Have you ever caught yourself thinking: “Never have I ever taught a language course on fascinating topics, such as ‘German protest songs since 1945’, ‘Witches, Wolves, and Wanderlust’, or ‘Northern German dialects’? Well, sentences like these, you will not hear from graduate students in the German program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison!
Every semester, graduate students teaching third- and fourth-semester German have the opportunity to explore and teach topics of special interest to them in ‘Mini-Seminars.’ To teach these interactive one-week courses, the graduate teaching assistants create their own authentic materials and develop lesson plans based on their chosen topic. Second-year undergraduate students can sign up for any seminar that seems of interest to them.
Mini-Seminars are a win-win situation for graduate as well as undergraduate students: The teaching assistants can concentrate on one topic of their choosing, which may be related to their own research, personal interests and backgrounds. Undergraduates can explore authentic cultural and linguistic topics that are not covered by textbooks and may feel encouraged to continue their studies of German beyond the scope of language courses.
To give you an idea of the Mini-Seminar variety that is offered, these creative Mini-Seminars are taught by our graduate students this semester: “Jump Around: Jumping through Genres and Adaptations”, “3 Modern Dialects in Germany”, “Uitlander oder Deutschländer? The complex case of German-Speaking Africa”, “The Lowdown on Northern German Dialects”, “Deutsche Protestsongs seit 1945”, “Childhood in German-speaking Countries”, “From Krauts with Attitude to Quotentürke: Was ist deutscher Hip Hop?”, “Witches, Wolves, Wanderlust: der Harz – Germany’s Northernmost Mountain Range”, and “German Romanticism: Tell me how you really feel.”