The Classroom Environment

Walking into S2 behind Frau B., I sit at the hexagonal group table on the right between two other boys, one from Italy and the other from Russia, with another sitting across from me and greeting me as I sit down. The two girls filter into class together and take their places at the table next to mine, laughing at their private joke. The last boys come in and meander towards the back, the jokester stopping to say something to everyone and laughing at his own jokes (without reciprocation) as Frau B. eyes him firmly to take his place between his tablemates. Behind their table hangs an elaborate map of the world with different strings leading from cards stapled alongside it, proudly displaying each student’s home country, its flag, and their native language (again, only one language and one nationality). As a few students stand to grab their materials for DaZ, Frau B. beckons them to sit back down, ready to begin the day with a group morning activity. Seeking to be heard over the back table’s continuing stream of jokes and brief, but very audible laughs, Frau B. looks to one of the girls and asks “welchen Tag haben wir heute?” (‘what day is it today?’). Needing only to look briefly at the date written on the chalkboard, she intones “heute ist Mittwoch” (‘today is Wednesday). Turning to her left, she continues the morning ritual by addressing the boy across from me: “Ne., welches Datum haben wir?” (‘Ne., what is the date?). He looks hesitantly towards Frau B., but as she points to the date, he remains silent due to his developing reading skills. She helps him, stating that “heute

ist der 6te Februar, 2019” (‘today is February 6th_{, 2019’), motioning for him to repeat the phrase}

aloud and he does so, if not still entirely confident. Nonetheless, she smiles at him and invites him to finish the exercise, so he turns to the back table and asks “wie ist das Wetter heute?” (‘how is the weather today?’). Distracted by his neighbor, Frau B. asks him to repeat the question and he stumbles out “es ist wolkig” (‘it is cloudy’). Satisfied with his response, Frau B. then moves on to ask each student to go up to the emotions board and move a clothespin with their names to match their current mood as they say it aloud in a sentence (a few needing significant assistance from Frau B.). Satisfied with their work, she instructs everyone to get their red folders for DaZ, my tablemates helping the boy from Italy who still cannot understand much German, and I look to the clock reading 8:25, halfway through class.

As everybody grabs their materials for the DaZ hour, I notice Frau B. moves to sit with a new student who arrived in class two weeks ago. In one week, another new student joins my table as two other girls, who were partially integrated students that only come in the

afternoon, become fully integrated. Frau B. is completely occupied during this time by helping this new student become acquainted with the required school materials and assisting with initial language-learning tasks, such as translating a vocabulary list into their mother tongue via in-class tablets. I walk around the classroom, first stopping by the girls’ table to ask if they need assistance with their work on writing verbs in the past tense. After spending a few minutes with them, the timid boy from the back table calls me over for assistance on a workbook assignment that requires him to identify irregular verbs and their stem changes. Working slowly with him (due to his limited listening comprehension skills), the jokester overhears our work and abandons his own task, sitting down next to me and offering another explanation to help him.

Frau B. rebukes him for being off task, though she appears pleased that he has finally started to focus on schoolwork, and he heads back to his seat as the Italian boy calls me over. I walk over and notice that he is working on a workbook assignment for classroom objects, the same list that he began over a week ago. Patiently, I smile and nod along as he excitedly points to a table and says “der Tisch!” (‘the table’), continuing the naming-game that I created the day before to facilitate his learning. I play along by pointing at other objects and correcting him as we go along, until another student calls me over for help on a problem about school subjects. I look up at the clock and it is already 9:00, ten minutes past the break between first and second period. Additionally, second block is supposed to be geography, but nobody moves to take a break or switch folders, and Frau B. does not acknowledge this discrepancy. Due to the flexible

environment, Frau B. allows everyone to finish their DaZ work for the next 15 minutes before transitioning, starting somewhat later than scheduled but aligned with everyone’s progress.

Interrupting their individual work, Frau B. asks everybody to finish the sentence they are writing and to grab their materials for geography. Slowly the majority of the students swap their folders in the back of the classroom, the Italian not completely understanding the directions but following at their classmates’ example. We pull our chairs into a circle at the front of the room and Frau B. engages everyone with an atlas hanging on the chalkboard, pointing to northern Germany where Lübeck is located. She turns to the jokester, who is still squabbling with his neighbor, and asks him where he is from: “wo ist deine Heimat?” (‘where is your homeland?’). A girl turns to quiet him and his face lights up as he goes to the board and points: “ich komme aus Afghanistan” (‘I am from Afghanistan’). Pointing at his Ghanaian tablemate’s dark skin, he starts to make a jest about Africans, but Frau B. silences him with a

curt word and he sits back down, still laughing at his unspoken joke. She turns to the Italian, sitting next to me with an innocent smile, and repeats her question. He simply stares back smiling, clearly not understanding her question but engaged and cheerful nonetheless. She outlines his sentence for him, knowing his background, carefully pronouncing each word individually: “ich komme aus Italien” (‘I am from Italy’). He repeats each word back to her, still not comprehending, until she beckons him to stand and point to Italy on the map, and his eyes brighten. “Italia!” (‘Italy’) he exclaims joyously, beaming at me and Frau B. motions him to sit back down while beginning with the next student. This continues for everybody, including myself, until the bell rings and Frau B. shuffles the students out: the first 25-minute break.

