The Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies is proud to announce that Lecturer Dr. Biz Nijdam is this year’s recipient of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and German Studies Canada‘s Innovate German Award 2022 for her GERM 121: Fairy Tales and Popular Culture (in English) course, which approaches the storytelling tradition of the Brothers Grimm through the perspectives of a variety of social-justice oriented disciplines to illuminate the politics embedded in the tales and their activist potentials.
The adjudication committee agreed that this course is in many ways exemplary (topic, presentation of materials, structure, organization, evidence of student learning and achievement), writing in the award letter that GERM 121 “is an outstanding interactive course that offers a unique take on an arguably well-worn topic in German instruction. The innovative aspect of this course lies in its immensely rich multimodal student experience, the focus on new media literacy, the use of project-based learning with interactive outputs in hybrid formats, and the implementation of tools such as Twine and RPG.”
The adjudication committee was particularly impressed with the distinct commitment to Indigenous ways of knowing, including Indigenous methodologies as well as a guest researcher, and its the focus on race, gender, ethnicity, and ability:
“The students were thus offered a glimpse of how German literature, culture, and indeed language courses have broad applicability across a number of interdisciplinary contexts – a challenging task in an introductory course. The course thereby sets new standards for commitments to equity, racial justice, and Indigenous ways of knowing in the German Studies curriculum and offers innovative examples for project-based and experiential pedagogy.”
Dr. Nijdam would like to express her sincere gratitude to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and German Studies Canada for the acknowledgement of the importance of this work through their award of this prize. She will be teaching GERM 121 again in both Term 1 and Term 2 of Winter 2022-23 at the University of British Columbia.
Featured image: Photo by Natalia Yakovleva on Unsplash
