Navigating Uncharted Waters : A One-Year German-Finnish Faculty Exchange

Abstract

Most graduate engineers will at some point of their career work in international environments. Our challenge as educators is to prepare students for this global environment. The usual approach is to facilitate both the admission of visiting international students and the posting of own students. For an intensive and lively international exchange both exchange students and people in the receiving organizations should have an open, an inquisitive attitude.

Teachers, as part of the effort to increase the intercultural exchange, receive much less attention and less support. The norm in many universities is to have an office for internationalization but very domestic learning environments. Foreign languages in lecturing, intercultural exchange and cross-national education are a challenge to many curricula.Two teachers from Finland and Germany decided not to leave internationalization to their students. Turku in the south of Finland and Hamburg in the north of Germany with their respective Universities of Applied Sciences provided both the support and enthusiasm to plan, implement, and execute a this exchange for a full academic year in 2020 / 2021.

With this paper we share our experiences of this project. Our aim is to encourage others, to do the same.

We will also share our personal experiences and perceptions of differences in the organizations with respect to teaching and research. How do universities plan and organize their courses and curricula? How are research projects planned and administered?We shall also address pedagogical views and how they reflect on competences to be acquired and tested as well as the impact of legal constraints on the structure of lectures and exams.

Though we intended to keep the exchange as simple as possible, we soon learned that health insurances and employment contracts posed significant challenges to our project. It was impossible to simply extend a common one-week-exchange to a full year. Many issues had to be dealt with on administrative level in both universities. And there were no blueprints as to how to tackle them.

On a personal level, the exchange was governed by pragmatism. Since there are no public funding mechanisms available to cover significant extra cost of the exchange, we soon agreed to swap our flats and take as little as possible. Nevertheless, shipments of some household equipment, school admissions for the children, travel-permits in times of COVID-19 restrictions and a reliable mail exchange had to be arranged.