When one says it that way (“Kulturwissenschaft”), rather than calling it “Landeskunde” (or the significantly more ghastly “Culture Studies”, with the stress on “Cult”), it almost sounds like something one might in fact be proud to be trying to teach well.
Every culture, of course, has its own preferred way of approaching the other cultures it engages with. In the mid 70s, I attended lectures on “Civilisation française” at the University of Sydney, which were a kind of Guido-Knopp-style, “gee whizz” panorama of historical events and cultural trends; the lectures were accompanied by what in those days were called “slides” (diapositives, projected from the back of the lecture theatre); and at times, audio was added to turn the whole thing into a veritable “son et lumière”. There was no theoretical foundation to it; it was like an extended “explication de texte”, treating everything that ever happened in France as just one big ongoing narrative that it was appropriate to give a running commentary upon. And it went backwards, starting with the 20th century in first year, then jumping back a century or so at a time for higher years.
My own approach to teaching an introductory course on British/Irish Culture Studies to Germans has been a rudimentary historical materialist one, starting with the geological history of the two islands and their initial settlement, and moving through to the modern-day period, initially 500, then approximately 100 years at a time, by comparing the development of productive forces, productive relations, institutions, and ideology.
Next semester I plan to do more theory — at least Berger and Luckmann, and Malinowski; and if possible also some work on multimodal semiotic theory, to help the students decode images better.
But the prospect of teaching two courses simultaneously, one to French students, one to German students, raises the question of cultural presuppositions in an entirely new way. The course for the French students could be more philosophically and linguistically orientated, for example. French students, significantly, and unlike their German counterparts, have usually heard of Bacon and Locke and Hume…
🙂
In addition, there needs to be a kind of checklist of cultural concepts, and a reader of essential, very short texts, and music in every lesson. At least the lesson on Roman Britain will be easy to find music for — the total musical legacy of the thousand years of Roman culture amounts to just 45 seconds…
More on this later.