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Mit seltsamen Gabärden
Gibt man sich viele Pein,
Kein Mensch will etwas werden
Ein jeder will schon was sein.
No one wants the trouble of becoming
Everyone wants to have already become
Why struggle when putting on airs
Would seem to work just fine?
Goethe 650; my trans.
EVEN though we do not know the context of Goethe's epigram, we can easily imagine that it had to do with Bildung (“self-cultivation”) or, rather, with a reluctance to embark on a quest for it. What Goethe alludes to is that all kinds of learning involve a fundamental dialectic, namely, the dialectic of self-preservation and self-transformation. And though he may not have had foreign language education in mind, it is hard to imagine a field of inquiry in which the dialectic comes into play in more basic and varied ways.
Invariably intersecting with the linguistic, cultural, epistemological, “textual,” psychological, pedagogical, the dialectic manifests itself in the tensions between ethnocentrism and (discriminate) ethnorelativism, self- and other-understanding affective and cognitive learning dispositions, mythological and real or everyday culture, textually encoded and interpretively emergent meaning.
As varied as these tensions might be, they all seem to point at the same source, the dialectic of language itself—that is, the dialectic between language as instinct and language as weltanschauung. Evolving from this source, the dialectic of education moves along a path of ever-increasing enlightenment, approaching but never reaching its goal: maturation and autonomy. If these keys to human existence sound Kantian, so be it; after all, it was Kant who had the dialectic inscribed on his tombstone in this much-quoted variant: “The starry firmament above us and the moral law within us.”
The implementation of Bard's Foreign Language, Culture, and Literature Program is in large part due to a recognition of this dialectic. This dialectic, its conceptual and psychological premises, its pedagogical and curricular ramifications, and its concrete educational benefits and outcomes are what concern this essay.
Although Bard's foreign language faculty holds a common philosophy, the practical implementation varies from language to language. Since German has served as a model, the examples adduced below are from that language. The development of the program would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, without the inherent opportunities Bard offers as a small liberal arts college, especially its integrated curriculum and its emphasis on a course of study that, while tailored to the student's needs and ambitions, balances breadth and specialization. Last but not least, both the dean and the president of the college have had a hand in creating the program.
At the outset, I should mention one other dialectic, namely the Gotthelfian one of Geld und Geist (money and mind), for without two generous grants from the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation, 1 Bard's once wallflower-like foreign language program could not have flourished as it has in both substance and size. 2 Tangible testimony to this dialectic is a state-of-the-art foreign language education center, part of whose function is to house powerful tools for multimedia learning. As yet, we have little experience with this polysensory, modular, and interdisciplinary technology. Our goal is to make multimedia thoroughly interactive and also tailored to students' individual learning strategies and cognitive gaps (Kramsch, Context 196–203; Oblinger; Patrikis; Yu). By avoiding its reduction to a solipsistic practicing of slick cyberdrills, our electronic classroom may even live up to the expectation expressed—with a grain of salt—in the following limerick:
Word has come down from the dean
That by aid of the computing machine
Young Oedipus Rex
Could have learned about sex
Without ever touching the queen.
(Patrikis 36)
The two key words that best describe our program are intensive and diverse. At the learning level we offer, in addition to or in intervals with a regular-paced course sequence, an intensive format. It allows students to complete the equivalent of two years of language study in five months (German and Italian) or ten months (French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese). All our intensive courses include a one- or two-month summer or winter program in a country of the target language (current sites are Heidelberg, Bologna, Tours, Oaxaca, Saint Petersburg, and Tianjin).
The arguments for shortening the acquisition process and enriching it with a firsthand cross-cultural experience are self-evident. Let me therefore just reconfirm the numerical outcome documented in my 1990 report on the German Pilot program: a dramatic increase in upper-level enrollment—so great an increase, in fact, that we have reached, if not gone beyond, the limits of pedagogical conduciveness with, for instance, sixteen students in a third-year-level German literature course on the Grimms' fairy tales.
Another reason for the increase is the diversification of the upper-level curriculum, comprising a menu of literature courses with approaches ranging from the philological to the feminist, as well as nonliterary cross-disciplinary tutorials taught side by side with virtually any course outside the field of literature. For example, a philosophy major with a third-year competence in German who is taking a course on nineteenth-century Continental philosophy can read and discuss Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy in both English (in the philosophy course) and German (in the concurrent tutorial).
