Outreach Strategies and Innovative Teaching Approaches for German Programs explores recruitment, curricular design and student retention in modern language instruction by sharing best practices and a wide variety of pragmatic initiatives from teacher-scholars who have been involved in the successful building of German programs. With German programs facing dwindling grant monies as students across the country shift from the liberal arts into career-oriented fields, it is paramount to promote German programs vigorously, to offer courses that reflect and compel students’ interest, to keep students engaged in extracurricular activities and to establish a community of like-minded language learners. The combination of curriculum-based strategies coupled with innovative projects, and extracurricular and outreach activities is intended to serve as a guideline for teachers and scholars alike who are in need of best practices they can use to boost enrollment and attract and retain more students.

Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature provides guidance in navigating some of the most pressing dangers we face today. Science fiction helps us face problems that threaten the very existence of humankind by giving us the emotional distance to see our current situation from afar, separated in our imaginations through time, space, or circumstance. Extrapolating from contemporary science, science fiction allows a critique of modern society, imagining more life-affirming alternatives. In this collection, ecocritics from five continents scrutinize science fiction for insights into the fundamental changes we need to make to survive and thrive as a species. Contributors examine ecofeminist themes in films, such as Avatar, Star Wars, and The Stepford Wives, as well as television series including Doctor Who and Westworld. Other scholars explore an internationally diverse group of both canonical and lesser-known science fiction writers including Oreet Ashery, Iraj Fazel Bakhsheshi, Liu Cixin, Louise Erdrich, Hanns Heinz Ewers, Larissa Lai, Ursula K. Le Guin, Chen Qiufan, Mary Doria Russell, Larissa Sansour, Karen Traviss, and Jeanette Winterson. Ecofeminist Science Fiction explores the origins of human-caused environmental change in the twin oppressions of women and of nature, driven by patriarchal power and ideologies. Female embodiment is examined through diverse natural and artificial forms, and queer ecologies challenge heteronormativity. The links between war and environmental destruction are analyzed, and the capitalist motivations and means for exploiting nature are critiqued through postcolonial perspectives.

How do we intentionally design physical environments for language learning and teaching? How can we build spaces that are inclusive, accessible, safe and equitable? While the Covid-19 pandemic has advanced notions of online education, it has also revealed the benefits and affordances of human-to-human interaction in physical learning spaces. This book explores the design of physical spaces intended for language learning specifically. From residential learning spaces to active classrooms, from social and experiential spaces to zoom rooms and language centers, from mobile community-based learning to hybrid makerspaces, language learners and educators have more choices than ever regarding their possible learning environments. Changing pedagogies and new technologies provide ever more alternatives to the normalized technology of the classroom. With a focus on creating new awareness of the affordances and benefits of physical spaces as active agents in the language learning and teaching processes, this book takes a practical approach to introduce readers without any prior knowledge of design or architecture to the topic. As language learning spaces need to consider stakeholders from diverse cultures, Felix Kronenberg provides examples from language centers around the world, including Asia, Europe and the United States. Readers will learn how to conceptualize and create supportive, resilient, flexible, inclusive, accessible, affordable, sustainable, and safe physical learning spaces. The book is an interdisciplinary introduction to this emerging field, drawing from research in disciplines such as architecture, learning spaces design, second language acquisition, pedagogy, history, and sociology.

Addressing both veterans of justice work and novices seeking points of entry, the essays in this volume showcase practical approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion: ways to build community, earn trust, tell unheard stories, and develop solutions to problems. Emphasizing values such as empathy, self-reflection, and integrity, the volume is rooted in humanities work but also features contributions from fields as diverse as the performing arts, architecture, and evolutionary biology and represents settings beyond the college campus, such as schools, libraries, museums, and prisons. While bringing insights from higher education, it critiques the system as well, exploring the ways that institutions reinforce power structures and exclude marginalized voices. Interspersed with the essays, brief reflections by activists and artists offer testimony and inspiration.

Examines the challenges facing German-language study in the new millennium and highlights how creative, innovative, inspired approaches have allowed it to weather many of them.