 We're gonna highlight a couple of the examples and these are new lessons and we'll be piloting them in our program this coming fall. So these are not only open, but they are in progress and might get modified along the way and maybe there'll be a case study narrative coming up about what worked and what didn't work with some of these lessons. But the lesson I'm gonna highlight is part of a collection, it's a very small collection at this point because it's new, it only has two lessons but it's planning to grow. And that's what was already referenced on the literary and the digital every day. And this grows out of a curriculum development project that we've been working on in our fifth semester course in our program, which is kind of an intermediate advanced course. For those of you who are still comfortable with that word, it's our bridge course. And so the idea in this course, we had transformed the curriculum a few years ago to be a multi-literacies approach. And then as I mentioned before, we wanted to bring in various kinds of digital vernacular texts and have been experimenting with different ways of doing this. And this project became for me a really helpful way to think into how we might do that differently and better in some various ways. So I'm gonna highlight one of those lessons. Before I move into that though, I've chosen to highlight this one because I'm excited about it and because that's one of the collections that's growing. But we do also have some beginning level lessons in there for German for those of you who are German instructors. And those are, where'd she go? Oh, those are lessons that have developed out of lesson plans, primarily that Chelsea Steinert had developed for our beginning level classes that we've been working and reworking a little bit along the lines of the literary in the everyday. Those do not fit into this collection. Those are separate. But I wanted to mention those in part because one of those is an example of these open lessons around a closed text. And it's around a poem called Infantour, which is kind of an inventory. And so it's an example of taking a literary genre, a poem that's about everyday things, about the items that somebody has in his possession. In this case though, he's a soldier and he has very little. And that's part of what makes the poem very poignant. And where we're putting this in our curriculum, just again to kind of lay bare some of the logic, is in a chapter that in our textbook is about things. It's about possessions and enjoyment. And it makes me exceedingly uncomfortable because a lot of the communicative activities that are tied along with it, in addition to not highlighting the effective and the aesthetic and the creative and the playful elements, get really uncomfortably for me capitalistic because it's all about what would you like to acquire? What would you like for other people to give to you? And people, the students are asked to make lists of all the things they want. And so the idea with the lesson was to use that literary defamiliarization around something that is really everyday vocabulary. It's stuff that you have around you. A lot of the words in the poem are things like a pen or a razor. So really everyday items to defamiliarize that comfort with just listing all the stuff that we own and to try to do that by bringing this other context. And so there are different ways in which these can be brought into the curriculum. You'll find one of the other links at the top is Forms of Flight. And this is a space, these are categories which we've reworked a little bit but they're very strongly based off of the textbook that Joanna wrote. And these are great categories but they are also a work in progress. So we'd be interested in hearing from you where they resonate and what categories might be missing. But these are categories of different kinds of literariness that we've started to identify starting with Joanna's book and then they resonated a lot with some of the lessons that I was creating as well for German. Different ways in which this literary and the everyday kind of manifests itself. So it's a different way of thinking into the materials beyond the texts and the lessons and the collections but instead going in through the conceptual aspect. These are what we have just developed right now to kind of pique your curiosity or wet your appetite or whatever the metaphor is. So, but they, as you said, it enters it more conceptually. So these are how we're putting elements of a lesson together, whether it's tastes and aspirations or metaphorical coherence or whatever it is. So please you can certainly generate your own forms of flight. The particular lesson that I wanna highlight which is this lesson that we're gonna pilot again in this fifth semester course, the idea is to bring in among the other kinds of texts that we use a lot of literary texts but also non-literary texts, non-literary texts to kind of text about informational texts, I guess you would say, to bring in these digital vernacular texts and I'm greedy. So I put this text in three different categories of forms of flight because I think it hits on different aspects at different moments. Genre play and cultural values, intertextuality and symbolisms and unexpected juxtaposition. So if I click on genre play and cultural values, I have to open text at the bottom. It's this one that has cultural illusion, humor, memes on and offline. And we have in the kind of this being a work in progress, some of the metadata we've been discussing, having very involved discussions among ourselves about how to highlight metadata in a way that's searchable. So some of these are categories that we're still also working on and working out. And we'll be talking about that more in the afternoon after lunch when we create the materials. The lesson I'm gonna highlight is and what the text is, is a series of memes, internet memes. It's framed in the posts that I discovered as a meme story, memgeschichte, which I thought was interesting in itself because that's sort of this hybrid genre that I had never heard of before. But that was obviously kind of being, reference being created through this particular post. Some of you may have seen this. This made it around the internet a lot. It happened, it was an event I guess at the University of Mainz where a door broke and what happened was people started to post print offs of various internet memes around a sign that said the repairman has been informed. So the sign that started was a repairman has been