How to combine intercultural education with the teaching of intercultural literature
Submitted by:
Wiebke von Bernstorff
Abstract:
Thinking about an intercultural education in the frame of literature education, there are a lot of connections between both themes on hand. First of all both are grounded on a reflection of language and especially communicative skills and performances. Intercultural education cannot achieve its goals without working on self-confidence and with real emotions, which are the motives behind prejudices. In literature education teachers and pupils also deal with emotions as present in the texts and textual clues that provoke emotional reactions. This seems to be the perfect link for combining both approaches for the goal of intercultural learning on a strong basis and a wide range of possibilities to gain self-confidence in intercultural settings.
But coming to practice exactly this link seems to be the most difficult task. How can we combine the goals of intercultural education with the goals of literature education? Or more specific: which goals of literature education can help to develop intercultural competences? Is it only the knowledge, which is transported through literature, or is it more? Immigrant literature with its typical reflection on languages and problems of intercultural situations seem to be a perfect topic for intercultural education. But teaching immigrant literature can also stabilize prejudices and does not necessarily help to reduce them. This can happen especially if literature education only focuses on themes rather than on aesthetics or the relation between form and content. Literature education comes to the point, where it aims on understanding foreign perspectives and on perspective-taking over. Also the tolerance for ambiguity is something one can learn through working with a text, which irritates its readers on the first sight.
The proposed presentation shall focus on this problem and show a few approaches how to deal with the combination of intercultural learning and literary education. Emine Sevgi Ãzdamars autobiographical fiction (Die Bracke vom goldenen Horn) and Rafik Schamis novel The Dark side of love can function as a source for reflecting possibilities of intercultural learning in this setting. The two German immigrant authors show two different types of immigrant/intercultural literature. Ãzdamar, who came 1965 as a "Gastarbeiter" from Turkey to Germany and is today a well known actress and author, reflects in her prose not only on language in intercultural situations, but also on foreign language learning and intercultural conflicts. Her literary aesthetics are genuinely intercultural. Schami, who came 1971 from Syria to Germany, on the other hand opens the world of the Libanon and the Orient to the German readers. He is literally spoken a "translator" of oriental traditions into the German language.
I propose a demonstration of 2 to 3 tools from intercultural trainings, which can help to develop an intercultural awareness of ones own and so prepare for the reading of immigrant literature. Afterwards there shall be suggestions, how to connect these tools with the literary education task. On Ãzdamars and Schamis prose we shall discuss the possibilities and problems of this connection.