In Mari McCarville’s German classroom at Leysin American School, students are not learning how to conjugate verbs or memorize vocabulary. They are learning how to investigate.

A student might begin with a photograph, an old letter, an interview with a family member or the story of someone they find compelling. They search archives, museums and libraries, gather fragments of information and then use German to make sense of what they find. The final product is not simply a language exercise. It is an original piece of research.

“The stories we tell about our past really inform how we show up in the world every day,” Mari says. Her goal is not to give students a perfectly packaged version of history, but to help them understand that the past, like the present, is full of conflicting identities, perspectives, and choices.

Mari learned this as she learned about her own family history.

Growing up, she knew her family’s past mostly as fascinating lore. Her favorite movie was The Sound of Music, and she loved telling people that her great uncle had married one of the Von Trapp daughters.

But there was a more complicated story behind the family connection.

Mari’s great grandfather was vice mayor of Vienna in 1934, as Austria was being pulled toward Nazi Germany. Working within Austria’s authoritarian government, he attempted to unite opposing political factions against the Nazis. He failed, was blacklisted and told he would be arrested if he remained in Austria. He fled first to Switzerland and eventually to the United States.

For years, Mari’s great aunt sent her letters, newspaper clippings, and other family documents. Mari kept them in a box in the basement.

After completing a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction, she found herself questioning whether elementary education was where she belonged. Teaching six-year-olds remotely during COVID had been exhausting, and when a friend asked what she would do if she could do anything, Mari had an answer: she would travel through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and research her family.

Her friend pointed out that she could do that as part of a graduate degree in German studies.

So that's what she did.

For a year, Mari traveled through Europe, working with archives in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. As she dug deeper, she realized she did not want to choose between her two academic interests. She wanted to combine her German ancestry and research with teaching.

The family archive became the foundation for her graduate research and, eventually, for a set of German-language teaching materials.

Researching the past changed the story for Mari. What had once seemed like an entertaining family connection became an examination of displacement, grief, belonging, and intergenerational trauma. The more she uncovered about her great grandfather, the harder it became to categorize him simply as hero or villain.

“He was working for National Socialists in Austria. He was in this very Austrian fascist government. He was very monarchist,” Mari says. “And I couldn’t really hold those two things at once inside myself.”

That tension became one of the most important lessons of her research: history rarely fits neatly into the categories we want to give it.

Mari became interested in how later generations construct cultural memory. What remains after people are gone are documents, photographs, recordings, and stories. But these materials still require interpretation. Each generation decides what to emphasize and how to tell the story.

This idea now informs her classroom.

Mari gives students considerable freedom in choosing what to investigate. Their projects might involve family history, but they don't have to. A student might explore a relative’s experience during the Great Depression, research an internment camp, investigate a more recent family experience or dive into the archives of a person they find interesting.

“I’m not sitting in class to receive knowledge,” Mari explains. “I’m sitting in class to be guided on how to discover what I want to discover.”

That distinction matters at LAS, where students bring histories and cultural perspectives from around the world. Mari wants those different lenses to become part of the learning rather than something that gets flattened into a single version of the past.

Her students are also learning how to ask better questions, make connections, and communicate ideas. In that sense, the German language is both the subject and the tool.

Mari’s teaching philosophy has evolved around three ideas: curiosity, meaning-making, and communication. In an age when information is increasingly easy to find, she believes students need an avenue to do something with it. They need to ask why something matters, connect it to their own thinking, and communicate what they have discovered.

For students who have previously decided they are simply “bad at languages,” the approach can be transformative. German is not an easy language to learn, and many of Mari’s students arrive after discouraging experiences in other language classes. Yet they are discovering that they can use German to accomplish something meaningful, even before they have mastered every grammatical detail.

“Communication over perfection,” Mari says.

This philosophy reflects her own journey. Mari did not find meaning in her family history by accepting the version that had been handed down to her. She found it by asking questions, confronting contradictions, and looking closely.

Now she is giving her students the same opportunity: to become curious about the stories around them, investigate them for themselves, and discover what they have to say.