Climate and songs of spring/May around Germany: Toward development of interdisciplinary lesson plans at the university for promoting students’ perception of the changing climate and understanding of the heterogeneous others

Abstract

To promote the students’ ability to perceive how the climate has been changing and to understand how it is likely to change in the future is an essential base for the Climate Change Education (CCE) in ESD (Education for Sustainable Development). The change in the climate in each area could be recognized not only by the deviation from the normal one but also by the “distortion of the seasonal cycle” there. It should be noted that even within middle and higher latitudes, where the seasonal cycles of the climate systems are clearly seen, the detailed cycles show rather different features from region to region. Thus, in the CCE, deeper understanding of the detailed seasonal cycles themselves would be also necessary. By the way, interdisciplinary approach with cultural understanding education such as music, and so on, sometimes gives a great help for understanding of the regional climate including the detailed seasonal cycles. In addition, selection of the study areas or targets which are not so familiar to the students in their usual lives could also provides considerable advantage for deepening the students’ perception of the heterogeneous others. Based on the above concepts, we have continued the interdisciplinary studies summarized mainly as follows by Kato et al. (2023): (1) asymmetric seasonal progression from autumn to the next spring around Japan, (2) winter climate around Germany in association with the “seasonal feeling of severe winter”, related to the traditional event “Fasnacht” for driving winter away, and (3) seasonal cycle and the “seasonal feeling of the short summer” related to the summer solstice festival “Juhannus” around Northern Europe. This time, an interdisciplinary approach toward development of lesson plans with the above concept will be reported on a topic of the climate and songs of spring/May around Germany. Around Germany, there are so many songs and literature works in which “May” is treated as the special season. The German lied “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” (“In the especially wonderful month of May”) by R. Schumann is a typical example. However, without knowing the detailed seasonal cycle around Germany, it seems rather difficult for the people in the other regions, such as in Japan, to realize why they celebrate not simply spring but especially “May”. According to our climatological analysis together with our previous results, May is the very month when the appearance frequency of the days with daily mean temperature corresponding to the ordinary summer days increased rapidly in May, while the winter when the extremely low temperature days often appears had been terminated at the end of March. With considering such climatic backgrounds, expressions of spring/May in several German lieder were analyzed for demonstrate the importance of the word “May” in these lieder for the interdisciplinary lesson at Okayama University, i.e., “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” by Schumann, “Andres Maienlied (Hexenlied)” by Mendelssohn, “Trockne Blumen” by Schubert, and so on. We would also like to introduce such analysis results relating to the climate with listening to a part of these songs.