The Danger of a Single Picture

Danger of a Single Picture
A Storybook about Multiple Perspectives

Supervisory and editorial work by Petra Rauschert and Fabiana Cardetti

Short stories contributed by
Michael Gaiewski, Maximilian Hauer, Christopher Hayes, Sebastian Lory, Angela Mastropietro, Josip Matosevic, Gabrielle Melamed, Daniel Mourad, Lisa Naples, Nora Röver, Josefine Winter, and Stefanie Wölfl.

Cover artwork created by Servando Díaz.

This publication may not be reproduced in part or in whole without permission from the editors. Educators wishing to know more details about this project to adapt to their own context are encouraged to contact the editors directly.

January 2020
Connecticut, USA; Munich, Germany

Senior Lecturer, Department of English and American Studies (TEFL), University of Munich, Germany.
Email: rauschert@lmu.de

Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Connectitut, USA.
Email: fabiana.cardetti@uconn.edu

Contents

Preface

Project Group

Short Stories

The Danger of a Single Picture (Stefanie Wölfl, Maximilian Hauer)
Two Friends a World Apart (Nora Röver, Josef Matosevic)
The Walk (Josefine Winter, Sebastian Lory)
Tea-time Shenanigans (Gabbie Melamed, Lisa Naples)
No Choice, Multiple Choice (Angie Mastropietro, Michael Gaiewski)
ESL Math Classroom of Vegetables (Daniel Mourad, Christopher Hayes)

About the Cover

Acknowledgements

Preface

This multimodal storybook is the outcome of an intercultural, interdisciplinary and collaborative project between a foreign languages course in Germany and a mathematics course in the United States. Dr. Petra Rauschert lead the foreign languages group of students who were participating in a course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. The mathematics group was lead by Professor Fabiana Cardetti whose students were participating in a course on mathematics education at the University of Connecticut.

We engaged in this collaboration as part of our learning about intercultural communicative competence using the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture [RFCDC] (Barrett et al., 2018). The RFCDC model proposes 20 competences that are organized into four groups: values, attitudes, skills, and knowledge and critical understanding. For this particular activity we focused on the competences related to values.

Process
For this activity our students first reflected on the competences presented in the RFCDC with a focus on values. We then used Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk "The Danger of a Single Story" (2009) as a starting point to reflect on local and global issues that can/should be seen from more than one perspective. The students finally wrote short stories in which they address these issues. The topics they chose are all related to the domain of values in the RFCDC.
We used Google Slides for our collaboration because it allowed us to share the entire project content in a single file and comment on each other's work. We collaborated at every step in the creation of the short stories, i.e. we provided and responded to feedback, insights, and questions from the original brainstorming of ideas through to the final drafts of the stories. Students also created audio or video versions of their stories to further enhance the storybook, as well as to make these stories available to the visually impaired. The project outcome is this multimodal (digital) storybook that tries to inspire its readers to see things from different angles.

We hope you enjoy!

Petra and Fabiana
(on behalf of the entire LMU/UConn project team)

References
Adichie, C. N. (2009, July). Newton Aduaka: The danger of a single story [video file]. Retrieved from:
https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story

Barrett, M., de Bivar Black, L., Byram, M., Faltýn, J., Gudmundson, L., van’t Land, H., & Zgaga, P. (2018). Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture, Volume 1: Context, concepts and model. Strasburg: Council of Europe. Retrieved from:
https://rm.coe.int/prems-008318-gbr-2508-reference-framework-of-competences-vol-1-8573-co/16807bc66c.

Project Group

LMU team

Department of TEFL
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
Munich
Germany

UConn team

Math Department
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT
USA

The Story of a Single Picture

Stefanie Wölfl and Maximilian Hauer, LMU

There are some pictures that have changed history. The picture of a young girl, running down the street, naked, her face distorted with pain, her skin burnt during a Napalm attack on her home town in Vietnam. Pictures of people from eastern Berlin, standing on top of the Berlin wall, cheering, tearing down the wall by sheer force of will. In 2015, German newspapers, journals and TV talk shows were flooded with pictures that would soon develop a similar force in Germany and throughout Europe: pictures of tens of thousands of refugees, men, women and children of all ages, arriving in Germany by train. And pictures of thousands of people welcoming them, willing to offer their help. Within weeks, these pictures were replaced by numbers: Thousands of refugees per day, hundreds of thousands within a few months, more than one million in 2015 – these were the kinds of headlines you could soon find in the media. But this story is not about numbers – it is about people, and the pictures we have of them.

Listen to the story here

When I was in kindergarten, the picture I had of an immigrant was quite clear-cut. It was the picture of a middle-aged man, his hair at the threshold of turning from black to grey, wearing blue overalls and speaking with a funny accent. It was the picture of a neighbour living across the street. I admired him because he had once told me he was a builder. He had given up his life at home and left his family – he was from Poland – to get a better-paying job in Germany. And he was only one out of thousands of people who had come to Germany as guest workers. But I would only learn about this much later. Back then, he was just cool. And he was my picture of an immigrant.

Some years later, when I was in elementary school, we discussed immigration in class. My teacher at the time asked who of us had a migration background. As I looked around, I saw more and more pupils raising their hands – more and more of my peers, my classmates, my friends. And I was surprised. I was surprised because people were raising their hands who were not wearing blue overalls, who did not work in construction, who did not even have a funny accent. I was surprised because they simply didn’t fit into my picture.