Living Literacies in a Märchenwelt: World Building and Perspective Taking in a Fairy‐Tale Simulation Project

Abstract

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 classical versions that needs to be challenged. At the same time – and as multiliteracies approaches to language teaching can help explicate –, 19th‐century narrative conventions are linguistically and stylistically quite removed from the communicative and literacy practices typically encountered in the beginning levels of instruction, and the leap in discursive complexity from more everyday genres to even more familiar fairy tales requires pedagogical support. This article reports on a global simulation unit that was developed and implemented in a fourth‐semester German course focused on fairy tales to address these pedagogical concerns. Students were asked to not only read about but to live out the fairy‐tale worlds and personas depicted in the Grimms’ tales by engaging in perspective taking and world building activities, as they adopted a character from a Grimms’ fairy tale.