"Kassel's Places of Remembrance" as a digital discovery tour

The goal of the joint project between the University of Kassel, FB02, the DaFZ department and the Stadtmuseum Kassel was to design a digital learning arrangement for selected historically significant places in Kassel. This experiential learning offer for the smartphone, which was designed to be "barrier-free" in terms of language and presupposed knowledge, can help to promote knowledge of the city of Kassel in teams or groups as well as holistic perception through the discovery of new things and the playful acquisition of historical background. For people who are new in Germany, especially in Kassel, an active participation in life and thus an arrival on site is not only connected with learning the language, but also with getting to know the local peculiarities and with an understanding of social and historical discourses. By actively engaging with selected places of remembrance in Kassel, one's own perspective can be broadened and a connection to the place and the people who live there can be established through understanding.

The service-learning project in the winter semester 2021/2022 was about designing a language- and knowledge-sensitive as well as activating app offer for dealing with Kassel's places of remembrance and testing it with second language learners, evaluating it, revising it and making it permanently accessible for teachers and other learners. During the tests, the German as a Second Language students investigated the extent to which the tasks they created were comprehensible to the students, and how they approached and accepted the various offers of discovery. The findings on language- and knowledge-sensitive conception gained in this way can in principle be transferred to the educational and mediation work in the museum and at Kassel's places of remembrance.

The free use of the exploration tour takes place via the application "Actionbound" and can be used for mobile devices with Android and iOS operating systems. The digital exploration tour can now also be accessed at any time outside of the City Museum's visiting hours with the help of the Actionbound application, which can be downloaded free of charge to cell phones, under the title "Kassel's places of remembrance: monuments and much more besides".

The cooperation between the University of Kassel, FB02, Fachgebiet DaFZ and the Stadtmuseum Kassel was initiated by Dr. Tanja Fohr and Antje Goebel. The project was supported with funds from the University of Kassel for service learning projects and social engagement.
 

Contact
Dr. Tanja Fohr, FB 02, Fachgebiet Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache
Tel.: 0561 804-3305, tfohr[at]uni-kassel[dot]de
Antje Goebel, Stadtmuseum Kassel