Unlike programs at other institutions (see esp. Jurasek; Anderson, Allen, and Narváez; Metcalf; Grandin), the structure of our languages-across-the-curriculum program is totally flexible and, most important, in the best scenario integral to the teleology of undergraduate education as a whole and in particular to its capstone at Bard, the senior project.
Shortly before a semester's course list comes out, foreign language faculty members mark courses in the college at large that could lend themselves to the addition of a language tutorial. Once a student decides to take the course and the concurrent tutorial, the course instructor and the tutorial instructor consult with each other and put together a reading list. After that, the two classes maintain their own course structures—but they provide a common educational benefit.
The diversification is based on the conviction that while the genius of a language may find its richest expression in literature, literary and nonliterary texts are equally useful for exploring the foreignness of a language and its textual manifestations. As long as expository texts are, depending on a reader's background and expectation and the text's “rhetoric,” received as illocutionary (Swaffar with Kern 115–16), both types of texts, as Claire Kramsch persuasively argues, should be regarded, analyzed, and critically appreciated as discourses. As such, the difference between the two lies not in intellectual content but rather in the way meaning is constituted in and intellectual pleasure is derived from the dialogue between culturally conditioned readers and texts.
While, in Kramsch's words, “a foreign language text invites the learner to discover both the personal voice of a foreign author, and the cultural voice of a speech community” ( Context 123–24), one reading may be more cognitive, analytical, “efferent” ( Context 129); the other more affective, impressionistic, “aesthetic” ( Context 129). Genuine foreign language literacy “includes the capacity to perform both” ( Context 128).
Of the usual suspects whose works (or excerpts thereof) are read and discussed in German cross-disciplinary tutorials, many, such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, or Ranke, are more likely to elicit the first type of reading, others—Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, and Jakob Burckhardt come to mind—a combination of the two. Since students' interests and ambitions know no bounds, there have been also some unusual (efferent) suspects, for instance, Arnold Schoenberg, Adolf Loos, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Oskar Kokoschka, Kurt Wölflin, Dorothee Sölle, Rudolf Otto, and Adolf Kußmaul.
The dialogic interaction between translated the original text and the interplay between different kinds of cognition and imagination are much like a cross-pollination that engenders in-depth understanding and thus a much more thorough digestion of additional knowledge. Undoubtedly, students' interdisciplinary awareness and critical thinking are enhanced too, as are—and these benefits may very well be the most substantial—their sensitivity to the uses and abuses of language (including its pleasures and responsibilities) and their awareness of the intricate interrelation of language, thought, emotion, and imagination.
For instance, listening to a piece of music while reading a composer's description or commentary greatly facilitates not only the student's lexical comprehension of musical concepts but also the student's understanding of what they concretely mean as they are transmuted in the composer's musical intelligence into, for example, sound, measure, modulation, pitch, movement, and tempo. A wonderful illustration of the degree to which certain conceptual terms depend on the genius of the original language is the theologian Rudolf Otto's significant differentiation among Glaube ‘faith,’ Wissen ‘knowledge,’ and Ahnung or Ahndung ‘divination.’
Another example, off the beaten track like the foregoing but all the more revealing, is Kußmaul's seminal 1874 article on nascent diabetes research, “Zur Lehre vom Diabetes mellitus” (“Toward an Understanding of Diabetes Mellitus”). Kußmaul's use (or abuse) of language is not simply stilted and convoluted; it is coldly bureaucratic, revealing a mind for which the ethical dilemma of the scientist seems to have been replaced by a Faustian hubris. To wit: Kußmaul's patients are literally transformed from human beings into scientific data and experimental statistics, and the patient's death signifies nothing but the end of the experiment—which is probably why Kußmaul calls the passing away a “letale Katastrophe” (2, 10). Consider as well that Kußmaul's fame rests in part on his invention of the term Biedermeier , meaning “stodgy German,” and it takes little imagination to sense a prototypical Arendtian banality of evil in his discourse.
