Willkommen to Campus, AWL Middle Schoolers

On Feb. 20, it might look like students on the UC campus are getting younger and younger, and maybe a bit shorter. Those youthful faces will belong to 50 elementary school students from the Academy of World Languages, a Cincinnati Public School from the nearby neighborhood of Evanston.

The sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders will receive a grand "Willkommen" to UC from the

Department of German Studies

in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. German studies faculty and students at UC have formed a partnership with the academy's German language classes. Professors, graduate students and undergraduates are working with the middle school students to enrich their learning experience, serve as mentors and role models, introduce the youngsters to Cincinnati's German heritage and German culture, and provide technologically-based resources to supplement their class work.

Feb. 20's half-day visit to UC is just one of the activities UC is arranging with AWL. On Thursday, young students will converge on the Max Kade German Cultural Center in Old Chemistry for a slide presentation on Cincinnati's German heritage by Don Heinrich Tolzmann, director of UC's German American Studies Program. The day's schedule will also take them on tours of UC's Langsam Library and the biological sciences department's greenhouse on the ninth floor of Rieveshl Hall. The program will conclude with lunch and an episode of "The Simpsons" in German in Room 601, Old Chemistry, and lunch back at the Kade Center.

"The German department used to run a partnership program that was taken over by the Cincinnati Public Schools and became the first bilingual school in the magnet program," said Karl Obrath, associate professor of German Studies and director of the new AWL Partnership Program. "This new program will help to give urban students a more enriching introduction to German language and culture, as well as an introduction to higher education. We want them to know more about UC than its basketball team and a football team." Assisting Obrath in operating the partnership is Julia Baker, project coordinator and graduate student from Graz, Austria.

Since the UC initiative began this month, the AWL German classes have been visited by Darell P. Jones, a College-Conservatory of Music opera student who sang to them in German. On Feb. 12 met a visiting professor from Berlin, Hans Michael Speier, who read German poetry to Linda Hall's seventh grade German class and discussed Berlin's unique history of separation between East and West and recent reunification.

Students listened intently to a video about Berlin and to Professor Speier's presentation as well as an introductory discussion led by Baker.

Professor Speier, who grew up in West Berlin, told the class that before the wall fell in 1989, "East Berlin was like a locked room in my house that I could never go in."

Students learned about "Berlin in Zahlen" - Berlin in numbers - in an Erich Kastner poem that recounted statistics behind this city of  4.5 million. The Cincinnati students then worked on similar poems about Cincinnati to give to Professor Speier on postcards of Berlin.

"Das war ja fantastisch! Herr Speier and Frau Baker were great. This is
exactly what can have an effect on these students," said AWL Princical Stephen Hoyt. "The students are spell-bound." For some of the AWL students, this is their first opportunity to meet someone from Germany. The program is one effort to open the students to possibilities and people they may not usually consider or encounter, he continued.

The visit to UC "may for many be the first time they've ever seen a university. These kinds of programs can have a very good impact combined with other strategies to encourage them to stay in school," the principal added.
 
The AWL Partnership Program is funded by UC's Institute for Community Partnership. In addition to the German department, mentors have been recruited from Ethnic Programs and Services.

Ultimately, says Obrath, the elementary students may have an opportunity to meet other Germans, not here in Cincinnati, but in Deutschland itself.  Professor Obrath said the program will work to establish pen-pal relationships with peers in Germany via e-mail and possibly an exchange program through the German American Partnership Program.