Meet a German Day!

This fall students at Darby High School were able to take part in an initiative through Fulbright Germany. Meet a German Day was sponsored by Fulbright Germany as part of Fulbright's 75th Anniversary celebration. Of course I was thrilled to jump on board! With my international field experience set to take place in Germany, what better way to start making connections for myself and my students?

Fulbright Germany paired our school with Clara Weber, a a postgraduate research fellow currently studying at Yale. Clara and I communicated several prior to our meeting on October 6th, 2021. We discussed what she would like to share with me students, as well as what we had been discussing in class in hopes of timing everything together somehow.

On the day of the meeting, students from several of my classes gathered together in our media center, ready for a discussion about Germany, a place very few of them have much knowledge about. We decided to form our talk like a socratic seminar, a thoughtful conversation. Students came into our session with one pre-determined question, and directions to write down the following in their sketchbooks as we went along: a comment, a question, and something they would like to explore further. This helped direct their focus.

Clara created a wonderful presentation to start us off. She talked first of what perceptions the students had of Germany, then spoke with my students at length about her experiences living in both northern and southern Germany, as well as her time in America. My students were enthralled with her stories, and peppered her with questions about general German customs before delving into a deeper discussion about stereotypes and schooling. They were so enamored with the artists she shared, including Marta Minujín's Parthenon of Banned Books and Gerhard Richter's paintings, that we changed the course of our next project to study them further.

Students were shocked to learn about Germany's free universities for higher learning. This particular group, made mostly of juniors and seniors, have had the rising costs of college tuition looming on their minds and this knowledge was like a bombshell.

While students thought they would learn only about German customs or perhaps a few words, what they gained instead was even more valuable. They had frank discussions about stereotypes, about the roles of women in German academics and the workforce, about being an outsider in a new place, and so much more. They learned about the German schooling system and its differences form their own high school experience. This was an invaluable experience for my students, some of whom have always lived in a small town in Ohio, and many whom have lived in many places throughout the world.