informed. Don't worry about the door being broken. And then people started to post these internet memes around the post. And what intrigued me about this, in addition to this reference to it being a meme story, which is already this kind of hybrid digital literary genre, was the ways in which it plays with allusion and citational practices, which I think are one kind of literary practice. And it's often a literary practice that alienates students when they read literary texts, when there are allusions, intertextuality, references that they don't get. That's often, at least in my experience, a potential moment where students will say, well, I don't get this. This is too foreign, right? It's the, I'm not engaged because I don't get it rather than the engaged, because I finally get it. And so the idea was to use this as a way into thinking about, well, what are the effects of that kind of allusion, those kinds of citationality? When do they make you feel like an insider? When do they make you feel like an outsider? And what are those effects? And at the same time, because many of the memes play with very formulaic language, and formulaic language is a kind of nice thing to be able to give to foreign language learners, right? These little packets of language that they can use. But to show how even this formulaic language can be really creatively used for a variety of different effects, including humor, but also including sometimes critique, cultural critique or social critique of a moment. And I'm going to walk through this pretty quickly, but I want to at least highlight some of the kind of thinking that went along with it. So the lesson starts because I wanted to have them do a little conceptualization around what is an internet meme, because it's not something necessarily that they've ever discussed in academic context or a learning context, let alone in a foreign language classroom. So we do have a text at the beginning that's called what is a meme? And I like this text in particular, it's from a blog. But in addition to having that sort of pre-reading function of thinking about what is a meme, itself is a very literary text. There's a lot of playfulness. There's a lot of English language use that's done in a playful way, which is very characteristic of German internet speak. And then there are also a lot of metaphors. And so in this part of the lesson, the students in addition to thinking about the more propositional meaning of the text are asked to reflect a little bit on this literary element. And then we have one example of a meme, which is the bunny with a pancake on its head, which says, I have no idea what you're talking about. So here's a bunny with a pancake on its head, which is a common internet meme that people will post in a forum or in a discussion or in a thread when they just don't understand what's going on and they want to express that. We hope the students don't feel that way at that point. So this is where the story begins, the meme story. So there's the original post, broken, the technician, the repairman is informed. And then I'm not going to go through all these. And these are not even all the ones that are in the story. I edited the story down a little bit because it's an open text and I can do that. But you'll see there pretty quickly, a number of posts come in. And these posts include very pop culture illusions. They include literary illusions. They include political illusions. They include illusions that are part of the Anglo-American culture but they're really part of a global culture. And I think that's evidenced by the fact that they're there and they're posted at this German university, by presumably students who are attending that university. And so the students in a sense, rather than trying to make claims about some very essentialized German culture, get to see how multilingualism also plays a role in this kind of context. They're English and the German mingle side by side. And one of the effects of that in terms of this insiderliness and outsiderliness, which is another aspect of these kind of digital practices, is that the students in my classroom are going to get a lot of these illusions, I'm assuming. We'll find out, that'll be in the case study. And they're not gonna get a lot of these illusions. So they're gonna have that combined feeling of insiderliness when they perhaps, for example, see a meme that comes out of the Lord of the Rings story. There are a lot of those in this particular example. But they might not get the Anglo-American quote about how if the Euro fails, the Euro fails, then Europe falls apart, right? So they might not get references to German TV shows, but they might get a lot of these references to shows that are produced in the U.S. but are also very popular and very common and part of the kind of pop cultural discourse in Germany. So these are mingled there side by side. And that's part of the discussion. We're talking about the practices and you mentioned the citation of digital world, all of these pieces of literature that we have, whenever the image you took is thicker or someplace, that needs to be part of the lesson. Right, and these are all from the same page. So the page itself is cited at the top. And that would be, that's actually the way I'm gonna have them access them is through the website. And part of the logic is the, is it viewable? But part of that is also so they see it in its natural habitat, so to speak. But I produced these here for the lesson to make it a little bit easier for instructors to have them all in one place. And then also at the end of the lesson, there is a clarification of all of the MEMS so that the instructor who themselves might experience that outsiderliness in encountering some of these has a little bit of a crutch to work into them. What I wanna highlight here going on towards the end, so there's this series of MEMS, I'm not gonna go through the whole MEMS story, but what happens is that they remove all of the posts. And there's a message first that's put there in the space where the notification of the broken door is posted, but then also one that's posted on the official Twitter of the University of Mainz that is in the voice of the dean, so the authoritative voice of the university coming in saying, okay, we've cleared away all your posts. We can't have these here because of, yes, because they're causing a fire hazard. Having all these pieces of paper here is causing a fire hazard. And so the authoritative voice comes in and clears them out. And I love thinking about