Dear SCENARIO Readers,
Looking back on five year’s SCENARIO by now, we are very pleased with the growing world-wide interest in our journal, which regards itself as a pathfinder of a performative culture of teaching and learning.
This time, our rubric Texts around Theatre features an excerpt from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (first publication in 1808).
The first two articles come from Southern Africa. SPRACH-FLUSS: Theaterworkshops mit Jugendlichen aus 16 afrikanischen Ländern – Theaterpädagogik zwischen interkultureller Bildung und Fremdsprachendidaktik by Edda Holl (Goethe Institute, Johannesburg, South Africa) gives us a glimpse into theatre pedagogy projects with two different target groups: a) adolescents from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and b) teachers of German from Africa and Germany, who examined the question of how theatre pedagogy might be employed in the language classroom.
The article PROBE – Praxislabors für kreative Lernwege. Ein Konzept für offene Lernprozesse in heterogenen Lerngruppen offers a complementary perspective. Gisela Fasse (Heinrich-Heine-Gymnasium, Cologne) describes projects with children and adolescents in the multilingual sub-Saharan Africa. These projects combine theatre pedagogy and multilingualism, as well as communication training and body work.
The contribution by Sabina Vecchione Grüner (Liceo Ginnasio "Francesco Petrarca", Trieste, Italien) and Sigrid Unterstab (Wortspiel Berlin), Die Welt – ein (virtuelles) Lebensdorf, describes how students of German at a high school in Trieste developed a play from improvised scenes.
The subsequent three articles focus on aspects of foreign language teaching and learning at institutes of higher education.
In Affektiv ist effektiv: Dramatische Aktivitäten als Hilfsmittel zur Erlangung einer kulturellen Sensibilität im Fremdsprachenunterricht, Siegfried Boehm (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexiko City) focuses on the development of ‘intercultural sensibility’ through drama pedagogy in the German as a Foreign Language classroom.
In their article The compatibility of drama language teaching and CEFR objectives - Observations on a Rationale for an Artistic Approach to Foreign Language Teaching at an Academic Level, Filippo Fonio (Université de Grenoble, France) and Geneviève Genicot (Ici/Ailleurs Compagnie, Grenoble, France) carefully examine the compatibility of the Common European Framework of Reference and its aims with drama-oriented foreign language teaching. On the basis of their experiences with Italian courses at the Université de Grenoble, they plead for an artistic orientation of foreign language teaching and learning at the university level.
In Lola Reruns in the Classroom: Dramatic Improvisations on the Film ‘Run Lola Run‘ for Intermediate German Instruction, a film becomes the reference point for drama pedagogical foreign language instruction. Erika M. Nelson (Union College, Schenectady, NY, USA) suggests ideas, materials, and approaches that are of particular interest to colleagues pursuing connections between film and drama.
Susanne Even (Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA) opens our new rubric WINDOWS OF PRACTICE with her contribution Multiple Hotseating, a variant of the staple drama pedagogy activity “Hotseating,” tailored in particular to student groups still unfamiliar with drama activities.
Following this is a conversation with Renate Breitig, the founder of TUSCH (Berlin), a network for cultural education in the field of theatre, as well as two book reviews. Christiane Günther (University of Wales, Swansea) discusses Gerlinde Kempendorff-Hoenes Lehrer und Kabarettisten (2010). Tying in with the first article of this issue, Rachel Darby (Cork, Ireland) examines Edda Holl’s SPRACH-FLUSS: Theaterworkshops mit Jugendlichen aus 16 afrikanischen Ländern – Theaterpädagogik zwischen interkultureller Bildung und Fremdsprachendidaktik (2011).
Finally, we would like to point out that the next SCENARIO issue (1/2012) will be based on papers presented at the 2011 annual convention of the German Society for Foreign Language Research (DGFF). These papers were all part of the working group “Theatre Methods and Foreign Language Research.”
With best wishes from Ireland and the U.S.,
Manfred Schewe & Susanne Even