While S2 does not observe the five-minute breaks between subjects, the longer two at 9:30 and 11:40 are sacred to teachers and students alike who need mid-day break. As I follow Frau B. into the teacher’s lounge, I watch my students run outside onto the courtyard to meet friends outside of class and expend their energy despite the near freezing temperature. Greeting friendly faces in the walkway, I turn left to grab my lunch in the refrigerator and take my seat across from Herr S. whose exhausted face is mirrored by an exacerbated sigh. He grumbles about his hectic morning, having spent the first two hours with S1 and relieved to finally get a reprieve. He complains that they were “unruhig” (‘noisy’) the entire time, needing to mark two students in his book for future discipline, and I commiserate with him, knowing that this will likely be repeated tomorrow when Frau K. will be entirely absent. As I and others around sympathize with his morning, I am reminded of how differently the students behave around Frau K.’s stern demeaner and consistent, public reprimands than Herr S.’s more subdued, complacent attitude that unintentionally encourages more erratic behavior. Lost in

these thoughts, I return to the conversation as Herr S. casually mentions that Frau L. is absent again today, the third day in the last week. I groan internally, knowing that I will have to take over her class without any preparation or notion of what the students have been working on, as I have been working with Frau D.’s section the last few days. It feels as though a teacher is absent every day, forcing us to reshuffle classrooms, students, and sometimes entire subjects, so the only sense of continuity is the inevitable amendment to their schedule (see Klovert, Laurenz, & Quecke, 2019 for a review of teacher shortages around Germany). The students certainly appear pleased as their schedule is disrupted, reducing their workload, but we teachers scramble to find an activity that (hopefully) somewhat relates to their previous

lessons. This challenge is only exacerbated when Herr S. is forced to teach two sections of math at once, likely the case this afternoon. We chat through the rest of the break, avoiding further conversation about class, and start to prepare an impromptu combined math class together as we head out the door a few minutes after the bell rings again to mark the end of break.

Though there is a high degree of flexibility between the classes and the specific lessons, the overarching themes central to the National Integration Plan are preserved, though slightly modified to fit the school’s (and program’s) own vision for migrant integration. Reflecting on the implications of the stipulations in this national plan, there is an explicit connection between German society and democratic values and this emphasis is expected to be implicitly embedded within the program to concurrently teach history, language, and culture in the context of a modern democracy. These are subtly ingrained in pedagogical practices like encouraging active participation amongst all students, especially with those who have rudimentary language skills

(e.g., my Italian tablemate) by asking simpler, direct questions with significant scaffolding (i.e., teacher-directed help; see Vygotsky, 1978).

These practices were more explicitly developed during a teacher’s training and development day where the DaZ team spent a day discussing how to integrate democratic values such as ‘tolerance, justice, solidarity, and equality’ that are the foundation of German society and, by extension, the school environment, according to our guiding manual. While we developed a reward system for students acting on these goals, we spent the majority of the time discussing how the classes already actualize this mission in their daily pedagogical practices and how to improve them to better align with this initiative. Though not necessarily presuming the students’ lack of democratic values, we discussed how their home countries may advocate different ideologies that could spark cognitive dissonance and classroom conflict. In this sense, the paradigm has permeated all domains of DaZ life by necessitating a reorientation of students’ personal values towards those upheld in contemporary German democracy.

Deviating from the underlying ideologies of this federal plan, however, Karl-Eberhard’s DaZ program emphasizes the efficacy of students maintaining connections to their Heimat9_{. In}

Herr S.’s computer class, the students were tasked with created a presentation about “meine Stadt” (‘my city’). This assignment directly infers ownership unto the students, making them resident experts on their home, and implicitly implies that Lübeck is not their home, not even their ‘zweite Heimat’, a phrase echoed by Vertriebene building new lives in Germany. This is juxtaposed, however, by the class’s field trip to the local Holstentor and its museum, designed

to inform the students of the city’s history and help orient themselves within this local space. The classes also engage in a nutrition program where every other week, students from one of the classes cooks a meal from their home country for the rest to enjoy during a communal meal. Beyond cultivating a sense of unity amongst the students while supporting healthy eating habits, this has the effect of reinforcing the students’ non-German backgrounds through

‘ethnic’ foods in a positive light that values these traditions. Furthermore, while incoming students are busy translating vocabulary lists into their mother tongue, this practice is continued for all students across language levels, even when they are near-fluent and do not necessarily need this activity. This perspective values the students’ linguistic heritages alongside the National Integration Plans that maintain the importance of establishing a new German identity based on German cultural values. However, these activities still serve to reinforce a monolingual paradigm linking students to their (singular) homeland linked with their (single) mother tongue. Through these practices, the DaZ program has reinterpreted assimilationist ideals espoused by nationalist policy makers (read: AfD) for the National Integration Initiative in order to facilitate true ‘integration’ (by Berry’s standards) by encouraging students to maintain aspects of their non-German heritages while encouraging them to embrace democratic values and German language learning, all while still operating in this monolingual paradigm.

The program’s flexible curriculum is reinforced by spontaneity within the classroom itself, as changes between subjects may be overlooked to finish an activity or a teacher’s absence temporarily alters the organization of each class. While this does not mean that DaZ is less rigorous, it does disrupt continuity, where a schedule change is more typical than a

language practice alongside studying subjects that may be entirely novel, or mere reviews, as the classroom composition is diverse across all variables. This diversity is encouraged by faculty whose practices hail the importance of students maintaining connections to their Heimat, a paradigm that runs contrary to ideologies that advocate assimilationist incorporation (and assumes that Germany is not their Heimat). Simultaneously, there is a heavier, but more subtle, emphasis on following Germany’s rules and aligning with modern, democratic values. I would therefore expect students becoming integrated into the regular school system to function well in class due to their language skills and content background, but despite their congruity with German values, they would likely be marked as distinctly non-German and ‘ethnic’. Merely a hypothesis, this idea will be further investigated in next chapter’s ethnographic interview analysis. These perceptions were moderated through my outsider position as a temporary American researcher acting as a teacher’s assistant that also afforded me significant mobility in the larger Karl-Eberhard environment and allowed me to contextualize these DaZ reflections within this space.