Privilege, check! - An activity for foreign language teaching to promote critical awareness

Abstract

Critical approaches such as critical pedagogy (Freire, 1976) and critical foreign language didactics (Gerlach, 2020a) have become increasingly popular in German-speaking countries in recent years in the wake of numerous social, political and economic changes. In addition to functional communicative competence, intercultural communicative competence and digital competence, the promotion of critical consciousness among learners is an important goal in content-oriented foreign language teaching. The results presented here were developed in the course of an CLIL teaching unit on feminism, violence against women and femicide in Spanish-speaking countries in an eleventh grade of a grammar school in Germany. In addition to developing a critical awareness, the focus was on global education and sharpening the perspective on a globally occurring and important social issue. Initial results of the analysis and discussion show that the learners are beginning to deal with issues of social justice, express social criticism and train their empathy. In addition, a critical awareness of global issues among the learners manifested itself in the results.

Keywords

• Critical consciousness
• Global education
• CLIL
• Classroom activities