Some rock stars get their breakthrough overnight. For eleven-year-old Rym it happened on a school day in autumn 2008. In the morning the sixth-grader from Rennes in France held an electric guitar in her hand for the first time – that same evening she was already on stage. Her career developed so fast that she didn’t even get stage fright. “We prepared the whole concert in German,” she reports proudly. She has only been taking German lessons for two months, but she already knows the most important words: “Eins, zwei, drei,” Rym counts, tapping her foot to the beat. She is one of the 160 students learning German at the Lycée Zola in Rennes. Together with seven others in France, the school was chosen for the Federal Foreign Office’s Schools: Partners for the Future initiative. One part of the project is music teaching à la hip hop. The teachers come from the Mannheim Pop Academy. In 2008 alone, the Federal Foreign Office spent 45 million euros on the global initiative. The participating schools are given special funding to enable them to expand their German language teaching. The aim is to promote German teaching worldwide: with teacher-training courses, school partnerships – and new didactic approaches such as musical language teaching.
The Pop Academy is the first educational institution in Germany to offer a course in pop music design. The college – where such German pop stars as Xavier Naidoo and Udo Lindenberg occasionally teach – first invited school kids from the Mannheim region to music workshops in 2007. The idea was that playing music together promotes creativity. So why shouldn’t pop music also act as an ambassador for Germany and its language?
The eleven students from the Pop Academy who are teaching at the Lycée Zola know a lot about rhythm – but they don’t speak much French. So they give their instructions in German. When they talk about high notes they point a finger into the air; when it’s deep notes they want they point to the floor. Eleven-year-old Rym picked up the German word for finger while learning the chords on the guitar. “The students’ main aim,” says Catherine Gaillou from the Pop Academy, “is to put a concert together. They don’t even notice how much German they’re learning.”
As the locals like to emphasize, the writer François-René de Chateaubriand, a central figure in French Romanticism, attended the Lycée Zola. So you might think that reading Hölderlin and Eichendorff would make more sense that hip hop German. Even so, Raphael Gitton, who teaches history in German, describes the appeal of this form of teaching as follows: “It’s more lively and closer to the young people’s everyday lives.” And Catherine Galliou from Pop Academy is convinced: “These music workshops are a wonderful way of showing the students that German can be both lively and cool.” She spent her own school years in France – and knows all about the elitist reputation that German teaching has. Yet the Pop Academy’s tour generated more enthusiasm than even Ms. Galliou had expected. In Reims, the headteacher, a man in his mid-fifties, jumped onto the stage in the evening and started rapping with the best of them.
Teacher Gitton is confident that the students’ parents recognize that there are serious ideas behind all this fun. And being included in a programme coordinated by the Goethe-Institut acts as a seal of approval for the school’s educational work. Germany is France’s main economic partner, and many management posts in the French economy are currently vacant; there aren’t enough applicants with the necessary language skills.
Goethe-Institut, which is coordinating the programme, chose schools with especially good facilities for teaching German in a total of 80 countries. The rappers from Germany will be teaching in some of these schools in spring 2009. Their French tour was so successful that they will now also be teaching their hip hop sounds to students in Italy, Spain and Portugal. They start in Trieste in March 2009 and move on via Milan to Florence, Rome and Palermo. Furthermore, another idea has emerged from the first music workshops: school bands from the four countries can submit their own songs in German. The four linguistically best bands will be invited to Mannheim for a band-coaching course in August 2009.
