One day, I was speaking with one of our international students from Brazil and he shared that his motivation for learning German was his own family’s heritage.  He came from one of the Brazilian states that had a large German-speaking population, and grew up in a community which had, over centuries, maintained its German cultural identity.  While I had some vague knowledge that there were German settlements in Brazil, I realized that the textbooks I used did not address the German diaspora and I myself had never been explicitly taught about these communities in my own education.  In fact, aside from the occasional cultural inset about the German influence on American culture and the post-World War II emigration to the U.S., the textbooks I used did not mention the many and diverse German-speaking populations outside of German-speaking countries.  Consequently, my courses focused solely on the German speakers in European countries where German was a national language – and overwhelmingly on Germany. I saw that my colleagues in Spanish regularly taught courses on Spanish-speakers and their unique cultures outside of Spanish-speaking countries and I wondered why there was this large cultural blind spot in German Studies. In part, it was likely an academic casualty of post-War national and political reorientation, along with coming to terms with the impact of German nationalism and the concept of national identities tied to ethnicity:  What was to be gained by remembering the ethnic German populations in other countries? The conversation with my student prompted me to consider ways to add a broader understanding of German culture to my classes. Although the focus would largely be on populations that had historically lived in the regions or had emigrated there prior to the 20th century, the list of options also included former colonies such as Namibia.  At the same time I was considering these things, I learned about the support offered by PALNI’s PALSave Open Pedagogy Assignment initiative. This inspired me to integrate a cultural research project into a German language course and give students the opportunity to share their research as an Open Educational Resource (OER) on Pressbooks.  I decided to do this in a mixed-level special topics course which covered both language instruction and culture. I called it “The German-Speaking World Today” and as our main cultural project, students picked a German-speaking population outside of Germany or Austria (from the list below) and researched that community.  The goal was for us as a class to learn about each community and also gain an understanding of what cultural institutions or practices helped either maintain the culture or led to its disappearance.  The final poster presentations included the following information:

1. Name of the country/community
2. Location (country, capital, other significant cities)
3. Size of the German-speaking populations
4. Geographic size comparison with the U.S.
5. How long has the group been there?
6. Why did they settle there?
7. What dialect do they speak? (What German-speaking region did they come from?)
8. Famous people from this German-speaking community
9. What “cultural artefact” supports and sustains this cultural group?
10. How is the culture maintained or not maintained? (Are there protests or laws against the group? Are they encouraged to assimilate?)
11. Sources