Die Website des Zentrums für Inter-Amerikanische Studien wird seit Beginn des Jahres 2020 generalüberholt und aktualisiert. Dies gilt vor allem für den Bereich Forschung. Wir bitten noch um etwas Geduld.
Bevor die neuen Informationen zu unseren aktuellen und vergangenen Arbeits- und Forschungsschwerpunkten verfügbar sein werden, möchten wir schon vorab einen Arbeitsschwerpunkt vorstellen: Narrative Didactics.
>> Narrative Didactics Website
Narrative Didactics is a research group at the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz, founded in 2019, which studies and disseminates innovative approaches and methods that use stories and narrative practices to facilitate learning and teaching processes in education. The idea of Narrative Didactics is to expand the scope of didactics by providing alternative methods and tools to critically engage with the challenges of our times through narrative practices. Members of the research group study, work, and teach at Austrian schools, colleges and universities.
Current members:
Roberta Maierhofer, Christina Pöckl, Andreas Schuch, Dagmar Wallenstorfer, Nicole Haring, Nina Reibenschuh
Current research:
Literature-Enactment-Process (LEP)
This project promotes reading literature for students through a newly developed approach termed the Literature-Enactment-Process (LEP), where students can gain access to and comprehend narratives and associated inquiry topics through a range of phases, with performative methods as a pivotal point. As a pedagogical tool, these enactment strategies are embedded in a larger procedure that oscillates between individual and collaborative comprehension processes (see illustration). Since enactments, reflections and follow-up tasks (writing, new media creations) are combined, literature and the experiences with it become visualized, substantiated and shared.
At the University of Graz, the LEP was tested with current and future teachers as well as language arts students, proved itself in practice and was positively evaluated as an interdisciplinary teaching method.
Contact: Christina Pöckl - christina.poeckl(at)alumni.uni-graz.at
Digital Storytelling
First experiments of combining multimedia elements with storytelling performances can be traced back to California during the 1980s. In 1994, the Digital Media Center was founded in San Francisco, which later became the Center for Digital Storytelling and, in 2015, simply StoryCenter. The center has played an instrumental role in developing and popularizing the practice of digital storytelling, which was initially limited to mostly therapeutic and expressive applications. Scholars and educators worldwide have since discovered and written about the numerous benefits of educational digital storytelling. However, digital storytelling has not yet reached the classrooms and university courses in German-speaking countries.
Contact: Andreas Schuch – andreas.schuch(at)uni-graz.at
Diversity Pedagogy
In a due to globalization and migration increasingly diverse society, we see ourselves confronted with new and unknown challenges. In order to counteract the forming of parallel societies and promote a multicultural way of live, people need to learn how to approach and live with differences. The starting point for this learning process is the classroom, which is in many ways a microcosmos. Numerous societal issues can be witnessed when 25 children or teenagers come together every day in one room. The promising outcomes of digital storytelling in terms of cultural awareness, critical thinking and understanding have been discussed by scholars worldwide. In that, digital storytelling is used as a tool in classrooms to communicate differences, foster understanding and affection, and in that promote acceptance and appreciation for diversity.
Contact: Dagmar Wallenstorfer – dagmar.wallenstofer(at)uni-graz.at
Game-Based Learning
Contact: Andreas Schuch – andreas.schuch(at)uni-graz.at
Intergenerational Storytelling
The method of the „Intergenerational Feminist Mic” was developed by May Chazan during an intergenerational workshop with women activists in Montreal through the ACT Research project. Using digital storytelling as a tool to produce knowledge transfer across generation and deconstructing the common perception of older people as wisdom donors was the aim of the project. The developed feminist methodology is a valuable tool for education as well since it stimulates a critical discourse of certain topics across generations.
Feminist Narrative Practices
The idea of feminist narratives goes back to the long standing feminist tradition of consciousness raising groups and the concept of “the personal is political”. The idea here is to use it as an educational tool to produce narratives and then investigate them through an intersectional feminist lens to ultimately deconstruct the gendered stereotypes and assumptions that resign in the narratives.
Digital stories as well as literary narratives are an ideal tool to be used in educational settings to critically engage with narratives through an intersectional feminist lens.
Contact: Nicole Haring – nicole.haring(at)uni-graz.at
