Teaching current crises : designing task-based online lessons on U.S. structural racism with the help of educational web tools

Kurzfassung/Abstract

This article explores the foreign language learning potentials that selected digital tools hold with respect to teaching about U.S. structural racism. Teaching complex topics like structural racism in online learning environments requires highly competent foreign language teachers and high-quality online learning materials. These demands and resulting digital teaching innovations have a significant effect on how university-based (foreign language) teacher training should be structured in the future (Amhag et al., 2019). To address these demands, we have integrated distance teaching as a mandatory element in foreign language teacher training at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Stadler-Heer & Böttger, 2021). This article presents exemplary online lessons on the topic of structural racism which were developed, tested, and evaluated by pre-service teachers in two remote university teacher training courses. Drawing on the principles of task-based language teaching, the presented digital lesson materials aim to foster secondary school students’ intercultural communicative competence.