My mission is to support students as they become “producers” of knowledge. Regrettably, students might believe they need only “consume” knowledge; they might think that learning only requires them to regurgitate the knowledge that their professors provide them. My teaching, by contrast, is guided by the philosophy of Significant Learning, which acknowledges that foundational knowledge is one of several components essential to motivating students to learn. Guided by the Significant Learning approach, I aim to train students how to apply the knowledge that they construct to discover and generate meaningful connections between our course work, the students’ own lives, and the world around them.

When creating a basis of knowledge with my students, I am always certain to provide them with reasons to use what we are learning in a practical, creative, or critical context. In my “Business German” courses, we produce application dossiers for summer internships in Germany and Austria, and our final exam features a mock interview to ensure that learning outcomes have been met. In an honors seminar on comedy and society, students work in teams to propose, design, and then produce research projects with the goal of showcasing how the themes, forms, and ideas from the semester have applications in and connectionsto a variety of disciplines. This course, like many I teach, culminates in a public poster session, where student teams discuss their research with community members. Because my most recent version of this honors seminar had a digital humanities component, students shared their research on topics like the frequency of gendered language in the Greek Comedy Lysistrata and a social network analysis of characters in Moliere’s comedy of manners The Misanthrope. Similarly in my general education course on German culture, my students shared their research on German visual culture and German history. Specifically, students developed, designed, and shared research posters that investigated what images from the GHDI database tell us about how German culture conceptualizes challenging topics like gender equality, social justice, global ethics, education, and technological innovation. These approaches ensure that my students can and do seek out new ways to connect what we are reading to their own lives outside our classroom.

To foster these connections, my language classroom stresses communication over grammatical accuracy. This fact might surprise some when they learn that I have created testing materials for the textbook publisher Cengage and that I have authored and co-produced two series of interactive textbooks for the iPad. Yet, in planning the curriculum, instructional methodology, and assessment tools for my first textbook Deutsch interaktiv, I drew on my understanding of ACTFL proficiency standards and best practices to help users learn linguistic forms, cultural meaning, and communicative use simultaneously. For example, when teaching the German alphabet, I avoid non-natural tasks like “take turns spelling the following list of words to a partner” and instead create a prompt like “you are in a Kaffeehaus in Vienna; ask a waiter (your partner) for the WiFi password.” My goal is to (re)create circumstances that naturally require students to employ certain structures—the guiding principle behind Deutsch interaktiv as well as Deutsch als Fremdsprache-interaktiv, a second series of interactive textbooks that I designed to conform to the Common European Framework. As my approach to teaching German demonstrates, I believe language is much more than a system to be learned. Similarly, I believe literary and cultural texts are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are cultural products whose constructed nature has much to tell about the practices and perspectives during a specific time period.

To this end, students create and analyze their own products in my courses. For example, in my GERM 3020 “Oral Communication in German” class, advanced undergraduates encounter themes like “personal and public identities,” “beauty and aesthetics,” and “global challenges” via authentic videotexts from Deutsche Welle, YouTube, and German-language podcasts. As each unit begins, interpretive tasks that I adapted from ACTFL Integrated Performance Assessments guide students as they further develop their abilities to make linguistic and intercultural meaning from the visual and aural dimensions of the videos. Next, we identify and examine specific discourse markers in action before the students collaboratively write, record, and edit their own informative podcasts about current social, political and cultural events in the German-speaking world. Last year, our podcasts focused on topics like the city of Aachen, religious freedom in Bavaria, and Germany’s stance on autonomous drones capable of lethal force. I encourage my students to view our classroom as a kind of laboratory, where they learn how to test and expand the limits of their ability within a positive, supportive environment.

This process of learning, however, is invisible. An instructor cannot determine whether students have achieved the objectives from a lesson just by looking at them. For this reason, I consistently strive to improve my teaching methods through networking and workshops. Indeed, after completing an NSF-funded online course on the evidence-based methods of the STEM fields, I developed new assessment tools so that my students and I can evaluate where they are in the learning process. For example, at the beginning of my novice German classes, I use Conceptests, “clicker” style tasks that I have adapted to the language classroom from the work of Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur; these questions are essential to my flipped classroom. Each multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank question that I develop targets a specific communicative structure or discourse marker that the students were introduced to outside of class, have practiced at home, and are expected to use in class. Each option on these Conceptests focuses on a specific misconception or mistake that I have seen students make during my decades of teaching. Structured in a “think-pair-share” format, students reflect on their own answers before presenting, reevaluating, and justifying their answers while working with a partner. I have seen how this pair phase precipitates peer instruction, which normalizes the learning process, lowers the stakes, and raises personal accountability. When possible I also employ case studies, open-ended questions, and problem-solving scenarios to integrate critical thinking into my classroom. As a frequent faculty scorer for the international Critical-thinking Assessment Test (CAT), developed more than a decade ago at Tennessee Tech with the support of NSF, I can both effectively assess the broad range of skills that comprise critical thinking and integrate these skills into my lesson plans. In fact, students appreciated my German culture course so much that they have nominated it for a general education award here at Tennessee Tech several times over the years.