|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
IN THE early nineties enrollments in the study of German at SUNY Binghamton experienced a slight increase following the fall of the wall, but from 1993 on, troubling national trends did not bypass our campus: overall decreasing enrollments, fewer students starting the study of German (from a high point of 3 sections of elementary German in 1990 with 90 students, we went in 1994 to two sections, and by 1996 we had dropped to a single section of elementary German with about 25 students), smaller enrollment at the upper-division level, fewer majors, and declining enrollment in upper-division German literature classes. The sky did not fall because we had made some important decisions in the eighties that—in the long run—proved to be the backbone of our overall program: elementary German and other language courses were taught by regular faculty members instead of teaching assistants; every faculty member was teaching language and literature courses; self-assessment was regularly practiced; faculty members displayed concern not only for what students learned but also for how they learned; German was the medium of instruction and communication in the department; a reasonably priced and effective junior-year study-abroad program in Graz, Austria, continued to turn out globally connected students proficient in German (about 75% of our 20 to 25 majors and minors study abroad); students who had started German at Binghamton but had not gone abroad performed well in the regularly administered proficiency examination, Zertifikat Deutsch als Fremdsprache; and students who had gone abroad excelled in Zertifikat Mittelstufe. Binghamton had no foreign language requirement (about 99% of freshmen entered with the required 3 units of high school foreign language study), which meant that few students at Binghamton were in foreign languages but that the ones who came were there by choice. Bridging courses were offered between second- and third-year German, and students could gain depth in cultural studies, literature, or business German.1 We were doing things right, as student entry and exit assessment instruments informed us, and yet after 1993 language enrollments were slipping (except in Spanish) to the point where the administration proposed a split into a foreign language center and a literature department. A “mean and lean” faculty had been successful in opposing a split into language and literature camps following a self-study of foreign language departments in 1992 that had established long-range strategy, minimal staffing configurations and support needs, enrollment targets, and the overall contribution foreign language and literature departments needed to make to the larger university community.
As an undergraduate foreign language and literature program, it had been easier for us to avoid the problems described in the often-cited essay by Dorothy James, “Who’s Minding the Store,” than it would have been for a graduate department because we were minding the store, but from 1993 on our customer base was still shrinking. Regular annual faculty retreats in which we took stock of the situation and regular assessments using entry instruments probing student expectations and exit instruments probing outcomes allowed us to measure how educational and behavioral goals had been reached by different students following different tracks. As German teachers teaching German language and literature classes in German from the first semester to senior seminars, we felt we wanted to have a greater influence on the intellectual campus community, and we wanted to place the perspective shaped by writers in German-speaking countries into the educational experience of students, but we lacked a forum in which to carry out this dialogue. Contrary to what Sander Gilman stated in his MLA Newsletter President’s Column about students wanting to study what faculty members want to teach—not enough students showed up in the German language-culture course we wanted to teach.
Foreign language and literature faculty members were visible at all levels of university governance. A Strategic Planning Council was appointed by our president at six-year intervals with instructions to examine the campus mission statement, review all academic programs, and develop a plan for the future. A representative from foreign languages and literatures (she happened to be from the German program) was regularly asked to serve on this council. With input from foreign languages and literatures, the Strategic Planning Council drafted a mission statement calling for internationalization of the curriculum and all university programs; it set globalization targets, including greater foreign language proficiency, a 25% target for study abroad (by 1998 we had reached a 20% undergraduate student body participation), the meaningful application of foreign language skills to research and jobs within and outside the university, and greater flexibility for international education in the curriculum, particularly in general education (Mission Review 10–11).
