From 25th to 27th November, a group of 15 students visited the BBS Rohrbach in Upper Austria to conduct research about teaching English as a foreign language in a student-centred learning environment.

BBS Rohrbach is an innovative vocational school that offers multiple educational emphases, such as Digital Business, Information Technology, Media Design, and Health & Nutrition. Most students at BBS Rohrbach study two or three foreign languages, English being one of them. In 16 classes, a humanistic teaching approach called the Dalton pedagogy is applied to teaching English and other school subjects, such as Natural Sciences or Geography.

The Dalton pedagogy fosters learner autonomy, self-regulation, and cooperation. Students receive self-study assignments, which they complete in teams during open-learning phases at school. The assignments, prepared by the teachers at BBS Rohrbach, often combine different subjects with each other. When completing the assignments, students are free to move within the school building, use the resources available at school and online, and consult the teacher or other students for support.

By working in teams and independently of a teacher, students develop a multitude of skills beyond those related to the subjects they are studying. They learn, for example, how to manage their own time, how to communicate effectively, how to solve problems, how to explain processes, and how to motivate themselves and each other. Their acquired social and communicative competences, as well as their ability to self-regulate their capacities, make graduates from BBS Rohrbach strong competitors on the job market. However, during the excursion we learned that many students at BBS Rohrbach plan to continue studying at university.

The excursion was part of a university course in the teacher education programme at the Department of English at the University of Klagenfurt. The course has a strong focus on research and enables students to gain experience with planning, conducting, and writing about small empirical research projects on topics related to teaching and learning English as a foreign language. The participants were impressed by the way the Dalton pedagogy is implemented at BBS Rohrbach and by the high degree of contentment and self-confidence the students displayed.

We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to the dedicated teachers and the headmaster at BBS Rohrbach, who have been welcoming us for years, and look forward to visits in the future.

Conveners: Alexa Weik von Mossner, Marijana Mikić, and Mario Grill

Location: University of Klagenfurt, Austria

Dates: September 17-19, 2020

 

Taking a cue from pioneering efforts at the intersection of context-oriented approaches in race and ethnicity studies and post-classical narratology, this conference is interested in the relationship between narrative, race, and ethnicity in the United States.

Reading so-called “ethnic” American literatures means encountering characters and storyworlds imagined by writers associated with minority communities in the United States. Without doubt, the formal study of narrative can help us gain a deeper understanding of such encounters, but until recently, narratologists rarely grappled with the question of how issues of race and ethnicity force us to rethink the formal study of narrative.

Attesting that the relative “race/ethnicity-blindness” of narrative theory is a severe limitation, scholars such as James Donahue have called for a “critical race narratology” (2017, 3) that addresses this lacuna. A range of recent book publications (e.g. Aldama 2005; Donahue 2019; Donahue, Ho, and Morgan 2017; Fetta 2018; Gonzáles 2017; Kim 2013; Moya 2016; Wyatt and George 2020) demonstrate that a variety of insights can be gained from narratological approaches that open themselves up to issues of race and ethnicity in conjunction with other important identity markers including class, religion, gender, and sexuality. And, as Sue Kim has noted, there are shared interests in understanding the ways in which such narratives “operate within larger social structures as well as an investment in the scrutiny of how minds and subjectivity work in and through narratives” (2017, 16).

How do ethnic American literary texts use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity? What narrative strategies do they employ to interweave these issues with other important identity markers such as class, religion, gender, and sexuality? How do they involve readers emotionally in their storyworlds and how do they relate such involvements to the racial politics and history of the United States? And how does paying attention to the strategies and formal features of ethnic American literatures change our understanding of narrative theory? These are some of the questions we hope to address at this conference.

 

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Frederick Luis Aldama, Distinguished University Professor, Ohio State University

Patrick Colm Hogan, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, University of Connecticut

Paula Moya, Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities, Stanford University

 

We invite paper proposals on topics including, but not limited to the following:

• Theoretical intersections of race/ethnicity and narrative theory
• Narrative worldmaking and ethnic American storyworlds in fiction and nonfiction
• Narrative strategies of representing racial and ethnic histories
• Intersectional narratologies
• Narrative identification and disidentification
• Performativity and ethnic identity
• Cognitive approaches to ethnic American literatures
• Narrative engagement, simulation, embodiment, and emotion
• Affective reader response and the empathic imagination
• Unnatural narratives and non-normative narrators
• Narrative ethics, race, and the environmental imagination
• Empirical reception studies related to ethnic American literatures

 

The conference is supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in the context of the Narrative Encounters Project at the University of Klagenfurt (https://narrativeencounters.aau.at).

There are plans to publish an edited collection related to the conference theme; selected papers will be considered for inclusion.

Abstracts (300-400 words) for 20-minute papers and a short bio note should be submitted by email no later than Jan 31, 2020 to: narrative [dot] encounters [at] aau [dot] at

For questions and queries, please contact narrative [dot] encounters [at] aau [dot] at.