this as a story as well. And then you have this image. Does anyone recognize that one? What is it? It's a big Lebowski, right? Okay, who says, am I the only one around here who takes care for the Bronzschutz-Forschriften and I love the code switch, the multilingualism of this one as well? So you have this answering back to the authority through these MEMS, which is something that often happens online and here they've transported these practices into this offline context. Switch it off, he ain't coming. Oh, there's where Angela Merkel comes in. So if the door fails, then Europe fails, which is a playoff of her quotes about the Euro. She's sad. And then you have the Dean coming in with a little more of a humorful and less of the authoritative voice saying, we've gathered all your papers and we're gonna make something of it. Maybe an exhibition, right? Like an art exhibition or something. And then you have the image of all the things, right? And then you have, this is a reference to a big pop hit. Any couple of you are nodding over there? Okay, which is, first I'm gonna save the world and then I'll get to the door. It's a reference to a song that's, first I'm gonna save the world and then I'll come to you. It's a very sad sort of love song. And then we have the final breaking news on the website, which is that the door's fixed and what's beautiful, and this comes at the end of the lesson, I really love this example, is that there's an entire Facebook group devoted to this door now that continues to exist. And students continue to post on this site. It has an active life. I mean, there were posts as of a couple of days ago when I checked again of people continuing, not all students of the University of Mines either, to play with these memes and play with these various kinds of internet speak on this site, all around this door at the University of Mines. And this post came to me through an English language website originally. So you can see how these things traffic in interesting ways as well. Where this appears in our class is where we're focusing on genres of storytelling. And we wanna look at various ways in which people tell stories, including spontaneous oral stories, including anecdotes, including more traditional narratives, like short stories. Can't quite get to a novel in that amount of time, but to look at the various ways in which people tell stories. And so part of what we bring in is, well, what is this as a story? How would you retell this story? What is a recount of this story look like? And then comparing that recount with the original story, what happens if you do a linguistic recount? Where does the multimodality go? What humorous effects or what kind of critical effects are created by the memes that get lost in the recount? So this kind of comparative aspect. And then the students at the end, either as a class or in a couple of groups are going to identify an event or a social phenomenon or something that they agree upon and are going to come up with some memes. So remix existing memes, for example, or to create a meme that comments somehow on that. So we can create our own meme stories around the classroom and then to, again, transform those and think about, well, what does it look like this to tell these stories a different way? And so the idea is to bring in this literary illusion, cultural illusion, pop cultural illusion and these references to think about how they comment on an event or a set of experiences in some way. And then what we're gonna use, this isn't in the lesson, but just to kind of foreground how this fits into the curriculum, use that as a way of thinking about storytelling in different ways, but also as a way of then coming back to what we might more comfortably consider literary texts and thinking about, well, how does illusion work there? And in our particular context, we look at some East German texts where there are a lot of cultural illusions to things that somebody growing up in East Germany would immediately get, but as somebody in the US, the students often feel left behind. And the idea is to allow that to reframe our thinking that these aren't just foreign texts, but what are these particular effects of getting it and not getting it? And what are the gains and losses of creating those kinds of effects as a sort of literary experience? All right, that's the lesson in short. That's one of the examples. Any questions or comments about that one? Yeah. On them's short. Yes. How, I mean, I figured out how to set it up technically, but how would you actually get the ball rolling? What would be your idea of getting the ball rolling? I mean, I just looked on the internet. Yes. Of that space? Of that space. Yes. Kind of cool. Once we brainstorm something like immigration, right? Where you take those, they're gonna be posted around the room, probably about four groups. And then the students, there are the technical aspect, you said you get it, but just in case there are mem generators where people can recreate different mems, you can change the text, you can change the image slightly, and they're very easy to use and there are lots of them freely available. And then the students are gonna bring in, print them off. They're gonna kind of imitate what went on here and they're gonna post them around the space and then moving around that space, start to interpret and work with each other's stories. Now the question is, in what way is that a story? But that's an interesting question for this as well, because it's very hypertextual. It's not a linear story. So part of our question of what makes this a story is gonna help us to reflect on storytelling as a practice and as a genre. Yeah. Again, go to the mem generator, but there's also no your mem, which is a great website. Yes. So you have to then go to understand then the parameters of the meme and how to go to that and then to the generator to generate the meme. Because you kind of need both. To play with what is this as a genre as well. To play the genre. Yeah. So they really get the genre convention. I went to that knowyourmem.com. What's interesting about that site is that it also tells you when they're created and to the extent that they can, it's hard sometimes to trace these. But when they were created, how that started, how it's typically used, what its typical function is, and a conversation. And so the ways in which these become shorthand, they can become pragmatic elements in online speak is highlighted through that site. Observable behaviors. Yes. That we, the rubric grading, just