Because of their presumably familiar plot lines and character tropes, the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales are often included as one of the earliest literary selections in German language and culture curricula. However, for learners to engage more critically and interpretively with fairy-tale genres, it is exactly their assumed familiarity with the…

Fairy tales often occupy only a superficial role in German language classrooms, used to check a culture box and teach the simple past tense. However, teaching fairy tales can engage students' analytical faculties and expose them to the culturally and linguistically embedded nature of folktales, leading them to a deeper appreciation of language,…

German fairy tales have an established history of appropriation in popular media, from oral traditions to mobile media. The mimetic quality of fairy-tale motifs and tropes provides ideal conditions for intertextual adaptation. In this article, I demonstrate that German fairy-tale themed music videos are powerful vehicles for culture, parody, and…

"Fairy Tales and the Transmission of Prejudice" is a unit in a lecture course on fairy tales that draws on research on anti-Semitism in 18th- and 19th-century German literature and culture, mapping questions raised in 18th- and 19th-century tales onto contemporary issues: The unit traces a trajectory from the Enlightenment to the…

This article describes strategies that the author employed to make a general education course titled "Fairy Tales and Folklore" more diverse and inclusive. Students read primary texts and secondary articles as part of ongoing debates, then form their own arguments within the debate, thus coming to understand how fairy tales are embedded…

This article describes an advanced German course focusing on the German fairy-tale tradition. Course components are summarized and the themes and selected fairy tales for each unit are outlined. Additionally, 12 creative assignments are explained that were designed to foster students' engagement with the language and content of the fairy tales.…

This article describes a fourth-year German course on fairy tales that focuses on the integration of academic content with linguistic skills through technology-enhanced course modules. Situated in the discussion of the language-literature gap and the benefits of computer-assisted language learning, the proposed online course modules may prove…

Suggests the use of fairy tales in German foreign language instruction at the intermediate level. This suggestion is established using features of the Grimm genre and clarified using concrete examples. (Author/DMK)