Premium
STEM and Teaching German Language and Literature with an Interdisciplinary Approach: 18 th ‐Century Reports by German Jesuit Missionaries in the German Classroom
Author(s) -
Classen Albrecht
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
die unterrichtspraxis/teaching german
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1756-1221
pISSN - 0042-062X
DOI - 10.1111/tger.12054
Subject(s) - german , humanism , narrative , perspective (graphical) , action (physics) , sociology , history , classics , literature , political science , art , archaeology , law , visual arts , physics , quantum mechanics
Recent debates about the future of academia have focused primarily on teaching the STEM subjects. This is certainly a valuable call for action, but it also threatens to ignore the significant contributions of the humanities and other fields. This article presents a workable alternative by way of looking at more technical writings by 18 th ‐century German Jesuit missionaries in Sonora (today Mexico and Arizona), which invites a critical analysis of the data provided by those authors about the natural environment and the social conditions and also a thorough examination of “literary” texts at the same time from a humanistic perspective. Those narratives also serve as meaningful documents for all German students in the Southwest because they indicate the importance of the German language for the study of the local history going back almost two hundred years.