All courses in Bard's Foreign Language, Culture, and Literature Program are electives. There is no language requirement. While the switch from a seat-time to a proficiency-based requirement appears to have had important consequences (Barnes, Klee, and Wakefield), language requirements tend to sow frustration by throwing together the motivated with the unmotivated and by reducing learning to successful or, for the most part, unsuccessful test taking. There are, to be sure, some noteworthy exceptions, but in the light of the by and large disheartening outcomes one must ask: Why coerce students into reaching a woefully inadequate level of competence, when they crave the pleasures and rewards that an engagement with linguistically challenging and intellectually meaningful texts provides? The voluntarism of Bard's language program and its intensification and diversification have alleviated the former and accomplished the latter—under a single but decisive proviso: student motivation.
Another received but seemingly unquestioned truism about foreign language education is the pedagogy of communicative competence. The proficiency movement played a crucial role in counteracting the virtually speechless grammar-translation or structural approach and avoiding the thoughtless parroting involved in the audio-lingual method. As of late, however, two fundamental but largely unacknowledged drawbacks have emerged. One is that providing the learner with the means for communication became such an overriding principle that the content of communication was relegated to a negligible status. The definitive version of the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines , published in 1986, lacks levels for cultural proficiency. Evil tongues maintain that the Guidelines' “marketing branch,” the oral proficiency interview, recently graduated an interviewee who was so successful that he resembled Steven Pinker's “linguistic idiot savant” (50–51).
Exaggerated as this story may sound, adapting the communicative approach is—or rather, in Bard's case, has been—imperative. Insofar as language reflects and constructs culture, the two are inseparable—as are, by extension, culture and literature. And, as recent research reveals, first-year students' positive attitude toward foreign languages is overwhelmingly based on the motion that while fluency is important it is not an end in itself; “rather,” as one student puts it, “understanding basic cultural and ethnic differences should be the principal goal” (Roberts 277–78; cf. Henning). For the past few years, Bard's way out of this dilemma has been to teach foreign language, culture, and literature as a triad and to combine a proficiency-oriented teaching approach with a discourse-analytical interpretive approach.
Not only does communicative competence interfere with the students' wish to reduce ethnocentrism, but its proponents failed until very recently to acknowledge one of its psychological premises, communicative apprehension—which, along with social evaluation and testing, contributes to a phenomenon called language anxiety. Educational psychologists define language anxiety “as a stable personality trait referring to the propensity for an individual to react in a nervous manner when speaking, listening, reading, or writing” in a foreign language. It is “characterized by derogatory self-related cognitions (e.g., ‘I can't do this’), feelings of apprehension, and physiological responses such as increased heart rate” (Gardner and MacIntyre 5).
It is consoling that language anxiety is not genetic but rather an emotional response acquired through a series of negative experiences with foreign language learning. Consequently, it can be remedied or, at least, reduced. On the basis of my experience with Bard's foreign language program, I believe there are two factors that help reduce anxiety.
One portion of the medicine is administered by our residential “nurses,” the foreign language tutors. (Bard participates in the Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program under the auspices of the Institute of International Education. 3 ) Since language anxiety decreases with increasing proficiency, the quality of a student's initial experience with the foreign language is essential. For this reason, the German tutor meets with beginning students individually, honing their pronunciation, taking them, as it were, by the hand over the threshold of linguistic inhibition, and helping them find their own voices. After four or five weeks of personalized tutoring, small conversation groups are formed. They create a relaxed and intimate environment in which self-expression can flourish. As the students progress through the levels, these proficiency-enhancing group tutorials remain integral to language study, so much so, in fact, that they frequently induce students to initiate their own projects, such as the staging of theatrical scenes or the production of a radio play.
This intimacy, essential not only for overcoming language anxiety but also for creating an environment in which cognitive and emotional growth occurs (Ochs and Taylor), has been particularly manifest in the various immersion groups I have taught. The sense of unity, the feeling of empathy, respect, and responsibility for one another, has time and again brought out the best in the students (and in the teacher), both in intellectual and in human terms.
To achieve this kind of intimacy, all students enrolled in cross-disciplinary courses meet three or four times a semester and give brief oral reports on their work in progress. I have not experienced a classroom situation in which students have shared knowledge from areas farther afield from their own and with more pride and enthusiasm than in these gatherings. The meetings not only provide a fertile ground for intellectual interaction in which the articulation of ideas is put to the test but also counteract the compartmentalization of knowledge and emphasize the communality of learning.