One way of encouraging the meaningful application of foreign language skills on our campus was through Languages across the Curriculum, a program that had been introduced with FIPSE support on our campus in 1991 and that had grown steadily under the skillful leadership of its director. It attempted to encourage students in all disciplines to apply their language skills (on any level, including the 0 level) meaningfully to course content in the language of their choice, reading and discussing assignments for a course guided by a language resource specialist, typically an international graduate student who was a native speaker of that language and was trained by the program to work with students productively in it. Languages across the Curriculum had become a regular feature in a number of freshmen-sophomore courses and as a result had become part of the local culture. It was one of the requirements for a certificate in international studies, and it became an important vehicle for encouraging students to apply whatever foreign language skills they possessed to reading assignments in international business, a course in management. However, Languages across the Curriculum was not introduced in courses in engineering or in computer science, and there were no follow-up courses in management in which students could develop more advanced reading skills in the foreign language. The campus is still working to attract more students into this program and to bring the reading skills of students in Languages across the Curriculum to higher levels.
In 1995 the Binghamton University foreign language and literature departments had the good fortune to be selected for a self-study project sponsored by the NFLC in Washington, DC, and the AACU with support from the Henry Luce Foundation. Our local team of foreign language and literature educators had written a proposal on the basis of which Binghamton was selected as one of the sixteen campuses to participate in the project. We actively used this opportunity to reflect on the “missions” or roles of foreign language departments with national leaders in foreign language education, including the project directors Joseph S. Johnston, Jr. (AACU), David Maxwell (NFLC) (later Catharine Ingold), Jane R. Spalding (AACU), and the project consultants Richard Brecht and Nina Garrett. Our first task was to reconceptualize foreign language study within the general education framework; our second to link study abroad to general education. With the special help of Brecht, who became campus consultant for Binghamton, the Department of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages became the laboratory for something altogether innovative. Our mission was first to consider whether elementary foreign language study could fit into the framework of general education and second to make study abroad a more flexible option for our students, especially for those in the professional schools who were barred from study abroad by the number of general education requirements on the one hand and by rigid programs of study their specializations required on the other. If these students could study abroad during their sophomore year at Binghamton when they had fewer requirements than during their junior year when their schedules allowed no room for electives, would they not benefit greatly in their careers through this globalizing experience? Our reflection led to a proposal that resulted in permission for the director of international programs to grant general education credit for courses taken abroad and for the experience of living and learning abroad. This proposal was intended to make it possible for students from the professional schools to go abroad and still graduate on time. The option became institutionalized in a very successful International Studies Certificate that could be earned by students who go abroad and reflect on their experience in a one-credit course.
When the introduction of general education requirements was first debated on our campus in 1993 as a replacement for distributional requirements in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, a plea to consider foreign language study as part of general education encountered strong opposition from the administration, faculty members, and students on the grounds that it would be too expensive and too restrictive to force every student to study a foreign language or a foundational course about how language functions—even if liberal waivers were available. Administrators told us that the funds required to hire additional faculty members, adjuncts, and teaching assistants could not be found. And faculty members and students alike, who sought to decrease the number of requirements and preserve educational choice, saw foreign language study as less essential than foundational work in discipline-based writing, American pluralism, global interdependencies, science laboratory, mathematical reasoning, aesthetic perspective, and physical activity-wellness.2 When general education categories were adopted in 1996, foreign language and literature courses were excluded as potential offerings except for contributing to courses on aesthetic perspective. The imposition of general education requirements on all students, including students in the School of Engineering, the School of Management, and the School of Nursing, all of whom faced extensive sets of required courses imposed by the accreditors of their schools, meant that almost none of these students entered foreign language study, since foreign language study and study abroad did not enable them to complete either general education or major or school-specific requirements. The international focus introduced in the campus mission statement and the plan for the future for the curricula of the university threatened to bypass a group of students who had a special need for cultural fluency and language proficiency if they were to be successful in entering the global workplace in management, engineering, and computer science.
With mene, mene, tekel on the wall of foreign language, literature, and cultural studies programs other than Spanish, it became obvious that foreign language programs needed to welcome students in other ways if these programs were to be part of their general education. Providing information to students that foreign language study was important to their global education and advising were not enough; there needed to be a flexible mechanism for students that would valorize foreign language and culture study within the campus culture. General education was viewed by members of the faculty and by students as such a valorization, and even though foreign languages had initially been barred from general education, some faculty members in foreign language and literature departments still believed that there should be room for foreign languages and cultures in the house of general education. It is here where our participation in the Language Mission Project played a crucial role in helping us reconceptualize foreign language teaching in a general education framework.
