Going Green Sustainable Development in North America

Joannis Kaliampos and Prof. Dr. Torben Schmidt

Going Green is a transatlantic school project that fosters interest in innovative sustainability research across the curriculum including the humanities, languages and STEM/MINT subjects, to encourage civic engagement, and develop job qualifications for young people. It is part of the Moodle-based blended learning platform Teach About US. In this workshop, participants will:

—    explore local and regional case studies of sustainable policies and citizen action in the U.S.

—    review a fully developed project curriculum for teaching sustainability and American studies in the English-language classroom

—    analyze sample learner products and project ideas by previous participants

—    experiment with hands-on interactive teaching materials and blended learning tasks on a learning platform (a print-ready PDF version is also available), including approaches to scaffold online collaboration in English

—    develop ideas to start their own transatlantic sustainability projects at their schools

More information: http://www.teachaboutus.org/ (tab “Going Green”)

Joannis Kaliampos is a researcher in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He is the educational project manager and teacher trainer for the project Teach About US. He received a Staatsexamen degree in English and History (Gymnasium) from Justus Liebig University Gießen. He has held teaching positions at a secondary school (Lahntalschule Lahnau), in the German program of the University of Arkansas – Fort Smith (Fulbright scholarship), and as writing consultant for international students (Justus Liebig University Gießen). Joannis Kaliampos is currently completing a PhD on learner task perceptions in blended learning EFL projects.

Prof. Dr. Torben Schmidt is Professor of English Didactics at the Institute of English Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg. His fields of interest are foreign language learning and the digital media, self-directed learning and project work in the EFL classroom, teaching EFL in elementary schools, drama in education, and the teaching of listening and speaking.

OStR‘ Inga Dwenger and PD Dr. Maria Moss

Due to its abundance of novels and short stories dealing with animals and animal life, the animal story is the only literary genre for which a specifically Canadian origin has been claimed. “Animals are so fundamental to our writing,” Janice Fiamengo writes in her seminal work, Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination, “that it might indeed be said that [Canadian] literature is founded on the bodies of animals – alive or dead; anthropomorphized or ‘realistic’; indigenous or exotic; sentimental, tragic, magical, and mythical” (5-6). However, does the abundance of animal portrayals in both First Nations accounts and mainstream Canadian writings automatically mean that Canada is an environmentally friendly country when it comes to the treatment of animals?

In our workshop, we will look at animal portrayals in First Nations creation stories and contemporary accounts as well as in mainstream Canadian literature. The following issues will be addressed: (1) First Nations environmentalism (origin myths, questioning Native environmentalism and the stereotype of the “ecological Indian”), (2) Archibald Belaney’s (aka Grey Owl’s) endeavour of rescuing beavers and thus managing to change Canadian national policy, (3) Farley Mowat’s account of having to exterminate Arctic wolves and his subsequent novel, Never Cry Wolf, one of the great conservationist writings of all times, (4) animals in the writings of Margaret Atwood (e.g. Surfacing, Oryx and Crake, “Moral Disorder”).

PD Dr. Maria Moss received her doctoral degree in one of her life-long passions – Native American Studies from the University of Hamburg in 1993 and her post-doctoral degree in neo-realist American literature from the Free University Berlin in 2006. She has been teaching North American Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg since 2007. In addition to Native issues, she has recently branched out into the fields of animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies. Her other fields of teaching and research include Canadian Studies, environmental literature, and creative writing. She is one of the editors of the American Studies Journal (www.asjournal.org/) and the American Studies Blog (www.blog.asjournal.org/).

OStR‘ Inga Dwenger received her teaching degree in English and Music from the University of Hannover in 1989, and proceeded with her teacher's training in Lüneburg until 1992. She has taught English and Music from grades 5 up to A-Levels (Abitur) at grammar schools in Winsen/Luhe and in Hamburg-Bergedorf, where she served as head of English and IB Diploma Programme coordinator until 2015. Inga Dwenger joined the Institute of English Studies at Leuphana in 2014, where she teaches EFL didactics, area studies and debating. Her other fields of interest include teaching Shakespeare, Amish studies and the progress of the teaching profession in general. Recently, she has branched out to coaching and is focusing on introducing coaching elements into teacher education.

Micha Gerrit Philipp Edlich, M.A.

According to Carola Hecke (2011), comic books and graphic novels “can, as teaching and learning tools, foster creative communication and intercultural learning” in EFL classrooms (653). In this workshop, participants will learn how they, too, can tap the potential of the medium and use comics and graphic novels to achieve these educational goals. More specifically, they will be made familiar with different “ecocomix” (Sidney Dobrin’s term), that is, comics dealing with different environmental issues or, to use Jacques Derrida’s memorable phrase, “the question of the animal,” and related resources. Examining Nicole Burton and Hugh Goldring’s graphic novel The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet (2018) (available online), participants will also consider how, for example, they can support students in developing the visual literacy skills needed to understand contemporary representations of the environment and how a popular medium such as comics can be used in the EFL classroom to develop both language competencies and the ability to grapple with complex issues.

Micha Edlich , M.A., is a staff member at the Schreibzentrum / Writing Center at Leuphana University.

Dr. Andreas Hübner

Sustainability is commonly lauded as an issue that concerns everyone, but are we all affected in the same way? Recent scholarship has looked at the entanglements between social inequalities and the dispersal of environmental hazards. The emergent argument is that exposure to pollution, pollution-based health risks, and environmental hazards are distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, gender, age, and ethnicity. Taking these findings as a starting point, the workshop aims at introducing the concept of environmental inequalities. Thus, to begin with, a definition, a contextualization, and a historicization of the concept will be provided. Workshop participants will then examine and assess case studies of environmental inequalities in U.S. history, and, subsequently, participants will discuss possibilities of teaching these case studies in the EFL-classroom.

Dr. Andreas Hübner, born in Halle/Saale, is currently a lecturer at Leuphana University Lüneburg. His research focuses on Louisiana Studies, Human-Animal-Studies, and Didactics. In 2015, he received his Ph.D. from Justus Liebig University Giessen. He served as Dianne Woest Fellow at the Historic New Orleans Collection in 2016, and as Joseph P. Horner Memorial Library Fellow, Philadelphia, in 2018. Hübner’s monograph on German American filiopietist J. Hanno Deiler was published in 2009, his monograph on the German Coast of colonial Louisiana in 2017. At present, he is working on a project that combines Human-Animals-Studies and History / English Didactics.