Teaching and Learning the West Point Way

Educating the Next Generation of Leaders

Morten G. Ender, Raymond A. Kimball, Rachel M. Sondheimer, Jakob C. Bruhl, Morten G. Ender, Raymond A. Kimball, Rachel M. Sondheimer, Jakob C. Bruhl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367685850
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000384055
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Teaching and Learning the West Point Way is a unique compendium of the best teaching and learning practices from one of the most celebrated and storied undergraduate teaching and learning environments and institutions in America – the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, USA.

Drawing on the broad academic curriculum that the students follow at West Point – in addition to military leadership, character development, and competitive athletics – this book describes proven and effective undergraduate pedagogy across a number of academic disciplines. Case studies, strategies and techniques, empirical teaching and learning research results, syllabi, and assignments developed and deployed by West Point faculty are included, which faculty in other higher education institutions can adapt and apply to their own programs and courses. An accompanying companion website provides additional syllabi, course guides, lesson plans, PowerPoint activities, and lecture slides, as well as videos of the editors and authors discussing how key concepts in their chapters might be applied in different teaching and learning contexts.

This is an opportunity to gain an in-depth insight into the programs and practices inside one of the world's premier leadership development and educational institutions. It should appeal to new and experienced faculty and administrators interested in course creation and syllabus design across a wide range of disciplines in educational institutions and military academies across the globe.

Teaching notes

Morten G. Ender

The 14 teaching and learning notes included in this section provide empirical evidence of in and outside class activities. Teaching and learning notes are shorter, less comprehensive descriptions of pedagogical applications in specific disciplines. The notes cover a range of disciplines beginning with a foreign language and arts assignment. Other disciplines and topics include simulations in psychology and engineering, leadership lessons through film and coaching, encouraging participation and engagement in foreign language, physics, philosophy, and biology classes, experiential opportunities in sociology and foreign language, and improving writing across disciplines. The section closes with an active learning exercise in introductory psychology. The chapters are intended for practicing academics to easily adopt the full activity or parts of the activity into their existing course or replicate the study at their campus and in their courses.

13
Synthesizing art, language, and history

Creating empathetic leaders of character in the foreign language classroom

Diane Richardson and Xenia Srebrianski Harwell

Introduction

Empathy, the ability to identify with and share in the experience and feelings of another, is a fundamental feature of emotional intelligence and maturity. Michele Borba refers to empathy as the “core of civilized society”¹ and believes that the ability to share emotions with others is a key ingredient in successful leadership.² To empower learners to express empathy through creative writing tasks, we incorporated the David Labkovski Project³ into our language classes. By viewing and reflecting on David Labkovski’s artwork and experiences, learners began to explore the historical period that gave rise to these works from an individual artist’s point of view. In this teaching note, we discuss the pedagogical framework of our project; provide details on how we used the Labkovski Project to synthesize language, art, and history; and share results and student examples. The beauty of this project is that it can be adapted to many different types of courses and levels. We implemented it in two German courses – the second semester of the beginning German language sequence (LG204) and the fourth-semester intermediate German course (LG372). LG204 is a multi-section course with 11 sections of maximum 18 cadets, taught by five instructors (four military and one civilian, who was the course director and is first author) during spring 2018. Most cadets in the course were nonmajors. LG372 generally consists of two or three sections of no more than 18 cadets each. The course director and instructor of both sections during Spring 2018 is second author and the sections consisted of both majors and nonmajors, with some having placed directly into the second-year course.⁴

1 Borba, 22. See Borba, Michele. “Nine Competencies for Teaching Empathy.” Educational Leadership. 76 no 2 (2018): 22–28. www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct18/vol76/num02/Nine-Competenciesfor-Teaching-Empathy.aspx

2 Ibid, 23.

3 The Labkovski Project. www.davidlabkovskiproject.org. This project will be discussed in greater detail further in the text.

4 All cadets at the US federal service academy where we implemented the project are required to complete two semesters of a foreign language, which most cadets complete during their second year at the academy. If cadets wish to take courses in a language that they have previous experience with or exposure to, then they must test into at least the second-year level. Otherwise, they must select a new language to learn to satisfy the core requirement.

Pedagogical framework

Our pedagogical framework draws from the World-Readiness Standards for Language Learning, published by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, in particular the five “C’s” (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities), which highlight the importance of learning and applying a language beyond the instructional setting.⁵ We also refer to research on second language acquisition that has long emphasized that language learners should not be “using language simply to practice vocabulary and structures but to explore a different world and to relate that world to their own thinking and experience.”⁶ One way of bringing learners to explore other worlds, to communicate about, compare, and make connections between cultures and communities, is through art and art-related projects. Through authentic artwork, learners experience historical and linguistic contexts that inspire their own authentic language use and cultural learning. Projects like ours contribute to continued efforts by language educators in the United States for curricular reform that “situate[s] language study in cultural, historical, geographic, and cross-cultural frames within the context of humanistic learning.”⁷

5 American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages. n.d. Retrieved 16 March 2019, from www.actfl.org/publications/all/world-readiness-standards-learning-languages/.

