Outreach Strategies and Innovative Teaching Approaches for German Programs

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.

Melissa Etzler is a Lecturer of German and First Year Seminar at Butler University in Indianapolis. She has published book chapters related to her research on author W. G. Sebald and has recently shifted her focus to ecocritical readings of Gothic German texts and films, her most recent article appearing in German Quarterly. In addition to her regular coursework, she teaches in honors and coleads the annual short-term study abroad program Bulldogs in Berlin. She is the recipient of the AATG Indiana Post-Secondary Teacher of the Year Award (2018), the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Outstanding Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching (2018) and an Outstanding Professor of the Year Award for Teaching (2018–19).

Gabriele Maier is Associate Teaching Professor of German Studies and Director of the M.A. program in Global Communication and Applied Translation at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh. Her research includes literature of the 20th and 21st century and focuses primarily on travel writing, questions of home and identity, transcultural writers and graphic novels. She has published on Christian Kracht, Hans-Ulrich Treichel and Christoph Ransmayr, among others; coedited an anthology on Heimat; and her textbook Deutschland im Zeitalter der Globalisierung came out in 2015. Lately, she has contributed an article to the MLA Handbook Strategies and Perspectives on Social Justice Work. She is a fellow of the "How Well?" project funded by the Center for the Arts in Society at CMU, where she works with various student groups to educate the public about food insecurity and how to improve well-being on the CMU campus.