In addition to the self-confidence bolstering that these instructional settings offer, Bard's foreign language tutors arrange various opportunities for meaningful cross-cultural exchanges, from film screenings and poetry recitals to informal discussion groups on issues topical in Germany (e.g., elections, unification, xenophobia). Recent studies (see, e.g., Gardner and MacIntyre) suggest that such activities are more conducive to language learning than total immersion at so-called language houses or dormitories is; there, immersion students may not only develop “cabin fever” but also acquire a new fear, that of drowning. In other words, quality time ensures cross-cultural sanity, that is, immersion without dissolution, identification without adoption.
These remedies are of course no guarantee that every anxious student will turn into a silver-tongued small talker conversing with aplomb at the next foreign language smorgasbord. But tests at the end of the German immersion course indicate that even the communicatively challenged student passes the speaking and listening portion of the (equivalent of the) Zertifikat Deutsch als Fremd-sprache (Kempf 17). Moreover, I hope the awareness of language anxiety will prevent us from producing foreign language-phobes of that well-known species: those who apparently suffered so severely from this malady that the only way of “overcoming” it is to repress it by denigrating foreign language learning as a nonintellectual enterprise.
It is of course possible to see a foreign language as a mere tool based on a technical system of rules (and their exceptions) that need to be learned through mindless rote work—ad libitum and ad nauseam. And it is certainly possible to see any language as so fraught with ideology that it becomes the fabric of the rhetoric of power. What makes foreign language learning such an intellectually challenging and enriching endeavor is that it avoids these two extremes, in the words of M. A. K. Halliday, by defining grammar as “a theory of human experience” and language as “a part of reality, a shaper of reality, and a metaphor for reality” (qtd. in Kramsch, Context 8, 67).
One can hardly think of a more telling way to illustrate the creative and interpretive significance of grammar—here, in particular, and subjunctive for hypothetical situations—than a comparative and contrastive analysis of one of Brecht's Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner ( Anecdotes of Mr. Keuner ), “Wenn die Haifische Menschen wären” (“If Sharks Were Human Beings”), and Eichendorff's poem “Mondnacht” (“Moonlit Night”). 4
Despite the stark differences in context, form, and style, the human experience at the root of both texts is utopianism. Manifest in the literary form of soberly “concrete” or superbly “ethereal” language, it can take the form of a biting satire promoting an egalitarian society or a melodious song intimating a unio mystica. It is, so to speak, a grammatical feature that unites not only two writers who, ideologically and artistically, could not be further apart but also two fundamentally diverse modes of literature, namely, to use Walter Benjamin's well-known distinction, nonauratic, or allegorical and demystifying, and auratic, or symbolist and totalizing.
Students come away from a discussion of these two texts with the realization that grammar can be utilized and manipulated to serve diverse purposes. The more students understand how integral grammar is to a writer's artistic discourse, the less they view it as a daunting set of arbitrary rules and the more they become aware of how deeply it informs their own discourse.
Interwoven with the issues affecting language learning is the complex question of motivation. Motivation is the most crucial prerequisite for successful languages learning—not, as one might expect, aptitude. To let a student ride the wave of motivation for as long as possible, a language program should be voluntary, intensive, and diverse. On the basis of the two major motivation theories, namely, the behavioristic reward theory and the cognitive drive and need satisfaction theory, educational psychologists now differentiate between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
It seems that students enrolling in our programs experience both kinds of motivation. For instance, students who start with German immersion in February are very much aware that in June they will reap the reward of four months of arduous work by going to Heidelberg. They are equally motivated by the knowledge that after completing the relatively short intensive program they will be entitled to study the real thing in a third-year-level literature course or, say, a cross-disciplinary tutorial involving philosophy. But these rewards are not much more than the proverbial carrot dangling in front of the donkey's nose.
Absolutely decisive is intrinsic motivation, generated by “innate predispositions” that compel students “to probe the unknown, to control [their] environment, to be physically active, to be receptive to mental, emotional, or physical stimulation, to yearn for answers to questions, and to build [their] own self-esteem” (Brown 35). This feeling of self-determination is coupled with increasing competence, greater cognitive flexibility, and enhanced creativity, all of which propel the student on the quest for self-actualization (Deci, Vallerand, Pelletier, and Ryan).
In this respect, students of German immersion at Bard, for instance, have repeatedly highlighted two major benefits of the program: that it led them to perform to their capacity in ways they never imagined possible and that it had a decisive effect on the direction of their academic and personal lives. Even those who were not induced to major in German or to incorporate a significant German component into their liberal arts education acknowledged this sense of direction.
