Academy and Studying in Germany

What has long been common practice in research is now to take hold at last in teaching: a kind of excellence initiative at German universities is planned to help improve the status and quality of teaching. It is seeking cogent teaching and learning policies for the future.

Up to now in the discussion of educational policy in Germany, there has been no convincing forum where the significance of teaching for the quality, international reputation and competitiveness of universities could be underlined. In the summer of 2008 the German Council of Science and Humanities noted a qualitative imbalance between research and teaching: whereas the former has been highly professionalised, lecturers and professors remain, as teachers, largely “autodidacts”. That should now change. “Top universities have to be excellent in research and teaching’, explains Bettina Jorzik of the Donors’ Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities in Germany. The idea of “excellence”, she says, “has to be connected in people’s heads with teaching”.

Following the model of the excellence initiative for the promotion of top research at universities, the Donors’ Association, together with the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany (KMK), has therefore developed a funding programme in order to spur the competition of universities in this area. “In the long-term”, says Jorzik, “teaching practices at German universities should satisfy the same qualitative standards as does research and be committed to a similar dynamics”.

Learning also has to be learned

The initiative is particularly meant to support engaged university teachers and young scholars and scientists, and to promote their exchange of experiences. As part of the so-called “InnoLecture – Programme for Innovative Academic Teaching”, which is based on the Alfred Toepfer Foundation’s Eurolecture – European Programme for Innovative Academic Teaching, the initiative plans to invite highly qualified foreign scholars and scientists who are especially adept at university teaching to lecture to German undergraduates for a semester – not so much in order to teach them the subjects as to establish innovative teaching and examination formats in Germany and to foster a methodological and educational exchange.

Other modules include subject-specific and interdisciplinary summer academies and grants for scholars and scientists who have designed innovative teaching programmes. An accompanying research study will evaluate their subsequent implementation. And so as to ensure a continuing development of quality, also planned are subject and theme-related competence centres that design continuing and advanced training programmes for university teaching and offer them on a nationwide basis.

The charter of “good teaching”

The core of the funding programme is the Excellence Competition in Teaching that the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs together with the Donors’ Association inaugurated in January 2009. It will give awards for strategic ideas with which universities define their courses of study and teaching. At the same time, participants must set forth how they mean significantly to increase their attractiveness as places of education primarily for undergraduates. It is planned that the award-winning universities will then combine in a “quality circle” during the three-year grant and work out a “charter of good teaching”. The competition is endowed with a total of ten million euros. The grant will be awarded to at least ten universities, each of which will receive not more than one million euros. “But our vision of educational policy goes further”, explains Jorzik. “We want to implement a continuous third-party funding for teaching projects.”

Like the implementation of research plans, the development and evaluation of teaching programmes also need financial support. The Donors’ Association has therefore campaigned for founding a German Teaching Foundation (DLG), in analogy to the German Research Foundation (DFG), which would ensure continuous third-party funding for the development of innovative teaching plans and academic reform projects and for related research projects. Decisive, from the point of view of the Donors’ Association, is less the budget than the gain in reputation connected to funding, both for the individual lecturer and for his department and institution.

In the shadow of outdated structures

That teaching at German universities is overshadowed by research is documented not least by the student evaluations of lecturers and professors that have already been instituted at many universities. Yet, although the Excellence Competition in Teaching particularly concerns students, there are only two students among the fourteen members of the selection commissions. “As long as the makers of university policy are afraid of student criticism”, says Bianka Hilfrich of the Independent Coalition of Student Bodies (fzs), “not much is going to change about teaching”.

Good teaching should again to be worth one’s while. The German universities, however, are still focussed above all on research. Quality initiatives to honour of teaching therefore need a strong lobby. Thus Kai Gehring, spokesman on university policy for the Green parliamentary group, has proposed that teaching quality should be anchored as a criterion in any new version of the excellence initiative for the development of top research: “Only those institutions that produce excellent performances in both teaching and research should receive the rating of ‘top university’”.