Ich bin Deutschland goes Yale

Dieser Blogpost ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar

Tuesday morning, 7:30 a.m. on October 29, 2024: In the inbox of the ich-bin-deutsch.land mailbox, I found an email with the subject “Use of your text” sent from a yale.edu mailbox.
My first reaction was: “Nice try! Now phishing emails are already being sent from fake university senders”.

After I couldn’t find any technical evidence of phishing and skimmed the content of the email, it dawned on me that the email might be real after all. A quick search to see if the person who sent the e-mail really existed and worked at Yale University confirmed that the e-mail was genuine:

“My name is Theresa Schenker and I am the Director of the German Language Program at Yale University. In one of our courses, we are dealing with the topic of diversity and we have been talking about your ‘I am Germany’ campaign.
The students found it very interesting and it was a good impetus for discussion and learning German. I would like to ask whether you would give me permission to use the text from your website introducing your project (reproduced below) in an (online) textbook for German as a foreign language.
The textbook is non-commercial and only available online on Pressbooks for students. I would, of course, give the author’s name and any other information you would like me to mention. The textbook would be an online textbook published by Pressbooks. I would be very happy to receive your reply.”

At a first glance, I found the content and Ms. Schenker’s request so surreal that I had to pinch myself.

Of course, Ms. Schenker and Yale University have my permission to use the content of my “Ich bin Deutschland” project for teaching purposes.
It is a great honor and a source of pride for me that my project will be a small part of the curriculum at one of the most renowned universities in the United States.

We are planning a video conference for spring 2025 to enable a direct exchange with the students.

Ms. Schenker’s main aim is to use current teaching content to meet the students’ interests. She has therefore developed her own modules for teaching the second year of the program, which includes the topic of “diversity”.

Diversity is a topic that is becoming increasingly important worldwide and is also of particular interest to students at Yale University. The “Diversity” module not only looks at historical trends and events, including the guest worker movement and the refugee crisis of 2015, but also at diversity in Germany, Austria and Switzerland today, and how people with a migration background or from different cultures experience their lives in German-speaking countries.

According to Ms. Schenker, my project “I am Germany” is perfectly suited to this topic:

“The interviews with different people offer personal insights that encourage students to discuss and learn German.”