Target Level: A1-A2, B1-B2
Description:
How might instructors address issues of both racial and environmental justice in the classroom? The challenges of teaching these notoriously difficult topics in beginning language classes are the same; there are major flaws in readily available teaching materials, and doing justice to sustainability and anti-racism in the classroom requires extra preparation and, in some cases, extra training for instructors. While these overlaps between anti-racist and sustainability-based pedagogy might be seen as barriers, the following approach can, in many circumstances, present an opportunity: bringing to light the everyday connections between personal actions and larger systems. Shifting the scale to the local, communal, and personal reveals intersections with global networks and systems of oppression that environmental justice scholars examine (Pellow). Dr. Natasha Kelly’s traveling interactive EDEWA provides an example of how German language instructors can connect sustainability and anti-racist topics in beginning language courses by focusing on daily food practices.
EDEWA is an anti-racist, postcolonial market that encourages participants to “geht bewusst einkaufen” and exposes both colonial histories as well as racist and sexist marketing of everyday items for sale in German grocery stores. EDEWA—the Einkaufsgenossenschaft antirassistischen Widerstands” (retail collective of anti-racist resistance)—most clearly resembles the German grocery store chain EDEKA, but targets all supermarkets as a space visited daily by all people of “aller gesellschaftlichen Zugehörigkeit” (Kelly). In the exhibit, visitors encounter products whose racist or sexist imagery is turned into an opportunity for learning, by confronting encounters with colonialism and everyday racism. Kelly describes the goal of the interactive exhibit, which was awarded the prize “Aktiv für Demokratie und Toleranz” in 2018 from the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Engagement) as exposing the violent and discriminatory structures of everyday racism (“EDEWA: Der Postkolonialwarenladen”).
Methods and Approaches:
Video clips of Kelly and former students explaining the exhibit and its goals would fit well in second year courses. The website also offers a robust audio guide that touches on topics including racism, sexism, colonialism, the Afro-German movement and their intersections with commonplace items in a grocery store. For beginning students, the video could be shown without sound and students could guess what the content is, leading to an explanation of the exhibit by the instructor on what it would mean to “geht bewusst einkaufen” (Kelly).
In the lesson that follows, students can then view the weekly flyer from various grocery stores online (links below), giving students in a beginning course the opportunity to build cultural knowledge by learning about different grocery stores in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, seeing what products are for sale, what food costs, what portions exist, and where food comes from. Students can “shop” for three to four products and then prepare a small report on the products to share with the class: Where is the product from? How much packaging is there? What is on the packaging? Some stores take care to highlight their local and regional products with special labels, such as the “Da komm’ ich her!” brand in Austria.
Based on the products students select from the online flyers, they might also create their own brand or seal to reflect the supply chain and life cycle of the product. Once it’s safe to do so, the instructor could build on this lesson and send students to a local grocery store in search of both origin stories of their food as well as racist or sexist imagery on food packaging. Students could document their findings on a class blog or make short videos, creating a virtual exhibit similar to Kelly’s EDEWA that combines a critical approach to the origins and marketing of everyday products.
Links to sample weekly grocery store flyers:
Works Cited:
Kelly, Natasha. “Konzept.” EDEWA — Einkaufsgenossenschaft antirassistischen Widerstandes. http://www.edewa.info/info-material/konzept/. Accessed 11 September 2020.
Pellow, David N. “Toward a Critical Environmental Justice Studies: Black Lives Matter as an Environmental Justice Challenge.” Du Bois review, vol. 13, no. 2, 2016, pp. 221-236.