Rationale
The Tulsa Public Schools website states the following for the requirements for a German II course:
In this course a constant review of the skills acquired in German I is maintained. New vocabulary and grammatical structures are added, widening the areas of comprehension. The student will continue to develop the four skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing as well as developing more cultural awareness. The students will also connect to other academic subjects such as math, science, and language arts using their knowledge of German to access new information.
As you can see, this gives me a great deal of freedom in my classroom. I am constantly trying to keep the German language relevant to my students. Many of them aren't interested in going on to German III and instead are just trying to complete the first two years of any foreign language so that they meet basic college entrance requirements. By using the movie Goodbye Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003), I hope they gain historical insight into life in the DDR. This unit is designed not only to increase their vocabulary, but also to increase their understanding of how today’s Germany came into being. By analyzing the first ten chapters of the film with the students, I hope to give them a critical lens with which they can analyze other films. Hopefully, they will then be more fully able to appreciate the subtle messages found in film.
My students come from varied backgrounds. I have students who have well-read and well-traveled parents and who have also had the opportunity to travel to other countries and experience other cultures. However, about 30% of my students in German II have never been out of Oklahoma and many of those have never been out of Tulsa. Using film to help them understand Germany and what it means to be German would be a wonderful way to increase cultural awareness and hopefully, increase cultural sensitivity regardless of what culture they encounter.
I have chosen Goodbye Lenin!, because it was both critically acclaimed and heavily criticized when it was released. In contrast to Sonnenallee, which was farcical in nature, Goodbye Lenin! attempts to handle the idea of “Ostalgie”, or nostalgia for things East German in a slightly more serious, although at times ironic, manner. This movie was made at a time when both East and West were facing the reality that reunification was going to be much more difficult than people wanted to believe. The West was realizing how much it was going to cost to reunify and the East was realizing that not all changes were going to be radically better than what they had.
More about how I am going to deal with the film in the classroom can be found in the strategies section at the end of the analyses section. However, it is worth mentioning that I have only laid out the film analysis for the first ten chapters of the film. My rationale for presenting it this way is that once the main themes have been discussed with the students in detail, they will be able to pick out the elements of the film without being prompted by the teacher. The teacher will simply be able to ask or give them a questionnaire asking them to identify at least one key element and describe the feeling that that one element evokes and how it relates to or conveys a cultural meaning. If a teacher feels as if he or she wants to go into more depth in the analysis with his or her students, then the main themes laid out in chapters one - ten are easily identifiable in chapters 11-16. My main goals for this unit are vocabulary acquisition and cultural understanding. Film analysis is just one of several tools I intend to use to help my students achieve those goals.
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