as Johanna has put in this book. Right. What, with all this creativity and all these options, what kind of narrowing or focus can you do to decide what are my objectives? Yes. Using these wonderful texts that you are making accessible to us. On one hand, we're looking at storytelling. So the students are along the way also narrating a story. We're playing with various ideas of having that be a multimodal story. But for the moment, it's a narrative. It's a written narrative. But part of what they do is write a reflection around that as well. And so reflecting on this insiderliness, formulaic language and the creative use of that, how that plays into their stories is one way that we assess that. The other way is through the tests. And so they'll be looking at, again, these texts that are out of East Germany where these things play a really important role. And that bridge between a lesson like this and then thinking about the literary texts in an exam where they have to also do similar sorts of self reflection is important. What I wouldn't want to do with something like this is make the test a discreet knowledge sort of assessment. So the assessment is really about awareness and self reflection and how these things get then carefully taken up in the practice of writing stories. What university increasingly specifics on that and a narrow group of outcomes. Right. As you create these materials to have rubric, outcomes to have the kinds of observable behaviors that you think should result when people are really applying your ideas in the classroom. The objectives when we get into the metadata will show a little bit how we're starting to try to frame that. But I think this maybe is something that we can come back to as a group discussion because one of the struggles for me is that I think these really have to be contextualized within a particular curriculum. And so it's hard to define, it's hard to completely define what assessment's gonna look like for an individual lesson without knowing what curriculum it's placed in. One of the frameworks that I've been working with is the work of Copen-Kalansis and what I find really helpful about them and I'm gonna show this after lunch. They have a website where they have a series of verbs that they tie to different kinds of pedagogical activities, they break those down into four groups. Analyzing, conceptualizing, applying, and experiencing. Thank you, that's what I was looking at you. Yeah. And so underneath those categories, they also have a series of, well, what are the kinds of observable behavior? What are the kinds of verbs that show up? Where we're locating those at the moment are in a table that we'll come back to. These are the kinds of observable behaviors. But the assessment element, maybe that's something we even wanna think around collections or something on that higher level where we can say, pulling these together, if this were a unit or a module, what might the end assessment look like for that module? So that could be a metadata field of observable student outcomes. You're thinking in terms of assessment. That should be where every text that could be something that... Actually, the example that I'm gonna show, I will walk you through one of my chapters and assessment is built into that as you indicated. Yeah. But one of the things that I think this comes back to is, well, the building has been one of our struggles. It's a delightful kind of struggle, but the question is how to make these both flexible and identify points of articulation in terms of how you would build a curriculum. I think that's where the building comes into. And that was part of the motivation for creating the collections, is that we wanted to have a space where you could identify how these discrete lessons or use of text might build into something, might have a curricular progression. But at the same time, we wanted to keep flexibility in the text and the lessons themselves with the recognition that somebody might take this and use it in a different context, tweak the lesson, modify the lesson, and all of a sudden, the objectives become slightly different. And so we're still struggling to figure out how do you keep that articulation and that flexibility at the same time in a site like this? And it's a fun kind of problem to think with. If some of the major activists in the class and female are talking about the new stories, sometimes there's anything in native language that's phenomenal that comes in funny and how you have to explain it and talk about it in a step. And then discussing it, you keep deciding if it's in the foreign language and you immediately get it, but then then you don't have the nuance language to actually articulate it verbally. Like you understand it visually, but you don't understand it verbally. It seems like the team work could fall flat. Yes. Yes. I didn't know what kind of discussion actually being structured into it. Yeah, I don't like how it was done. So that you don't lose that. Yeah, so you don't lose that humorous aspect. Motivations for the lesson for me was that was exactly the experience I've had with literary texts that have lots of cultural illusions, is that by the point you've explained the entire history of, in my case, East Germany, and you've explained the context, you've explained the humor to death and it's not funny anymore. And so that was part of the motivation was, well, how do we find a different way in to that? And so the idea of using this text, what I liked about it is that I'm hoping that at least some of those will be immediate effects, not all, but some of them the students will recognize and therefore will find funny, and then the loss of them having to explain them, at least they're explaining them after they've already found the funny a little bit. The question of how do we then bridge that into other texts where they don't have that insiderliness? It's a little bit off the topic of this project, but we've been experimenting with ways of using other kinds of technology to play with that, and maybe I could talk with you about that during the break, but I think it's not just a problem for humor, it's a problem for literariness, in the sense that a lot of the times literariness plays off of allusions, or references, or genre play, or the unexpected, or juxtapositions. These are all things that do require a heavy amount of cultural knowledge and cultural perspectives. And so part of the question is, how do you keep the effects while recognizing that there's a lot that has to be covered?