My teaching features various kinds of activities, including in-class assignments, homework, and self-reflective exercises.
A basic resource I provide all my students with is a collection of Online Resources.
The main platform for my teaching is online. In the respective online space, at Columbia called “courseworks”, I set up homepages, discussion pages, where students can share material and links, as well as a material collection. All assignments are posted here. Some illustrations of what such an online space looks like may be found here.
For my poetry class, I created this text reader including German poems by women (and some male authors) of different eras and countries about what it means to be a woman – and what work that gendered category does. All texts are compiled from Anna Bers’ formative anthology Frauen | Lyrik: Gedichte in deutscher Sprache. Reclam, 2020.
A special unit in my Women Poetry class was specifically dedicated to empowering students to own their own learning by letting them organize two whole class sessions in two groups. Both groups created impressive presentations on contemporary women rap. Students’s collaborative competence specifically came to shine when the two groups discussed and distributed amongst them aspects of this topic: one group would focus on the history and major figures of German women rap and the other group would present on major thematic issues and forms of the scene, like racism, sexism, chauvinism, drugs and the specific linguistic features (dialect, accents, neologisms, model rap cultures and sociolects). In my advising of both groups preparation of their sessions, I could not foresee how comprehensive and creative both presentations would turn out. Both groups kept frontal presentation of information to a minimum and focused on activating the other half of the class. A glimpse of the result may be seen in this presentation covering historical aspects, including an innovative Jeopardy game, and in this presentation on thematic issues, featuring a stimulating debate question on sexualized violence in contemporary German women rap
Further exemplary work results of some outstanding students of mine may be found here. The two creators of this short film attended my Advanced Conversation and Composition class in preparation for their trip to Vienna where this film was created under the guidance of a colleague of mine at Columbia University.
