Bringing the Liberal Arts to the World of Tech: Emily Goodling, ’14, Teaches German at MIT
Written by Monica VanDerWeide, ’95
Emily Goodling’s foray into the German language began over ice cream. A casual conversation with German professor Fred Yaniga at the freshman/faculty dessert reception during her freshman orientation led to this sagacious advice from Yaniga: “You should take German 101.” Now, 14 years later with a Ph.D. in German, Goodling is bringing a taste of the liberal arts to one of the world’s premier tech schools—Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—as a lecturer of German.
Emily earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz, Germany, on a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst fellowship (DAAD), basically the German equivalent of a Fulbright Scholarship. She returned to the United States for her doctorate, earning a Ph.D. in German from Stanford University in 2022. But she considers her time in Germany indispensable not only to her career as a German faculty member, but also to her role as an American citizen.
“It’s so easy to be in a silo, or a bubble, until you are living in another country, speaking the language,” she said. “I would go so far as to say it’s imperative to have that global perspective that comes from spending time in another country, to really understand what is happening in our country.”
Emily brings that global perspective, along with a passion for the humanities, to her role at MIT. Now in her second year, she is surrounded by students, faculty, and peers deeply focused on the sciences—while her education has been firmly grounded in the humanities. Yet she considers MIT to be “such a good fit” for her.
“I absolutely adore working with this student body,” she said. “It has caused me to think about the humanities in an entirely different way, and I have grown enormously as a thinker and teacher. The humanities don’t exist in a vacuum, and these students bring the other side of the dialogue in ways that I find incredibly fascinating. There are so many interesting questions posed by the work I see my students doing in math and science that impact how we see the world from a philosophical perspective: how we think about things like the scientific method, or certainty, or proof. Not to mention that my students are great team players and insanely smart!”
Emily’s Hillsdale professors continue to guide her as she develops her own teaching style. “I think about them all the time,” she said. “Dr. Eberhard Geyer [Professor Emeritus of German] provided me with the ‘why’ of teaching—the beauty and importance of what we were studying, and Dr. Fred Yaniga [Chairman and Associate Professor of German] provided me with the ‘how’—how to teach well, every single day.” She strives to invest in her students just as Hillsdale’s professors did with her. “When you’re a student, you never realize how much the faculty think about the students,” she said. “But now, I’m constantly thinking about how best to serve my students.” And her students have taken notice. “I’ve written several letters of recommendation—including one addressed to an actual astronaut—and it surprises me that my students ask me when there are Nobel Prize-winning faculty here at MIT. But my students tell me that I know them best.”
As an example of the extent to which she invests in her students, Emily developed a new course, “Conflict, Contest, Controversy: A Literary Investigation of German Politics,” blending her interests in German theater and politics and drawing from summer research she conducted in Germany. In the class, her students read a play by a displaced Ukrainian playwright, whose production Emily discovered while in Germany. She worked with the theater to get a filmed production as well as the script to share with her class, and she also arranged a virtual presentation by the playwright. “I was just blown away by the level of the dialogues we were able to have,” she said. “The students brought their own backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to these materials in ways that really opened my eyes.”
While she was in her graduate program at Stanford, Emily got her foot in the door of another prestigious tech school—Georgia Institute of Technology. A Stanford acquaintance at Georgia Tech connected her to the school’s German Department. Emily created an online asynchronous German literature course for Georgia Tech—“before online courses were cool”—and has continued to teach online courses there part-time since 2018. This summer, she will finally get to meet Georgia Tech students in person as she teaches a two-week seminar in Vienna, an opportunity for which she is “super hyped.”
Following her time in Vienna, Emily will once again return to Würzburg, Germany, for a month to assist in teaching Hillsdale’s German summer study-abroad program, a collaboration that allows her to teach alongside her former Hillsdale German professors and to continue learning from them.
“At Hillsdale, I had models of admiration and love in my professors, who were genuinely enthusiastic about the material they were presenting,” she said. “I feel like I teach students how to love literature in a more informed and rigorous way, and that’s something I took away from Hillsdale. Also, Hillsdale professors are outstanding role models of excellence in pedagogy, and it was inspiring and influential to sit in their classrooms. I’m just beginning to learn what that looks like for me, to be a good teacher.”
Whether in the classrooms of MIT, on the streets of Würzburg, or in an online dialogue with Georgia Tech students, Emily models the admiration and love for her subject that inspired her to become a teacher and that, in turn, inspires her students. “I’m the luckiest person alive to have a job that I treasure so much,” she said.
Monica VanDerWeide is Director of Marketing Content for Hillsdale College. She graduated from Hillsdale in 1995 with a degree in English and German.
Published in April 2024