126233 VK MEd 01A/B: VK Specific Issues in Language Learning and Teaching (2025W)

This class is all about harnessing the power of cultural studies for the EFL classroom and providing future teachers with a set of critical, analytical, and didactic skills to navigate the various challenges of contemporary classrooms: pupils worried for the future amid the unfolding climate crises, militarization and wars; a body image cricis among kids and young adults, questions of diversity and inclusion, the role of different media and AI in developing critical media literacy in and via teaching English. Based on students’ own transmedial projects (from engaging social media content, films, podcasts, blogs and the like in their teaching (plans)) and varied interests, we will develop a toolkit of practical cultural studies concepts and methods to use in teaching. Throughout the class, students will reflect their own teaching persona, with the aim of overcoming insecurities, developing skilled confidence and resilience.

Based on our class readings and interactive exercises, students will learn how to identify and scrutinise cultural markers of difference like race, gender, class, sexuality, body type, ability/health, and age – and their intersections - in a variety of different media and online contexts. They will have learned how to appropriately use a toolbox of genre-specific methods of cultural analysis (e.g. semiotic analysis, mis-en-scène analysis for moving images, conjunctural analysis for socio-cultural contextualization) and how to engage their own enhanced critical media competence in their teaching, as they will have learned how to define aims, select materials and methods for creating engaging activities. Based on group projects on overarching issues like inclusion, the climate or technology, students will develop individual teaching projects that inform these group projects, during which students present teaching acitvies and materials relating to the overaching topic that they approach from different perspectives. In short, students will develop a repertoire of ideas and teaching activities to make cultural studies productive in the EFL classroom.