Most students start out foreign language classes inquisitive and spirited, ready to discover current social and political issues in the target culture. At the same time, they often struggle to find meaning in complexity and become overwhelmed or frustrated as they try to make sense of the language and culture they are learning. To address these struggles, one of our learning goals in our fourth semester German course is for students to recognize patterns in both the language and the culture by continually learning about and reflecting on current events. As foreign language educators, we see a clear role for language acquisition and the development of cultural competency as key to the mission of the university. Thus, we want our students to pursue this goal through learning and practicing transferable skills such as research skills, digital media literacy, analysis of source materials and application and creation of new knowledge from these engagements.

Although no strangers to multimodal approaches, we still struggled to discover a tool that would align effectively with our learning goals. After consultation with an initial training from Penn’s Center for Teaching and Learning, we chose Timeline JS, an online timeline platform developed by the Knight Lab at Northwestern University. Timeline JS is an open-source digital tool that was originally designed as a storytelling platform for journalists and is easily adaptable to other fields. The platform serves multiple purposes, such as archiving, analyzing, developing an argument and reflection.

In our classes, we use this tool to engage students in consideration of German politics. After a discussion of definitions for ‘populism’ and ‘extremism’ as well as examples of such movements on a wide-ranging political spectrum in Germany, students in our course researched the media coverage of populist movements between the last two German federal elections in 2013 and 2017 with the goal of ascertaining any apparent shifts in language and/or content indicative of changing attitudes. While students completed several phases individually, they mainly worked in collaborative groups using the Timeline JS tool to organize, curate and analyze their findings.

Initially, we organized the students into mini-research teams, one for each of the years between elections (2013-2017) and brainstormed possible search terms for Google. We introduced students to the ways that the selection of specific search dates and language choices for Google can maximize their results. This was an important scaffolding step: unfamiliarity with the topic as well as a lack of relevant vocabulary at first only generated the word “populism” as a possible search term. A little bit of probing eventually revealed a much broader range of suitable words and phrases. Students identified at least nine terms to describe a person affected by the refugee crisis, a phenomenon that raises particularly strong populist reactions. Reflecting on these choices, students recognized that each word carries its own social and political implications and would affect the results of their searches, thereby gaining a more dynamic and deeper understanding of key vocabulary and cultural complexity. Students also began to recognize the implicit ideological messages their own word choices might carry when they present their research. We then addressed the practical technology issues, showed examples of other Timeline JS projects and distributed handouts with detailed, step-by-step instructions.

Building on these in-class activities, we asked students to complete the second phase at home, searching for relevant, reliable sources for their assigned year in the form of news reports, videos, political cartoons, social media posts, polls and graphs, among others. Students were then asked to write a synthesis of their source in no more than 10 sentences and upload their media and syntheses in the shared Google Spreadsheet provided by the Timeline JS home page. Here, the decision-making process for including or excluding certain sources, that is curating the information, compelled students to read critically and evaluate for a specific audience (students of German as a foreign language) and purpose. Since each group was assigned only one part of the puzzle, they felt responsible to their peers to work carefully, timely and thoughtfully. Linguistically, students were challenged not only to comprehend their sources but also to process, rephrase and synthesize the information. Using quotes and properly citing sources, a skill not always automatically transferred from first language into the foreign language domain, became an essential issue that had to be addressed as an interim step during the next class meeting.

Student entries into their Timeline JS spreadsheet automatically generated an interactive, multi-dimensional visual, audio and textual representation of their work. In the concluding in-class phase, students worked in their specific ‘year’ groups to analyze the results on Timeline JS for noteworthy tendencies and then prepared their conclusions for a presentation to the other groups. The class discussion revealed several important new insights about populism in Germany, such as the unexpected number of young participants in populist movements. Class discussion also revealed a possible blind spot on part of the students’ research skills. Their choices in search terminology resulted only in examples of right-wing populism, and  generated no examples of left-wing populist movements.

Through this project, students were actively engaged in the representation and creation of new knowledge for a specific purpose and audience. Moreover, they are essentially scaffolding their own learning process; students selected media based on comprehensibility, relevance and personal interest without the mediation of instructors or didactic materials. They worked collaboratively to help each other become more knowledgeable about populism and justified selection of their sources.

In surveys, students commented that the creation of the timeline helped them perceive a pattern in the growing populism movement. Additionally, they indicated that it helped them put things into perspective and become aware of their own prejudices, by critically reflecting on the nuances between populism and extremism, and by comparing populism movements across cultures. This helped them gain a multifaceted understanding, avoiding a simplistic and binary approach to this complex topic. Furthermore, they stated that they recognized how they acquired a transferable skill, that they could apply to other areas of their studies. Yet others pointed out that it was insightful to gather information collaboratively from different sources and perspectives as it provides a kaleidoscopic view of the theme. Finally, some students indicated that this project had enabled them to navigate digital content more critically and effectively. This feedback does not only reemphasize the role foreign language education plays in meeting the goals of a liberal arts education, but it also points to the effectiveness of incorporating digital tools in a deliberate way.

Sibel Sayılı-Hurley and Claudia Baska Lynn are both lecturers in foreign languages in the Germanic Languages & Literatures Department in SAS.

This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences,

the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching.

See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.