Björn oder die Hürden der Behörden

On November 20th, Iris Bork Goldfield presented at the American Council of  Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) conference in Boston, MA. She talked about  how to successfully integrate Andi Niessner’s  German film Björn und die Hürden der Behörden (Björn or the Hurdles of Bureaucracy) into the German language classroom.

GuteKunst: Goethe-Institut announces Prize for Young Translators

The Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to invite applications for the first Frederick and Grace Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators. The purpose of the prize is to identify and encourage outstanding students of translation and of the German language and assist them in establishing contact with the translation and publishing communities.

The prize, which comes with a cash award of $2,500, is open to all college students and translators under the age of 35 who, at the time the prize is awarded, have not yet published nor are under contract for a book-length translation from the German. Applications will be accepted only from candidates who live in the United States.

To get more information and to find out how to participate, please follow this link:

Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators

Hänsel und Gretel und die tapferen Flöhe Incorporating the Fairy Tale into the 21st-Century German Classroom

Iris Bork-Goldfield presented at the 2010 Connecticut Council Of Language Teachers (CT COLT) Fall Conference on October 25th. In their two-hour workshop for secondary and post-secondary German educators, Christine Kochefko (Ridgefield HS) and Iris Bork-Goldfield discussed the teaching of “traditional” Grimm’s fairy tales with new media. They presented creative student projects using Photostory and VoiceThread and showed how these media tools helps with the assessment of student oral performance.  The presentation concluded with a discussion of multicultural themes in fairy tales by the Syrian-born German author Rafik Schami