Press release: Virtual exchange for global education – an innovative teaching concept
No. 154 - 19.10.2023
Göttingen University’s Fabian Krengel receives Enlight’s Teaching & Learning Award
The European University Network Enlight has awarded its Teaching & Learning Award to Fabian Krengel, PhD researcher at Göttingen University. Together with Professor Carola Surkamp from the Department for English Philology at the University of Göttingen and an international team of experts in the subject, Krengel developed the project "Virtual Exchange for Global Education in Foreign Language Teaching". The prize was awarded in mid-October at the Enlight Teaching & Learning Conference at the University of Bordeaux.
Since 2020, the teaching project has linked potential English teachers in Germany with students in Brazil, Chile, Israel, Sweden and Turkey. In teams spanning nations, the participants create teaching materials for English lessons that deal with selected United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In this way, the teaching project team is able to respond to the need for educational policy to adapt to prepare students to deal with complex global problems.
A major focus of the teaching project is to enable students to have exchanges on topics that are both personally meaningful for them and are sometimes controversial, for example the Israel-Palestine conflict. The project team developed a system of mentoring so that participants can reflect on their conversations. In this way, they learn to classify critical moments and misunderstandings and to work out new communication strategies. At the same time, they improve their language skills and can experience English as a shared language for negotiating complex global problems.
"The European jury praised the project for teaching ‘soft skills’, debating social and political issues, promoting multiculturalism and respecting cultural identities in foreign language education," explains Professor Hiltraud Casper-Hehne, Head of the Enlight Network at the University of Göttingen. "The award also highlights the potential that lie in Virtual Exchange programmes in international exchange at universities." The award-winning project was funded by Lower Saxony’s Ministry of Science and Culture and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Krengel is doing his PhD in "Global (teaching) competence development through transnational virtual exchange". The award is presented every year by the Enlight Network for the best and most innovative concepts in teaching. The Enlight Network is an association of the Universities of Bilbao, Bordeaux, Bratislava, Galway, Ghent, Göttingen, Groningen, Tartu, Uppsala and Bern, which is funded by the EU within the framework of the programme "European Universities" and in Germany also by DAAD. Information on Enlight at the University of Göttingen can be found here: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/631929.html.
Contact:
Professor Hiltraud Casper-Hehne
University of Göttingen
Department for German Philology – Department of Intercultural German Studies
Tel: +49 (0)551 39-27157