34, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 33-35
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Experiential Learning in the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire’s
Program in Wittenberg, Germany
JEFFORD VAHLBUSCH
THE University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire’s study-abroad program in Wittenberg is designed for students who have completed three to four semesters of college-level German. Applicants must have attained sophomore standing and a minimum grade point average of 2.8, and must enroll in a one-credit orientation course during the semester before departure. Program participants spend fourteen weeks in the spring semester studying German language, culture, history, literature, and contemporary life at the Institut für deutsche Sprache und Kultur in Wittenberg, an affiliate of the University of Halle-Wittenberg that designs and conducts language and culture programs for foreigners. Our students live individually with German host families; undertake group excursions (Berlin, Dessau, Halle, Leipzig, Dresden, Weimar); and engage in a wide variety of academic, athletic, cultural, and social activities. All instruction, student work, and routine program business is conducted in German. One of the four faculty members in the German section at UW-Eau Claire directs the program and teaches two courses in it; the other courses are taught by qualified institute staff. Courses offered in 2002 included fourth-semester German (German 202); Advanced Conversation (310); Current Events: Speaking, Reading, Writing (314); Eastern Germany before and after Reunification (357); Regional Studies: Wittenberg in German History (360); and East German Post-War Literature (395). Formal instruction takes place Monday through Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., with some scheduled afternoon sessions and activities. Group excursions are undertaken every other Friday; some involve an overnight stay. There is a one-week spring break. For room, board, books, tuition, and excursions in program year 2002, in-state students paid $3,600; out-of-state students, $4,500.
Within its traditional structure and curriculum, UW–Eau Claire’s Wittenberg program offers its students three sorts of experiential learning opportunities.
Project-based learning. Much of the teaching and learning in the program is task- and project-based. This approach requires extensive student involvement in the community and intensive student interaction with citizens and agencies on topics of interest to the residents of Wittenberg. Topics treated during a typical semester might range from Martin Luther’s marriage to Katharina von Bora or his response to the peasant revolts, to the work of the city’s Stasi in 1989, to unemployment and worker outmigration in the state of Sachsen-Anhalt in the past five years. During the 2001 program, for example, students spent two weeks in the classroom and in the field, learning about the environmental history of Wittenberg’s region. For their projects, some students focused on private and government initiatives to reclaim and find creative ways to use the area’s now-closed lignite coal strip mines. Others examined controversial proposals to expand commercial barge traffic on the newly cleaned-up Elbe by widening and dredging the river; their investigation made students aware of the likely positive influences on the local economy and the probable negative effects on the river’s ecology and surrounding wetlands. Students working on these projects did library research, searched newspaper archives and the Internet, interacted with citizens’ groups and environmentalists, went on patrol with the river police, and interviewed government officials and members of the public relations team of the major chemical factory—SKW Piesteritz—that is Wittenberg’s largest employer and the owner of the city’s only industrial harbor on the Elbe. Students communicated their findings in formal presentations, in poster sessions, and in various sorts of written work.
Service learning. Since 1995, UW–Eau Claire has been one of the few public universities in the country to require candidates for the baccalaureate degree to complete a service-learning project (Crews 32). Service learning is, of course, not just service; in its simplest definition, it involves “community service in conjunction with guided reflection” (Ehrlich xiii). According to a well-known description, service learning offers students the “opportunity to enrich and apply classroom knowledge; explore careers or majors; develop civic and cultural literacy; improve citizenship, helping, learning and occupational skills; enhance personal growth and self-image; develop job links; and most of all foster . . . a concern for social problems, sense of social responsibility and commitment to human service” (Brevard Community Coll.).
