Teaching Workshop: African Land

The workshop is addressed to undergraduate students in Foreign Languages and Literatures. Focus of the workshop is the relationship between environmental issues and the literary and cultural expressions of sub-Saharan Africa. The workshop has a strong interdisciplinary nature; some lexical and cultural commonplaces referred to 'Africa' will be identified at the beginning and then discussed in class, subject to previous readings on the part of all participants. Students will increase their knowledge on various aspects of African cultural and literary life and will be stimulated to develop their analytical, critical, and argumentative skills.

At the end of the workshop, students will have increased their knowledge on different aspects of the cultural and literary expressions of the African Continent; their critical and argumentative skills will be strengthened by the constant stimulation to partake in the discussion in class, as a result of their reading brief texts assigned as 'homework'. They will have also understood the difference between voicing mere (uninformed) personal 'opinions' and the discussion of an issue on the basis of their previous reading up and careful consideration.