners that are excited at the prospect of entering a world much larger themselves. In an attempt to keep my students engaged and playfully confident in their learning, I am always looking for ways to ask my students to find the soul in the context of their exploration of German.