Since the founding of the UW–Eau Claire Wittenberg program, in 1999, each participant has undertaken thirty hours of service learning in Wittenberg and nearby communities. In 2001, our students served in soup kitchens; homes for the elderly; shelters for the homeless; both private and public kindergartens, some of them for children with disabilities; a women’s café; a counseling and job-training center for youth; a school gardening and ecology center; the city forest and children’s zoo; city unemployment counseling offices; the Wittenberg Youth Hostel; various elementary schools; an art school for children; a hospital emergency room; and a substance-abuse counseling center. Service learning abroad, in a foreign language, can help students build linguistic, cultural, and civic competence. It can engage our students in the challenge of personal growth through service, and it can offer them the sort of intimate involvement and investment in their communities abroad and in their target languages that few study-abroad programs can guarantee. It is axiomatic that the quality of students’ learning through their service grows in proportion to the quantity and quality of their written and oral reflection on that service.1
Short-term internships. In 2001, we added a business and professional internship to the program. For an additional $650 (2002), including room and board, students may extend their stay in Wittenberg by four weeks, to intern full time in local firms and offices. In consultation with the staff of the Institut für deutsche Sprache und Kultur, students select a focus for their internships—such as law, advertising, or city government—and are supported by on-site mentoring and at least four hours of instruction a week in business German, business etiquette, and business practices.
The two students who interned in our 2001 pilot program did so in part to explore possible careers, and both asked for a wide range of placements. The student who chose advertising and marketing spent time shadowing in a large agency charged with marketing the city of Wittenberg, in a one-person advertising firm specializing in small businesses, in a Lutheran educational foundation, and in the sales and marketing department of a major producer of heavy milling equipment. The student who chose architecture and construction was able to intern in both the largest and the smallest construction firms in Wittenberg, in the city’s urban-planning office, and with a construction foreman overseeing major projects from Berlin to Leipzig. In exit interviews, both students reported that dressing, acting, and performing as members of the regular workforce in Wittenberg had given them a new sense of self and of purpose. Both felt that their understanding of everyday and professional life in Germany had deepened during the internship and that their German-language abilities had improved significantly during that time. Both thought that their knowledge of the economic and social realities of Wittenberg and the state of Sachsen-Anhalt had increased, and they were delighted at being included as a matter of course in after-work socializing with their German coworkers.
Nearly all participants in the Wittenberg program are (or eventually become) German majors or minors. Most have another major as well and see their study of German as secondary or supplementary to the course of study that will become the foundation for their careers and their lives. They see the study of German as a practical means to professional and personal goals; they want our German program—and our program in Wittenberg—to help them develop competencies in language, culture, and society that will stand them in good professional stead in their primary fields. Students in the 2001 and 2002 Wittenberg programs listed their other majors as mathematics, education, finance, psychology, management, philosophy and religion, international business, technical writing, communication disorders, nursing, biology, English literature, chemistry, pre-engineering, history, music education, marketing and advertising, management information systems, social work, special education, communication and journalism, or forensic science.
As always, our task is to seek ways to serve the professional and vocational needs of our students while maintaining our German programs as places in which language, culture, literature, and history can be studied in the depth and breadth, and with the intensity, that must characterize good undergraduate major programs. At UW–Eau Claire, we continue to affirm and to sharpen our traditional focus on language, literature, and culture, but we are also developing other significant focal points. Enriching our study-abroad program in Wittenberg with project-based learning, business and professional internships, and service learning helps us to meet our students’ needs, to make our programs more attractive, and to branch out in new and interesting directions.2
The author is Assistant Professor of German, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
1For more information on the theory and practice of service learning in foreign language teaching and learning, see Hellebrandt and Varona.
2For discussion of UW-Eau Claire’s Wittenberg program in the context of service-learning theory and for practical advice on implementing service learning in a traditional study-abroad program, see Vahlbusch.
Brevard Community Coll., Cocoa, FL. Center for Service-Learning. Introduction. 24 Mar. 2002 http://www.brevard.cc.fl.us/ CSL/02Introduction/.
Crews, Robin J. Higher Education Service-Learning Sourcebook. Westport: Oryx, 2002.
Ehrlich, Thomas. Foreword. Service Learning in Higher Education: Concepts and Practices. By Barbara Jacoby and Associates. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. xi–xiii.
Hellebrandt, Josef, and Lucia T. Varona, eds. Construyendo puentes (Building Bridges): Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Spanish. Washington: Amer. Assn. for Higher Educ., 1999.
Vahlbusch, Jefford. “Experiential Education Abroad: Service-Learning, Project-Based Learning, and Internships in Germany.” Sustaining Change: New Directions as Standard Practice. Report of the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Ed. Gale Crouse, Sarah Doering, and Carter Smith. Valdosta: Lee Bradley and Valdosta State U, 2002. 129–39.
© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 34, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 33-35 |
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