Department of German

The grant applicants, faculty and graduate students in the German Department at Georgetown University (GUGD), propose a three-year curriculum dissemination project under the Exemplary Education Projects opportunity of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Its goal is twofold. Conceptually, the project seeks to enable foreign language (FL) departments in various institutional contexts and with various language foci to revitalize their programs through a coherent intellectual framework that encompasses all their work, from the teaching and learning of humanistic literary-cultural content to the teaching and learning of a second language (L2) to upper levels of ability. A felicitous intellectual framework toward that end is available through the educational goal of multiple literacies, understood as the development of a sophisticated reflexivity on language use in a wide range of oral and written genres in native as well as foreign languages. These include the genres of personal communication and of public discourse in institutional settings realized through non-literary as well as literary genres, in both oral and spoken modalities. Practically, the project seeks to enable FL departments to translate such an educational vision into a coherent and vibrant program in their particular settings by means of a principled reconsideration of curriculum, materials, pedagogy, and assessment within a literacy framework throughout the four years of undergraduate education. For both goals the project makes these assumptions: (1) one can derive a well-motivated long-term curricular sequence from text- and genre-based considerations; (2) one can translate this sequence into developmentally appropriate pedagogies through tasks that facilitate the acquisition of sophisticated forms of cultural literacy and sophisticated levels of ability in the L2 in a range of interpersonal and professional situations; and (3) holistic and task-based forms of assessments not only facilitate curricular and pedagogical work but also result in publicly readable evidence for humanistic learning in terms of cultural literacy and L2 abilities.

Accordingly, the project's activities have the following motivation, content, and design:
They are motivated by the need for FL departments nationwide to assert themselves as viable intellectual enterprises. They are also grounded in the experience and highly encouraging results attained in the multi-year curricular reform of the GUGD that embraced the above educational goals and means.
On that basis, participating faculty and graduate students will focus the content of the project's activities on (1) preparing and disseminating a wide range of artifacts and documents that were originally created in the GUGD curricular context but that now need to be tailored so as to exemplify curricular, pedagogical, and assessment approaches and praxes, as well as learning outcomes in various media and formats with the aim of facilitating their translation into other institutional contexts with other languages; (2) engaging in a long-term mentoring relationship with teams of at least two persons from other institutions (a total of twelve persons) that includes two workshops and ongoing consultation; (3) conducting a conference that enhances participants' content knowledge about the attainment of advanced L2 cultural literacy and also their experiential knowledge about how to realize it in diverse FL departments; and (4) offering conference presentations and other forms of dissemination as these become available over the grant period.
Finally, the project's design reflects an interpretation of dissemination as a multi-stage, dynamic and dialogic process that anticipates changes in the knowledge and praxes both of those that disseminate and those that are engaged in various aspects of program reform within their institutional settings.

All project activities take a dual evaluation perspective, formative evaluation for eliciting immediate feedback that can result in on-line change and summative evaluation that documents their impact on target audiences and the FL profession as a whole.

By comprehensively addressing issues pertaining to a humanistic education in contemporary multilingual societies and offering practicable educational solutions the project endeavors to contribute to educational reform of national significance.

October 2002