The Admission of a Modified Elementary German Course in the House of General Education
Aided by three informative seminars at the NFLC, biweekly meetings of our Campus Language Mission Committee, and a campus visit by our consultant from the NFLC, a group of faculty members and administration leaders on campus began to reconceptualize foreign language study, using German as pilot and laboratory; and in time this pilot study shaped thinking about language teaching and learning in our programs in Russian and Chinese as well. Romance languages and literatures did not make changes in its curriculum.
With support from the NFLC, members of the foreign language faculty at Binghamton started to focus on the one hand on general education goals and purposes in foreign language education and on the other hand on the specific definition given to general education categories on our campus, to see if common ground could be found. We settled on elementary German as our pilot project. Although we hoped that most students might continue into second-year German, we had to assume that one year of German would be all a large component of entering students might take, and so we asked ourselves what students should know about German and German-speaking countries after one year. In addition to the four skills, cultural fluency had always been recognized as a fifth skill. Making cross-cultural comparisons of the United States, Germany, and Austria had been a regular part of our program. Students had become interested in linguistics, history, cinema, music, art history, philosophy, and psychology through culturally diverse readings from these fields. The trouble was that these topics had been treated largely in German, perforce on the simplified level, rather than on the more sophisticated level required by general education. What if we were to treat these and other cultural studies topics in greater depth in English one day a week to engage students and to satisfy general education requirements at the same time? Having been introduced in English, general education topics could be referenced on a simpler level in German on other days and still capture the interest of students. It was encouraging to find that a similar model had been adopted by Stanford University for elementary German and other German-language courses to introduce cultural studies on a more advanced level (Bernhardt and Berman). Our goal became to articulate what we had already been doing in cultural studies, raise it to the more sophisticated level made possible through weekly readings and discussions in English over a period of a year, and meet criteria of general education by focusing the discussion to a greater extent on the framework specified by general education. By these innovations we hoped to increase interest in cross-cultural topics of a foundational character through the more involved discussion made possible by using English once in the five-day instructional week and to obtain a general education global interdependency G designation for elementary German, which would make it possible for students in highly restrictive programs like engineering and management to take elementary German and fulfill the global interdependency general education requirement.
In asking for a general education designation for an elementary foreign language such as German, we turned to the ideas we had exchanged with the leadership of the NFLC, arguing that this course met the basic goals of general education to broaden knowledge and understanding as well as to improve thinking. We pointed out, as Richard Brecht had summarized in seminars, that this foundational course dealt with
We argued that in the German program at Binghamton foreign languages and cultures had always been paired. Students had access to culture through study abroad, through basic language instruction, and in cultural studies courses. In our foreign language classes, we affirmed, students had come to understand the concept of culture and language in a broader global context through comparisons of the cultures and languages studied with their own language and culture. We proposed to recognize these cross-cultural comparisons in an institutionalized framework, where they would be carried on regularly in the classroom. We proposed to add the special module that would be conducted in English and would enable students to receive a G to indicate the completion of the global interdependency requirement.
In response to our justification and a course proposal containing specific units to be covered, our local curriculum committee granted our request for a global interdependency designation for the two-semester sequence. The course syllabus reflected our opinion that our students would benefit from knowing how ideas emanating from Germany had influenced art, economics, and education in the United States. Conversely, it was also important for our students to learn how German-speaking countries had been influenced by the culture, ideas, and economic forces of the United States.
