Teaching Philosophy

 Qinna Shen

I am often asked about why I study German. I tell those who ask what was on my mind when I was making the decision to study German after high school: “The German people are enigmatic to me. They have Goethe and Beethoven, but they also started the two World Wars.” The naive answer from a nineteen-year-old, however, showed her curiosity in wanting to know more about German culture and history, which was a driving force for her to learn the language. Today I have become an instructor of German language and literature, and I want to kindle the same curiosity in students through the love and dedication I have for the German language, literature, culture and history. In a language classroom, my primary goal is to foster students’ ability to learn to write, read, listen and speak, while in a class that is geared towards literature and culture, my primary goal is to promote students’ interpretive and analytical skills in understanding and criticizing a literary or filmic text. When I reflect on my teaching experience and envision how I would like to teach in future, the word “balance” stands out, which, at the moment, best illustrates many pedagogical issues I care about.

If the natural or communicative approach is adopted in teaching elementary German, it is important to achieve balance between grammar explanations and speaking activities. In the immersion approach, grammar tends to be overly de-emphasized. At an institution where I taught German beginners, the department makes students almost entirely responsible for the grammar. Course evaluations show that students unanimously clamor for more grammar explanations from the instructor. We have to be realistic enough to see that, as smart and hard-working as they are, students cannot grasp German grammar all by themselves. Insecurity in grammar will soon affect their confidence in speaking. Thus a reasonable amount of grammar explanation does not impede, but rather fosters speaking. Of course, the bulk of class time should be devoted to speaking activities. After all, class time should focus on activities students cannot do otherwise, i.e. direct communication with peers and with the instructor. Hence, I design many activities to be opportunities for students to practice speaking. For example, when we watched an English documentary film about German history, I prepared a list of follow-up questions to solicit answers in German. I always asked many follow-up questions after each role play that students presented in front of the class. I also designed some debatable topics so that students could spend the entire class speaking German. I created a power point presentation of posters chronicling German history. Students enjoyed using the German they knew to talk about the often interesting and memorable posters and to learn about German history this way. At the University of Chicago, I asked students to record some exercise answers and send me voice emails; this induces students to speak some German outside of the classroom. To guarantee more time for speaking, I involve all students in speaking, reading or giving answers to some exercises that could also be done one by one, but if only one student answers at a time, they speak less on that day.

In a literature class, I believe it is imperative that students should be invited to express their own critical reading of the texts. Thus my role is to achieve a good balance between lecture and discussion, between imparting knowledge and eliciting knowledge. A mixed format of mini-lectures and discussions can best achieve this goal. When I taught the Fairy Tale course and Literatur-Stunde, I used some of the following strategies. I usually give a mini-lecture in the beginning of a class to introduce a topic and open up the discussion. As a discussion leader and co-discussant, I should be open to diverse interpretations and challenging ideas; I should structure and facilitate the discussion by asking good, premeditated, well-sequenced questions, push the discussion gradually towards deeper and more complex conclusions, bring some students’ comment to a higher conceptual level, which perhaps makes the student very happy for having touched upon an important topic, intervene when the discussion seems to flounder or stray from the focus, paraphrase and synthesize the discussion for the sake of orientation. During the discussion, I can insert mini-lectures, mention the author’s biographical information when (and only when) it is necessary for understanding the text, place the text within a theoretical and historical framework, point out intertextual allusions, etc. My overall responsibility is to lead animated and effective discussions, help students extract as much as possible from a text and develop critical and analytical skills, but at the same time, not to let students feel confused about what they have learned on that day. I believe giving students a few questions to consider for the next meeting will enable more efficient discussions.

To that end, a good idea would be to ask students to write response papers. When I taught the Literatur-Stunde, I did away with the quizzes suggested by the coordinator, and replaced them with response papers. Students agreed that response papers took them longer to write than the quizzes would be, but they welcomed this more rigorous engagement with a text. The interpretations they handed in showed their individual insight into the text. Some misunderstandings became apparent in these papers, a fact which indicated to me that the texts I chose were somewhat too demanding for first-year German students, and I should revise them in future. But through their mistakes students also learned a lot in that class.

In giving guidance on students’ papers, it is important to achieve balance in regard to whether and when to use secondary material, so that students are neither deprived of opportunities in developing their own set of arguments nor forced to reinvent the wheel entirely. I should decide differently by considering the level of students and the nature of the task. I personally felt a sense of liberation when once a professor made it explicit that secondary literature was not required for the term paper, and she was interested in our original thoughts. However, good scholarship mandates inclusion of secondary criticism. Reading secondary works at a later stage, we may have initial panic if others have “taken” our points, but, it is true most of the time that we have something new and interesting to say, and have lined up arguments differently. After the first draft, it is usually a good time to read secondary works, modify and correct one’s argument if necessary.

I am also mindful in achieving balance in a group of students with heterogeneous abilities and personalities. In the German Reading course I taught, I had one student, a language teacher herself, who grasped the concepts rather quickly, while another student had tremendous difficulties in learning languages. I gauged the level of my explanations to suit the pace of the majority, and met with the student who learned slower outside of the class.

Ideally, when I teach, I should try to achieve balance between my own research and teaching, an ideal that is often hard to implement in reality, because teaching is time-intensive and quickly becomes one’s first priority. But balance between these two will benefit both research and teaching, especially when one teaches a course of her own design. When I taught the German Fairy Tale course, the class engaged with critical re-writings of Grimms’ tales. I started on familiar turf and asked the class to read a few East German fairy tales that I analyzed in my dissertation. It proved to be a good effort to reconcile research and teaching. Students appreciate the expertise I brought into the course and I myself gained new insight into the texts.

The idea of “balance” is definitely worth pursuing further. Balance between grammar and speaking, lecture and discussion, research and teaching, one’s original analysis and secondary criticism, and balance in regard to a group of diverse students are only a few places where I think two extremes could be avoided.