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.

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.

When I got home that day, my mother asked me what we had done at school. I told her about my teacher’s question, and she asked me if I had also raised my hand. I gave her a puzzled look. Why would I? She laughed. And she told me about my grandmother, who was born in the Czech Republic, and who came to Germany as a refugee after World War II. She showed me pictures of my grandma as a young girl, pictures taken in her hometown before she had to leave. That was when I understood that the problem wasn’t that the others didn’t fit into my picture. The problem was that my picture had simply been deficient. It had not been entirely wrong, but it had been incomplete.

When I’m at my grandparent’s house, I like looking at the large picture hanging on the wall of the living room. My grandmother and grandfather in the centre, surrounded by my Mom and her brothers, my Dad, my siblings and me standing next to my mother. You can tell immediately that we are related – the same hair, the same smile, the same blue and green eyes. It is apparent that this is a family picture.

And yet, this is not the whole picture. Next to one of my uncles, there is a tall, long-legged woman, her skin black, her hair curly. She is carrying a little boy with the same curly, dark hair, the same color of skin and the same nose as my grandpa and my uncle. In front of her a second boy, smiling, his face strikingly similar to hers, except for the tone of his skin – which is almost as fair as my own. He is my cousin.

On the left, my cousin’s wife is smiling into the camera, her red hair and the freckles in her face giving away her Irish roots. Next to my other uncle, there is a small woman. Her round face is surrounded by long silk hair, her almond-shaped eyes and small lips give her a typically Asian appearance.

This is still a picture of my family. But it is more diverse than some would expect – like the waitress in a restaurant, offering us separate tables because she couldn’t believe we were one family; or my grandparents’ friends, who were at least slightly surprised when my half-African aunt was visiting and answered the door to them. Sometimes, people are confused, incredulous, astonished - because the whole picture is more complex than they would have assumed.