Lesson Planning – Social Justice Example

Next, we will work with a lesson for second-semester German at Washington University in St. Louis that was overhauled at a CARLA (Center for Advanced Language Research) workshop in the summer of 2024. While the complexity of CARLA’s form makes the process, in this case in the Social Justice framework, look daunting, closer examination and further exposure prove the ease of its implementation, as most of the categories relate closely to what you are already doing in your lesson planning. After examining the original iteration (in the Social Justice framework), we will run through how the lesson could be reworked through the lenses of other critical pedagogies.

The lesson is from the book Impuls Deutsch I (1st Edition), the text we used for our basic language sequence until Fall 2025; we now utilize the 2nd edition. The lesson discussed here appears in a unit on Austria which touches on history, art, the city of Vienna and its characteristics, population statistics, transportation, and monuments, in addition to a variety of grammatical topics. In its original form, the 50-minute lesson focuses on understanding directions (as in how to get around in a city), practicing adjective endings, learning the history of the Jewish population of Vienna, and discussing the memorial to Viennese Jewish victims of the Third Reich. (NB: The discussion of the memorial has been removed from the new edition of Impuls Deutsch 1.)

My objection to the plan in its original form was threefold: first, the overview of Jewish life in Vienna is inauthentic, secondly, students are expected to manipulate the adjective endings in this same text, which shows scant respect for its content, and thirdly, no connection is made between this monument and the others we had already discussed in class. So now for the first lesson of reworking lessons: pick your battles! As you can see from the descriptions of activities and content, this textbook is very ambitious in its scope and moves very fast. Since this is the only day devoted (at least in part) to adjective endings, they had to stay, with the same thing going for Jewish history in Vienna, authentic or not. (In the book’s defense, the text used does a great job of showing how long and virulent the history of antisemitism is in Vienna, a fact itself eye-opening to most students.)

To better ground the lesson in the principles of social justice, my essential question focuses on the monument itself. As conceived by the authors of the textbook, the emphasis was meant to lie on describing how to find the monument from various starting points in the city and then to describe it. I changed the focus from the simple description to include more broadly the concept of representation (via monuments), comparing this monument to others we had already discussed, and noting how each projected a different aspect of the city’s “identity.”  This discussion in turn leads to a consideration of the students’ experiences with monuments themselves in their home culture, what they tend to represent and how they do so.

Admittedly at the second-semester level, some of the conversation would have to be in English, but here the pay-off is sufficient to warrant the sacrifice of ten minutes or so. The activity involving the physical description of the monument remained largely unchanged but was now considered in relation to the earlier discussion of many of Vienna’s other monuments. In other words, the contrast had already been set up between the city’s traditional attempts at self-presentation and the memorial to the Jews killed in the Holocaust; it needed just to be brought to the forefront. Additional vocabulary was provided to help students describe the differences. From there ensued the brief discussion in English about the monuments of Vienna, monuments in general, and their own experience with monuments. Thus framed, the discussion of the monument served not only to raise the students’ awareness of the persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich and what it cost Austria, but also connected this foreign experience to their own, leading to the interrogation of the home culture as well.

This lesson plan revision nicely summarized the entire workshop by demonstrating how using backward design to intentionally foreground social justice issues teaches content (both linguistic and cultural) while simultaneously challenging students to recognize and address the issues underlying social injustice abroad and at home.