Kiley Kost and Seth Peabody, together with Dan Nolan (UMN Duluth), served as co-curators for a section of essays entitled “Sustainability and Community Engagement in German Studies” in the Fall 2021 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German. In their introduction to the collected essays, they write that “the crisp ‘turn’ promised by the notion of an Energiewende is, unsurprisingly, not evident, let alone a clear model for emulation by other countries. Instead, the German example might serve as a reminder of the difficult cultural work required in order to reach large-scale sustainability. The contributions gathered here take up new approaches that move past a model of ‘learning from Germany,’ while still promoting methods for active and engaged pedagogy, by emphasizing the complex cultural dimensions surrounding environmental thought and action.”
In the journal’s special section, Kost and Peabody published a peer-reviewed article entitled “Environmental and Engagement in German Studies: Projects and Resources for Critical Environmental Thinking.” Their article provides frameworks and concrete examples for curricular innovations at multiple levels of the German language curriculum built around “a model of critical environmental thinking that foregrounds the inherently complex, socially situated, and linguistically mediated beliefs and practices connected to sustainability.”
Kost and Peabody’s journal publication is directly related to their work on an online resource platform for engaged teaching and research on environmental topics in German Studies: Environment and Engagement in German Studies: A Resource Hub for Ecocriticism, Pedagogy, and Academic Civic Engagement. Together with colleagues Daniel Nolan (UMN Duluth) and Nicole Fischer (UW Madison), they held an online launch event for the new website, which was attended by roughly 35 colleagues and is archived on the website.