At Binghamton global interdependencies are described as follows:
Consideration of how one or more of the regions of the world have influenced and interacted with the West and with one another, and how the West has affected and been affected by these regions and their distinctive cultures or civilizations.3
Our current description for elementary German reads:
Acquisition of basic grammar and vocabulary, development of reading and speaking skills, introduction to cross-cultural communication. Course introduces students to German culture and to cultural interdependencies between German-speaking countries and the U.S. Texts augmented by tapes and video materials. Upon the completion of 101 and 102, students will receive a “G” for General Education credit.4
The G designation made taking elementary German more attractive to students in the professional schools, who would not have been able to take both German and a global interdependency in another field, such as history. Once students were in our program and perceived possibilities of entering a global economy through German, more of them remained, because we also introduced a program of study leading to a dual degree in engineering and German and a German minor for students of management. Both degree programs involved study abroad. The payoff for our German program in 1999, the first year that we offered the G designation, was an increase to two sections of elementary German. Our enrollment doubled from the year before. About half the entering students who came to us were majors in engineering, management, computer science, or nursing—programs in which we had advertised but from which we had not drawn students before. It was clear that the G designation made a difference. Recognizing that the students in our classes were there by choice and that they were eager to prepare themselves for the global workplace increased our awareness of the need to reflect with them on what they should know and to build our general education syllabus for elementary German with their needs in mind.
We experimented initially with the modular format, believing that it might be possible to award general education G credit to those who participated actively in the four German days and the fifth English day but not to those who opted for only the four days of German instruction. That turned out to be unworkable because much of the discussion that took place in English on the German cultural studies day was referenced in German on subsequent days—albeit on a simplified basis. With two different sections being offered regularly, we experimented with offering the module in one and not the other, but students in the German-only section felt short-changed without the English cultural studies module. We are now offering both sections with the English cultural studies module.
The idea of conceptualizing teaching and learning in modules, which had already been introduced in Languages across the Curriculum, was developed and adapted to a number of courses, particularly courses for heritage learners. To a course in Russian culture and civilization that was taught in English, for instance, we added modules in reading Russian texts or in Russian grammar, or in both. To German cultural studies classes offered in English, for example, Women and the Holocaust: Gender, Memory, and Representation, we added similar modules or Arbeitsgruppen in German, where texts would be read in German and German films were available for students wanting to work in German. We made an attempt to package learning in units other than the fixed set of credits awarded for courses in order to customize learning for students to the extent that the learning environment and our ability to staff courses would permit. We found that modules still had to be tied to the credit system but that we could treat them more flexibly, either adding credits or giving a different rubric to a course that was cross-listed in two or more departments or programs.
Under dynamic new leadership the certificate in international studies program grew within a space of several years from 8 students in 1995 to about 100 students in 2001. Requiring one year of intermediate foreign language or the equivalent, a study-abroad experience, and cross-cultural course work, as well as an independent study consisting of a paper reflecting on the global vision or perspective that had been obtained, the certificate became a means of validating the importance of study abroad on each student’s transcript. For a number of students who went abroad having signed up for this certificate, courses abroad were counted as general education courses. Although many of the students who participated were already foreign language majors who would have gone abroad anyway, the recognition on the transcript, the cross-cultural component, and the additional independent study made the program especially rewarding.
Recognizing the importance of academic study and research abroad, our university’s plan for the future (adopted in 1996) had set a target of an experience abroad for 25% of the student body by 2000. Within our local Language Mission Committee we attempted to redesign study abroad to make it possible for students to go abroad earlier and to earn general education credits while abroad. When such authority was granted, it meant that students in the professional schools were now able to study both general education and foreign language, thus internationalizing their program of study. The director of international education sought and was granted the authority to award general education credit as appropriate, including a G for global interdependency by virtue of the course work and the experience abroad. She reports having made small use of this option to grant general education credit because most students have completed general education courses in the first two years before going abroad. In German, however, a number of students enrolled in professional schools (engineering, management and nursing) have gone abroad as sophomores, and these students have benefited from receiving some general education credit for academic work done abroad.