But even without an awareness of these far-reaching implications, it takes little imagination to see the importance of intrinsic motivation in foreign language learning. For instance, it significantly reduces language anxiety, enabling students to participate more actively and to be more cognitively aware, thus specifically enhancing their conceptual understanding as well as their oral and aural skills. Furthermore, intrinsic motivation has been shown to favor long-term retention, which is important because the question raised most frequently about intensive courses is whether they favor short-term over long-term retention (Gardner and MacIntyre 9; Deci, Vallerand, Pelletier, and Ryan 331).
Moreover, curricular diversification builds on intrinsic motivation. Cross-disciplinary students thrive not only on their excitement at being able to use their competence meaningfully in their chosen fields but also on the Wissensvorsprung , or head start in knowledge, that they bring to their tutorials because they are “specialists” (having risen to this status through their work in the regular course). Hence, the powerlessness and the “reduced-personality” syndrome associated with the learner's falling short of the expected or wished-for ability to discuss complex content give way to enhanced confidence and increased risk taking in articulating ideas.
Providing students nonliterary avenues to pursue intellectually enriching and pleasing goals allows a markedly (albeit not exclusively) aesthetic approach to literature courses. While this approach does not ignore the need to provide a cultural-historical, diachronic context to address the largely ahistorical, synchronic mind-set of the electronic-age students—the so-called Generation X born in the 1960s and 1970s (Dietrick; cf. Henning)—it is specifically geared toward honing the sensibilities of those students for whom, as Kramsch put it so aptly, “the smallest line of poetry can potentially change [their] inner timing, cause the sightings to become singings, and reveal in those singings some unknown self to be born” (“In Another Tongue” 14). As diverse as the curriculum and the approaches may be, the dialectic of education holds them together.
The nurturing of intrinsic motivation in the actual classroom has to go beyond delivering positive (affective and cognitive) feedback (cf. Brown 28). Students thrive when they are not being taught but rather being given the opportunity to learn (and to learn to remember) and when these opportunities are not only student-oriented but “autonomy-supportive” (Deci, Vallerand, Pelletier, and Ryan 333, 337). For instance, relegating grammar acquisition to home study or self-study and then using class time for interactive and functional practicing is beneficial only if a phase is inserted in which students are not expected to parse and speak simultaneously but are given the chance to proceed and process through trial and error. This goal can be accomplished by means of a simple missing-information-exchange exercise that moves (in content, not grammar) from supplied to personalized answers. Bereft of this opportunity, students are forced to engage in the paradoxical task of deconstructive construction, which is, to use a visual metaphor, equal to seeing Nekker cubes as concave and convex at the same time (Becker 219). Particularly autonomy-supportive activities are sketches and skits in which students apply newly learned material meaningfully, imaginatively, and playfully. Indelible in my memory are, for example, students' operatic rendition of Helga Novak's short story “Schlittenfahren” (“Sledding”) and a rap version of Goethe's poem “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”).
But there is educational substance to these performances far beyond mere self-initiated playfulness. As iconoclastic and parodic as these two productions were, they creatively and critically built on a genuine understanding of the stylistic and structural features and the shades of meaning of the originals. The discussion following the Gretchen song, for instance, revealed that the performing students intended their version to undo Schubert's attempt at repatriarchalizing Gretchen's rebelliousness as well as to counteract the asexual pathos of Gustaf Gründgens's 1958 theater production (we had listened to audiotapes of both versions the day before) and to recapture from their late-twentieth-century vantage point the spirit of Goethe's original.
By making Goethe's poem their own in this self-reflective way, they illustrated how intrinsically hermeneutical the foreign language classroom is (or should be), for it allows for, or, rather, sets in motion, a Habermasian dialectic of self-understanding and other-understanding: “Objectivity in hermeneutic understanding is achievable to the degree that, as the understanding subject, one learns to see through one's own knowledge-forming process by means of the communicative appropriation of alien objectivations” (Habermas 28; my trans.).
