• Academic Profiles
• German

Bernd K. Estabrook, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of German
Department of Modern Languages
Director, Language Laboratory

Education: Whitman College, B.A. (cum laude) 1984; University of California-Berkeley, M.A. 1988; Ph.D. 1993

Courses: German Language; German Contributions to World Civilization; Business German; German Prose; German Poetry; Foreign Language Teaching Methods; Wagner & Hitler; Mann’s Doktor Faustus; Weimar Culture; Modern Germany; German Drama; History and Literature; Goethe’s Faust; Marx, Nietzsche, Freud; Cinema Culture: German Films and the History of Modern Germany

Achievements: Charles E. Frank Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching 2004, 2001; IC Alumni Ambassador Award 2004; Malcolm Stewart Faculty Research Award 2000, 1998; Harry Joy Dunbaugh Distinguished Professor Award 1999

Research Interest: Use of technology in language acquisition; technology and the humanities; mythology; German literature of the 18th century; Hölderlin; intellectual history and popular culture

You may not want to suggest to Professor Bernd Estabrook that the German language is a bit guttural or throaty.

“I beg to differ,” he says emphatically. “The German language may have clipped consonants but it has long vowels that give the language a beautiful texture. Americans speak faster and in more of a monotone. They’re in a hurry to get the information out. Germans, on the other hand, have more highs and lows tonally and they’re not in such a hurry. I adore speaking the language.”

Estabrook’s mother gets most of the credit for this. Born in Germany and married to a U.S. soldier, she moved from Berlin to Sacramento just three months before giving birth to Estabrook. She continued to speak German until Estabrook was three years old. She stopped because someone suggested two languages in the household could cause brain damage in her children.

Estabrook, however, did not lose interest in the language. He studied German in high school and went to Germany for the first time at age 12.

“The Berlin Wall had a profound effect on me,” he says. “I couldn’t stop wondering what social and political events conspired to make such an incredible monstrosity possible.”

At age 17, Estabrook went back to find out.  On a “personal mission,” Estabrook spent a year living with relatives in Berlin. He walked the circumference of the Wall—with a German soldier pointing a gun at him from time to time—and interviewed more than150 Germans about their experiences during WWII and the postwar period. Rather than answering his questions, Estabrook said collecting the oral histories merely encouraged him to expand his studies.
 
“I impress upon my students that immersing yourself in another culture as I did can be emancipating,” says Estabrook, who has led students on BreakAway trips to Berlin, Vienna and Spain. “It allows you to question the basic assumptions of your own culture. You’re suddenly free to look at the world from a whole new vantage point.”

Estabrook earned his undergraduate degree in German and Dramatic Art from Whitman College His masters and Ph.D. in German came from the University of California at Berkeley. Since joining Illinois College in 1994, students and colleagues have recognized Estabrook several times for his outstanding classroom teaching. A sign hanging on his office doors sums up his philosophy: Knowledge Creates Obligation.

“If you learn something new in college and it doesn’t transform your life in any way then something’s wrong,” he says. “On the first day of class I tell my students I’m actively working to change their brain chemistry. I’m trying to turn on a part of their brain that was inactive or unconscious. Yes, you can live without learning a new language but there are genuine rewards to the endeavor that can reshape your world.”

In 2004, Estabrook received the Ambassador Award for incorporating technology into the classroom and for leading a six-year transformation of the IC Language Laboratory, which he directs. Estabrook says new multi-medial technologies, especially digital video, are transforming the way culture and language are taught and the humanities have an important contribution to make to technology education.

“Technology without training is a liability, “ he says. “My idea, therefore, was to go beyond creating a facility. I’d like to think we’ve created a learning community where trained students teach other students how to use computers to the maximum effect so they can make connections to the outside world.”

Off campus, Estabrook’s hobbies include swimming, racquetball, calligraphy, Scouting, digital video and poetry.

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