On welcoming students home with vastly improved proficiency in the foreign language as a result of study abroad, departments recognized the need to maintain and further develop this proficiency. In his critique of the use of study abroad, David Maxwell cites the failure to help the student maintain the proficiency gained abroad as a special problem at our nation’s campuses (Schneider; Maxwell). The German program at Binghamton has staunchly attempted to maintain and enhance proficiency gained, using and creating as many formal and informal opportunities as possible, which is especially important since we lack a German house on campus. All instruction in German classes in our program (other than those courses offered specifically in translation) is carried out in German. A German-language table meets once a week. There is a weekly German radio program. Students, particularly returnees, are frequently brought into regular contact with graduate exchange students from Graz, Leipzig, Chemnitz, and Dresden. Returnees are invited to participate as undergraduate teaching assistants in first-year German, infusing their own enthusiasm into one-to-one conversational practice with students and exploring career potential in so doing. A German Club meets regularly. A popular video program is run by students, and film series are regularly organized. Graduate engineering students from the technical universities of Chemnitz and Dresden work one-to-one with dual degree students in engineering and German using material on a Web site especially created for students who wish to acquire proficiency in technical German. By the time they graduate, nonnative students who do not go abroad acquire at least the middle of the Advanced level on the ACTFL scale; for those who go abroad, the proficiency reached depends on how much German they have taken by the time they go abroad and the extent of their stay in one of our two study-abroad programs: one in Graz, a liberal arts program that accepts students after the first year of German, although it has traditionally welcomed our juniors, and a program in Leipzig that has higher proficiency requirements and allows students to complete advanced work in their major and in German. Contrary to the experience described by Maxwell in connection with the elimination of the Department of Foreign Languages at Drake and Drake’s plan to outsource foreign language instruction and learning to international partner universities, our linking of language, literature, and cultural studies has been a successful experience for our students. Our exit assessment instruments and the Goethe Institute proficiency examinations demonstrate that our students graduate with the language skills they gained abroad; these instruments corroborate also that students value the link we have maintained among language, literature, and cultural studies at all levels of our program (except in the first year where literature is only one component of many topics).
In the early 1990s the German program at SUNY, Binghamton, was probably the weakest of the four SUNY centers. Today it has emerged as the strongest; in fact it is the only one to survive as an independent major, with growth in introductory language classes; strong alliances with other programs that facilitate double majoring; a customized curricular menu of options for its students that includes study abroad with the possibility of internships at two outstanding universities in Austria and Germany; a learner-centered curriculum focused on the communicative approach; a challenging combination of language, literature, and cultural studies courses; new programs leading to dual degrees or concentrations that facilitate the entry into the global workplace—all situated in an environment that is supportive of a community of learners. Our Web sites and brochures can offer additional information about these and other aspects of our program. In this brief essay I have been specially eager to show how our wish—to make an intellectual contribution to the entire university—became linked to the process of entering the house of general education. The room we have been given in this house is not the salon of the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, but it is one in which dialogues and discussions take place that are of a foundational nature and that broaden the global perspectives of the discussions carried on in all other rooms.
2A complete description of the general education program is found on the Binghamton Web site: http://www.Binghamton.edu.
3Binghamton University Bulletin 2000–01: 90. After being accepted in 1999 and being taught for two years, the course content has had to be revised as a result of a modified definition of global interdependency issued by SUNY Central on behalf of the trustees. The new formulation of the syllabus that has been accepted introduces foundational influences of the West coming from Indo-European mythology.
4A syllabus for the course will be found on the departmental Web site: http://greal.binghamton.edu/german/courses (the site is currently under construction).
Gilman, Sander. “Jobs: What We (Not They) Can Do.” MLA Newsletter 27.4 (1995): 4–5.
James, Dorothy. “Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who’s Minding the Store?” ADFL Bulletin 28.3 (1997): 5–11. [Show Article]
Maxwell, David. “Colloquy.” Chronicle of Higher Education 13 Mar. 2001. Online version.
Mission Review Document. SUNY, Binghamton, 1998.
Schneider, Alison. “A University Plans to Promote Language by Killing Its Language Department.” Chronicle of Higher Education 9 Mar. 2001: A14.
Standards for Foreign Language Learning. Yonkers: Natl. Standards in Foreign Lang. Educ. Project, 1996.
Weber, Richard. “Re(de)fining the College German Curriculum: A Project Proposal.” Unterrichtspraxis 33 (2000): 50–59.
© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
