DLT Podcast 17: Ron Freytag

Posted on by

In this episode I interview Ron Freytag, who works in teacher training at the Technical University in Braunschweig (Germany) and teaches future teachers of both English and German. We talk about:

  • how Ron loved theatre but not foreign languages in school and how that changed over time, so that he decided to become a language teacher
  • his PhD project: arts-based language learning across various art forms
  • What we can learn from theater for other performative art forms, including cooking, karaoke and poetry slam
  • that he uses a multimodal approach for gathering data
  • using art forms other than drama in the FL classroom (dance, artistry, podcast, photography) and how students’ opinions on this changed during the class they took with Ron
  • how students felt about the class
  • in how far the different art forms are performative
  • practical questions concerning integrating performative art forms into language classrooms
  • overcoming students’ reservations against teaching performatively

Links:

Ron’s contact page at Braunschweig University: https://www.tu-braunschweig.de/en/anglistik/seminar/esud/freytag

(in German)