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.

Language, identity, and art are not separate domains — they shape, mirror, and reassemble each other.

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 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.