6 Kern, 15. See Kern, Richard. Literacy and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

7 MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages. Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World. 2007. Retrieved 16 March 2019, from www.mla.org/Resources/Research/Surveys-Reports-and-Other-Documents/Teaching-Enrollments-and-Programs/Foreign-Languages-and-Higher-Education-New-Structures-for-a-Changed-World/.

This kind of approach requires language learners to develop “the ability to comprehend and analyze the cultural narratives that appear in every kind of expressive,”⁸ including those found in artwork. Our intent is to alleviate any hesitance that some learners, instructors, or administrators may have regarding art in the language classroom by contributing to the existing body of research and projects that promote art for various educational purposes.⁹ In fact, when we turn to art “with the goal of developing a moral society,”¹⁰ we are not doing something revolutionary. We are actually taking our place within a “paradigm … steeped in the history of aesthetics from the eighteenth century.”¹¹ Art-based projects expose learners to the cultural and historical aspects of a language, as well as to the emotional aspects.¹² Through art, learners can experience and express emotions while taking on multiple other perspectives: that of the artist, of the subjects in the artwork, and of others living in those worlds, times, or conditions. The ability to understand an event from multiple perspectives is a critical step in fostering the development of empathy. Images have the unique quality of enhancing “moral imagination”¹³ in an enduring way that remains with and influences individuals as they develop into empathetic leaders of character, who will subsequently be intent upon spreading these values to those within their own sphere of influence.

8 Ibid.

9 See, for instance: “Cultures and Literacies through Art for the 21st Century,” www.calta21.org/calta21-curriculum/#.XFuIj1VKjIU and “art/write,” https://artmuseum.arizona.edu/artwrite, both accessed 17 March 2019.

10 Riddett-Moore, 7. See Riddett-Moore, Karina. “Encouraging Empathy through Aesthetic Engagement: An Art Lesson in Living Compositions.” International Journal of Education and the Arts. 2 no 2 (2009): 1–22.

11 Ibid.

12 For more on why emotion and affect matter at all levels of language learning, see: Douglas Fir Group. “A Trans-disciplinary Framework for SLA in a Multilingual World.” The Modern Language Journal. 100 S1 (2016): 19–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12301/.

13 Borba, 25.

Developing empathetic leaders of character is a critical component of education, particularly for learners such as ours, who are soon to embark on careers as military leaders propounding Army values.¹⁴ Character is one of the main values in the leader development program at the US federal service academy, where the project highlighted in this teaching note was implemented. The academy identifies five main facets of the character development program: moral, civic, social, performance, and leadership. The civic facet aspires to develop a student body that “demonstrates the empathy, loyalty, respect, and humility that enable an individual to treat others with dignity and to display selflessness.”¹⁵ We propose a unique contribution to the overall academy and departmental mission of developing leaders of character by integrating art-based projects across the curriculum with a focus on language and empathy.

14 For an in-depth discussion of Army values, see Chapter 1 of this volume.

15 Ibid.

Project details

The roots of our project

The foundation for our project was laid during spring 2017, when this chapter’s first author invited cadets enrolled in LG204 to attend the Forbidden Art¹⁶ lecture and exhibit at the academy’s library, which was sponsored by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.¹⁷ For an extracurricular task, cadets had the opportunity to subsequently write a reflection in German on the following questions:

• What was the most interesting information that you learned or artwork that you saw, and why?
• How did the lecture or exhibit make you feel?
• Why is this topic (Holocaust and Forbidden Art) still relevant today?

In their reflections, cadets practiced dependent clauses, superlatives, and phrases for expressing emotion. To expand on these and other art-related topics, they gave final oral presentations based on the artwork used at the beginning of each chapter in the course textbook.¹⁸ These “Art and Artists” segments of the book allowed for some pre-project exposure to Holocaust-related themes throughout the course, since students learned about some artists whose work was deemed Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) under Hitler’s fascist regime.

16 Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The Exhibition ‘Forbidden Art’ at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point. 2017. Retrieved 17 March 2019, from http://auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/the-exhibition-forbidden-art-at-theu-s-military-academy-in-west-point1241.html/.

17 For further information on West Point’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, see www.westpoint.edu/centers-and-research/center-for-holocaust-and-genocide-studies/.

18 Tschirner, Erwin, Nikolai, Brigitte, and Terrell, Tracy. Kontakte: A Communicative Approach, 8th Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2017.

The next year, we wanted to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary of acronyms and military ranks
• Introduction
• Syllabi
• Assignments
• Teaching Notes
• Empirical Articles
• Interdisciplinary Articles
• Epilogue
• List of editors
• List of contributors
• List of reviewers
• Index