This dialectic feeds into another dialectic on an even higher plane. For German immersion students, the intensive semester at Bard culminates in the reading of the script and the watching of the early cinematographic classic Der blaue Engel ( The Blue Angel ). For an approximately third-semester competence, this “text” is absolutely marvelous both as a script and as a film. Even though most students have seen the film before, they become deeply involved in the script reading; fascinated by the mixture of colloquial and literate language of the dialogues and descriptions (in the script); and intrigued by the film's psychological, historical, and philosophical dimensions.
Through a careful reading of the film script and its various subtexts, students quickly discover that The Blue Angel is not just a movie about a bourgeois man corrupted by a bohemian woman but rather an artistic manifestation of the Wilhelminian and the Weimar Republic zeitgeist.
As varied as the many motifs and themes seem to be (e.g., male self-annihilation through desire reminiscent of Nietzsche's juxtaposition of the Dionysian and the Apollonian; the authoritarian structure and, hence, educational failure of the school system; the vulnerability, vanity, and corruptibility of the intellectual elite), they are but protean forms of the film's leitmotiv: sex and sadism in the private and public spheres. This leitmotiv culminates in the scene in which the magician and demagogue Kiepert, instigating, and instigated by, the soulless and mindless masses who are irresistibly drawn to the spectacle of public humiliation, destroys (the “quixotic” intellectual) Rath—while Lola, at least in spirit, commits adultery in public. Virtually no one protests.
(It is in the interpretation of this scene that the dialectic of (foreign language) education comes into play, for the cross-cultural dialogue turns into a confrontation that may lead to self-transformation.
What one easily fails to notice is that Kiepert, of all people, twice—albeit parodically and sarcastically—alludes to Goethe's notion of Bildung . Early on he welcomes Rath to the Blue Angel by incompletely paraphrasing the famous dictum on the secularizing force of the natural sciences and the arts that Goethe derived from his journey through Italy (incidentally, a “typical” study-abroad experience in that it led to a personal, scientific, and artistic rebirth).
Truly relevant is the second time because it occurs in the crucial scene discussed here. Kiepert calls Rath his Zauberlehrling ‘sorcerer's apprentice,’ thus making indirect reference to Goethe's 1797 ballad bearing that title. The ballad allows for multiple interpretations—its comic and visual potential, for instance, is exploited in a segment of Walt Disney's cartoon collage Fantasia; politically, it is frequently read as Goethe's allegorical response and solution to the French Revolution.
In reading the ballad, the students discover not only the inadequacy of the Disney version (a good example for the dialectic of self- and other-understanding) but, much more important, the link to The Blue Angel , namely, the unleashing of the chaotic and seemingly untamable and (self)destructive force of nature or, in The Blue Angel , of the masses. The students need not acknowledge or identify with Goethe's antidote to the unrestrained, irrational, and immature mob—the cultivated, moderate individual. What they nevertheless deduce from the apprentice's experience is that self-determination has its correlate in responsibility for one's actions, for one's self, and for others.
Seen from this dialectic—which is, in the last analysis, the dialectic enshrined as a postulate in the categorical imperative— The Blue Angel , steeped as it is in the intellectual climate of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany, seems to transcend national boundaries. This recognition brings us to a dialectic that is a Pandora's box better left unopened here—universalist interculturalism versus balkanized multiculturalism—and the attendant conundrum of how inclusive or exclusive each is.
Of course students develop a sensitivity to unexplored dimensions outside and within their own cultural frame not only through encounters with texts but also through encounters with culture in its concrete and living totality. To this end, and to further help fulfill intrinsically motivated aspirations, the integrated summer- or winter-break programs abroad have a crucial function. After four months of fifteen hours a week of in-class study (and countless study hours outside of class), the German immersion class, for instance, relocates in June—with partial support from the Van Meeteren Foundation 5 —to Heidelberg's Collegium Palatinum (the language institute of Schiller International University).
Years ago, when toward the end of the program in Germany I offered to help my first group of immersion students prepare for the final exam (a daunting, two-day-long, comprehensive test), they respectfully declined, saying that while they were eager to show what they had learned and would give their very best in the exam, they felt that not test could ever measure and no grade could ever reflect the quality and quantity of their intellectual and personal growth. Only after teaching and supervising several other immersion groups have I gained a good sense of what exactly they meant.
Research suggests that it takes at least six months of study abroad to significantly and lastingly effect students' cognitive and emotional development (Kauffmann, Martin, and Weaver with Weaver 62). But discussions with and evaluations by German immersion students give evidence of precisely such as effect—albeit on a small scale—after only four weeks.
