Abstract
In the unknown worlds of medieval literature and history and their heroes, students encounter the essence of human experience and longing. Thus they also encounter themselves – despite being embedded in a profoundly different world which for a great part has become a digital world. What appears to have become distant and foreign over the centuries can nevertheless be approachable to today’s young people. These connections are not automatically clear or visible, but must be described and established anew. In skills-oriented lessons we can teach them to forge these connections by highlighting (apparently) foreign yet quite familiar phenomena and vice versa. This approach conforms with the main ideas of current competence-oriented curricula. The article focuses on the options offered by the new 2016 syllabus in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg. The findings can, by and large, be applied in the curricula in any other German federal state.
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
