Notes from the Classroom

Professors Marianna Ryshina-Pankova and Astrid Weigert joined the leadership team of a newly established LEAP Initiative (Learning, Equity, Access, and Pedagogy), which is administered and funded through GU’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS). The LEAP Initiative is a comprehensive 18-24 month program to support teaching units across various language departments. Its strategic approach aims to transcend individual departmental boundaries and create a holistic, inclusive learning environment. The initiative focuses on enhancing student belonging, inclusion, and equity within language classrooms.

As one part of this larger effort, Profs. Ryshina-Pankova and Weigert are spearheading an innovative Digital Storytelling (DS) assignment that focuses on students’ autobiographical language learning journeys. The digital storytelling-approach demonstrates remarkable flexibility, with potential applications across foreign languages and instructional levels, including those taught in English. The DS task will be designed and implemented across 4 languages in the fall of 2025: German, Turkish, Urdu, and Spanish. The project aims to enable instructors to work with a meaningful learner-centered task that bridges academic learning with life experiences in foreign language instruction and allows learners to express and construct identity multimodally in the FL classroom. A pilot of this digital storytelling project entitled “Meine Erfahrungen als Deutschlernende/r” was successfully conducted in Prof. Weigert’s Intensive Intermediate class this semester.