Even though cognitive and personal growth are inextricably intertwined (see Kauffmann, Martin, and Weaver with Weaver 123—45), I would like to concentrate here on the intellectual. First of all, immersion students, demonstrate an exciting increase in linguistic capacity, especially in listening and speaking, entailing an awareness of nuances in intonation and rhythm and differences in usage. Equally high is the increase in cultural knowledge through face-to-face encounter with architecture, music, literature, theater, history, politics, customs, and traditions. Despite complaining about the superficiality of too short an exposure, students point out the relevance of combining, for instance, visits to the Lenbachhaus museum in Munich and to Dachau or to the Kaiserdom in Speyer and to the mikveh , the Jewish ritual bath, there. The comparison helped them gain a critical appreciation of German culture and history, but it also made them aware of how important it is to question one's own cultural heritage.
Finally, on a more abstract level, Bard students corroborate two results of recent study-abroad research, namely, that the exposure to different schools of thought enhances their ability to think systematically and delineate their own points of view and that the exposure to different manifestations of cultural activity alerts them to the interrelatedness of diverse disciplines, indeed “awakens” in them “the purpose of liberal education” (Kauffmann, Martin, and Weaver with Weaver 45).
The study-abroad experience heightens cultural sensitivity among students, helping them make the transition from, as the Kauffmann study puts it, an “encapsulated ethnocentrism” to an “empathic ethnorelativism.” Elaborating on these concepts, Kauffmann and his coauthors judiciously observe that “difference is experienced as threatening” on the enthnocentric level but as “nonthreatening” on the ethnorelativist level, on which “cultural difference [is] viewed as enjoyable and welcome” (128, 141). Here the authors of the study inadvertently make a strong argument that foreign language education is ultimately about the teaching of difference (cf. Peck). Correct as this contention is, does it not immediately raise the question, Can it really be relativistic and nonevaluative? To paraphrase, is the “paralysis of commitment” not too high a price for “cultural openness” (141)? It may be, at least until one reaches the highest level of cultural sensitivity, “integrated ethnorelativism”—which, according to the Kauffmann study, generally happens not until midlife (129).
Foreign language teaching has to be geared more toward accelerating this transition. Particularly in German, the difference we teach must be discriminate from the start so we can impart in our students a critical appreciation of German language, culture, and literature, past and—in dialogic interaction with the past, as Azade Seyhan reminds us—present (cf. von Dirke). For Bildung to be emancipatory, our pedagogy, though grounded in a genuine love of subject, has to be critical.
If studying abroad is both a journey into another country and “a journey into the self” (Adler 22), then foreign language, culture, and literature education is, as a whole, a journey toward self-actualization.
On their return to Bard, foreign language students can pursue, as it were, a bilingual approach to their liberal arts education, choosing from a menu of courses besides the genuine literature courses that tap into the entire curriculum. The acme of this journey is a year-long senior project.
Comparable in intensity, breadth, and depth to MA theses, the more traditional projects take the form of a critical study, or a translation with a critical introduction, of a piece (or pieces) of fiction or a set of poems. For the more progressive projects, foreign language, culture, and literature are still integral, if not foundational. But these projects also shown how students can go beyond narrowly conceived disciplinary boundaries and how they can succeed in synthesizing different theoretical and creative imaginations into a coherent whole so that the final product is more than the sum of the disciplines involved. Here are three examples.
An erstwhile German immersion student majoring in music became, through a combination of cross-disciplinary tutorials and music department courses, so fascinated with Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel that she decided, for her senior project, to put together a performance (with herself on violin) of Mendelssohn-Hensel's E-flat Major String Quartet and Adagio for Violin and Piano and to write a biographical sketch and a critical essay on the composer's work. The primary sources were mostly in German, including letters and the diary of Mendelssohn-Hensel's Italian journey, and, to everybody's surprise—given the appropriation of her works by her famous brother—a review of her piano compositions (opp. 2, 5, and 6), which the student, through meticulous research, had dug up in the June 1847 volume of Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Interestingly enough, it was this review that prompted the student to explore and define the “feminine” aspects of Mendelssohn-Hensel's compositional technique.
