Goethe-Institut Representatives Visit Montclair’s SPARK for German Teaching Lab

For the first time since the establishment of Montclair’s SPARK for German Teaching Lab, guests from the New York City Goethe-Institut paid the lab a visit, observing the 12 Montclair students and their faculty mentor Pascale LaFountain as the group facilitated an all-German performance of “Die Wichtelmänner,” or “The Shoemaker and His Elves,” a classic German fairy tale first featured in the 1812 Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the Brothers Grimm. This was the culmination of a 2-week fairy tale unit that the SPARK lab undertook alongside other themed weekly meetings on topics such as robotics, geography, farm life, Karnival, and other topics that bring together German vocabulary practice, cultural exploration, music, crafts, and more.

Montclair student instructors pick themes and create lesson plans for each week, and it is perhaps not surprising that some students choose to focus on fairy tales, as Professor LaFountain teaches a course on “Fairy Tales from Grimm to Disney” that focuses on cultural relevance of fairy tales in contemporary culture. Professor LaFountain emphasizes creating a welcoming and creative teaching environment: “We meet on Friday so our goal is for this to feel more like a party than a language lesson,” says Pascale Lafountain. “Ideally it is both, and the children leave hungry to learn more about other languages, cultures, and the world around them.”

For the “Wichtelmänner” performance, the 12 elementary-school-aged local children learning and practicing German through the SPARK for German program made elf hats, donned costumes, drew sets, learned vocabulary, and rehearsed in German before the arrival of their families. Michael Thompson, Project Manager at the Goethe-Institut, and Alina Frieser, an intern from Germany, joined the audience and shared gift bags with the children, noting that this was their first chance to visit one of the 150 North American SPARK for German labs in person. The Montclair SPARK lab, which has support from the Goethe-Institut and the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG), has now taught hundreds of children and produced multiple post-graduate winners of Fulbright Germany and Fulbright Austria grants, hopes to host Goethe-Institut representatives again in the future.