From Sensory Memory to Multilingual Pedagogy

  • Modulprüfung | Referendariat

    10th Grade | J.-G.-Herder Gymnasium, Berlin | 2022

    This bilingual unit explored how art and language intersect to build cultural awareness. Over 6 lessons, students investigated art forms of the 1960s — performance art, happening, installation — while reflecting on how these terms evolved across languages and histories.

    Using English as a lingua franca, they:

    • Researched key art terms (e.g., happening, performance art, avant-garde, underground, cut-up).

    • Discussed how language frames cultural memory.

    • Presented artworks from their own cultural backgrounds, linking personal perspectives to a global narrative.

    The final reflection revealed a powerful insight: language shapes how we see art — but art also transcends words.

  • 11th Grade (Q2 - Lebensräume und Alltagskultur) | Melanchthon Gymnasium, Berlin | 2025

    In this seven-lesson CLIL project for an 11th-grade Art class, students explored major architectural styles through bilingual, research-based group work. They investigated Bauhaus, Brutalism, and Deconstructivism, focusing either on stylistic features or the historical and biographical context of key architects.

    Presentations were delivered in English, German, and occasionally in students’ heritage languages, using systematic scaffolding: sentence starters, subject-specific terminology, structure models,collaborative glossaries, multilingual word walls, and model talk. Emphasis was placed on translanguaging, visual clarity, and the ability to communicate complex aesthetic and socio-historical ideas in a global register.

    In the second phase, titled Vom Bild zum Bau, students transposed selected paintings depicting buildings or interior spaces — by artists such as Edward Hopper, Lucian Freud, and René Magritte — into three-dimensional architectural models. These models combined formal interpretation with biographical interior elements, based on the students’ own experiences, transforming visual input into individualized design.

    The module demonstrated how multilingual learning in Art can deepen visual literacy, strengthen critical and inter-communicative skills, and foster identity reflection.
    93% of students reported improved confidence using English in subject-related contexts, and 64% expressed interest in applying CLIL methods in other subjects.

CLIL+i – Content·Language·Identity Learning

Origin and Vision

CLIL+i emerged from the need to expand the traditional CLIL model beyond competence and performance.
In multilingual classrooms, language is not only a medium of instruction but also a mirror of belonging, migration, and imagination.
CLIL+i introduces the missing dimension: identity. It invites learners to inhabit language as a creative and aesthetic space — to think, feel, and build knowledge through the plurality of their voices.

Core Principles

The “+ i” stands for identity, inclusion, and interdisciplinarity. In CLIL+i, art becomes the laboratory of language: visual form and verbal expression are interwoven until they illuminate one another.
Students work bilingually or multilingually — English, German, and heritage languages coexist as equal instruments of thought.
The aim is not perfect linguistic accuracy, but authentic articulation:
to discover how language carries memory, shapes perception, and opens dialogue across cultures.

Pedagogical Framework

CLIL+i lessons follow a project-based, multimodal structure. Each unit integrates:

  • conceptual exploration of art topics;

  • bilingual research and technical terminology (Fachsprache) scaffolding through sentence starters and visual organizers;

  • creative production

  • reflective writing in which students analyze their artistic and linguistic decisions.

Assessment values precision of thought, compositional awareness, and reflective depth rather than linguistic conformity.
The classroom becomes a multilingual environment — a site where language learning, artistic practice, and self-formation converge.

Impact and Research

First implemented in upper-secondary Art classes at a Berlin Gymnasium, CLIL+i has shown remarkable results: 93 % of students reported improvement in their English skills, and 64 % wished to experience CLIL in other subjects.
Their projects demonstrate that when language and identity are treated as resources, learning becomes personal, global, and intellectually alive.
The architecture-based CLIL+i unit was published in Kunst + Unterricht (495/496, 2025).

Curriculum as Artistic Research

What would later take shape as CLIL-based curriculum design was, at its core, rooted in artistic research. It began during my Master’s studies in France, where I explored how identity takes form in art.

My thesis L’intime à l’œuvre (Sorbonne, Paris, 2010) examined practices that intertwine autobiography, memory, and sensory experience — from Eva Hesse, Christian Boltanski to Pina Bausch and Maya Deren. The final chapter traced my own process: an installation built around scent, tactility, and visual storytelling as a memory-based practice of resistance and reconstruction.

Years later, during my teacher training in Berlin, this conceptual nucleus became the foundation of my bilingual teaching. My Modulprüfung thesis asked: Inwiefern kann, in einem bilingualen Kunstunterricht, das Arbeiten in der Fremdsprache die Funktion der Bildenden Kunst kulturelle Vielfalt zu vermitteln?

The early CLIL unit — designed and taught in a Gymnasium — marked the beginning of my formal curriculum-building. But the story had already started — in a different building, through a different medium.