Museum-based learning

Cultural and aesthetic education in teaching and learning contexts is an important research cluster at the Department of German as Second and/or Foreign Language. Faculty member Dorota Okonska is working on a dissertation on art as a source of inspiration in learning German as a second language (‘Kreative Impulse zum Lernen des Deutschen als Zweitsprache. Eine empirische Untersuchung zu sprachfördernden Ansätze des Projekts Sprache durch Kunst’, supervised by Professor Rupprecht S. Baur). Encounters with art, the project assumes, enable pupils to express themselves as individuals: they find their way to language and back from language to art. The dissertation examines the interrelation between the museum as a place of learning outside of school and language pedagogy as it is applied in school contexts. Based on linguistic data, the researcher analyses under which conditions migrant children can be motivated to learn and make progress at school through new methodological approaches.

Dr Andrea Schäfer-Jung has also dedicated her research to museums as a site of learning outside of (pre-)school, focusing on aesthetic sources of learning. Her target group are pre-school children in nursery settings who are being prepared for entering primary school. Through encounters with works of art in and around the museum, the children foster their sense of aesthetics and are encouraged to engage with different materials and creative forms of expression. Targeted artistic practice linked closely to the integrated development of children’s lexicon and grammar holistically promotes the acquisition of spoken language.