In another project, a student combined her linguistic, sociohistorical, and literary competence; her expertise in computer graphics (especially in translating original photographs into high-contrast and pixelated images); and her technical know-how and manual skills to craft from scratch a book—or, rather, to create a piece of art—entitled Faces of Berlin: A Selection of Images and Texts from the Weimar Republic.
A third student wrote the life story (with a critical commentary) of a sixty-year-old working-class woman who emigrated from Germany to the United States shortly after World War II. The project stands out in my memory for its originality, the high level of critical and self-reflective energy it required, and the way the student brought to bear insights from almost every course she had taken. For, eventually, she had to wrestle with a number of complex issues such as growing up in Nazi Germany and the attendant question of (absolving oneself from) culpability; the role and marginalization of women; the construction of memory—an issue, incidentally, woefully lacking in Alison Owings's critically acclaimed book Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich; testimonial literature; and the self in and as (auto)biographical writing. In the growing (but far from complete) project of recording women's life stories, this student's critical biography breaks new ground in another respect too, for it is about a female German émigré of non-Jewish origin.
The extraordinary quality of these projects is a tribute to the love of inquiry and creative and intellectual activity, a proof of the validity of our program's volitional and highly individualized format. For what could potentially turn into an educational ego trip confirming preexisting ideological and artistic views—an approach loathed by Goethe in his epigram—is in reality a way of producing and achieving ever higher degrees of complexity, differentiation, and innovation. And, finally, to the extent that these three women rewrote or re-created themselves through their projects, they proved the educational potential of foreign language, culture, and literature as a path to self-actualization.
Bard's foreign language, culture, and literature program has one significant drawback: it is extremely labor-intensive for the faculty members. Calling it a labor of love is probably stretching it a bit; after all, Bildung is a secular concept. It is precisely therein, in Bildung , in our self-cultivation, that our utterly this-worldly reward ultimately lies. For instance, because of our program's inherent inter-disciplinarity, we increasingly find ourselves involved in academic projects exploring the interconnectedness of different modes of intellectual and artistic inquiry (such as the aforementioned senior projects). This involvement has led to a higher level of self-reflection and has both inspired our teaching and influenced our scholarly work.
Furthermore, with our gain in curricular prominence came a gain in esteem and respect. A case of, as it were, reverse discrimination against languages may serve as an unusual illustration for this shift in attitude. A colleague who teaches history of science was so eager to have his class finally reap the benefits of (parts of) his extensive collection of original Einstein material that he “allowed” a student of German to register for his course, History of Science after Newton, only after the student was assured that there would be a concurrent cross-disciplinary tutorial.
To claim that our program has had campuswide effects is no exaggeration. Precisely because it is interdisciplinary, it has functioned as a catalyst for a unique and comprehensive modification of Bard's entire undergraduate curriculum. The main aim of these changes has been to redraw disciplinary boundaries without abandoning the disciplines per se, thus defining the relation between disciplines and “interdisciplines” as complementary, if not symbiotic.
Despite its success, Bard's foreign language, culture, and literature program is not presented here as a universally applicable model. At a time when cold-war dualism has given way to the querelle des modernes et des postmodernes , we cherish difference even within our program. Yet while our knowledge and experience may not be universal, they seem to us—for the benefit of students—worth sharing.
The author is Associate Professor of German at Bard College.
1 Bard received support to develop intensive programs for all languages (other than the one in German, which was already established), to design and implement the cross-disciplinary language program, to hire foreign language tutors, and to purchase multimedia equipment. For information, write to Linda E. Jacobs, Vice President for Programs, Charles E. Culpeper Foundation, Financial Center, 695 East Main St., Suite 404, Stamford, CT 06901-2138.
2 Roughly twenty to twenty-five percent of Bard's total body of students (approx. 1,000) undertook language study in 1994–95. The German program has fifty to sixty-five students a year; after a German immersion course, the upper-college enrollment figure may rise to forty, even forty-five.
3 For information, write the Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program, Placement and Special Services, Inst. of Intl. Educ., 809 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017-3580.
4 That both writers employ the indicative in these works, too, is important for a comprehensive interpretation, especially with Brecht's story, but irrelevant for the argument I make here.
5 Support is limited to students who are on financial aid, and it covers up to about half the overall expenses. For information contact Klaus Neuhoff, Stiftung Van Meeteren, Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, Postfach 16 44 60, 45239 Essen, Germany.
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