Online articles

With the rise of right-wing populist movements and parties, internationalization in higher education has become less self-evident. A specialist article by Ulrich Grothus on internationalization in higher education - published in November 2019.

Ulrich Grothus is President of the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA), the European umbrella organization of internationalization agencies, of which the OeAD is also a member. Until his retirement in 2018, Grothus worked at the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for 30 years, most recently as Deputy Secretary General. He expresses his personal opinion in this article.

In the fall of 2018, Anselm Herold completed an Erasmus+ internship of almost three months in Russia at a social circus project for children and young people, Upsala Zirk in St. Petersburg. An experience report about his internship.

Anselm Herold was an Erasmus+ Ambassador 2019 in the field of higher education. As part of his Bachelor's degree in Social Work at the FH Joanneum in Graz, he completed an Erasmus+ internship in Russia in fall 2018. Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility (KA107) enables study and internship placements for students as well as teaching and training placements for university staff in partner countries (third countries).

OeAD lecturers work for one to five years as university teachers for German as a foreign language, Austrian literature and regional studies at universities abroad.

In addition to teaching, lecturers also work on historical, linguistic, pedagogical and literary projects, organize excursions and writing competitions, support the internationalization of Austrian universities and work as educational, cultural and language mediators in a variety of ways. We would like to give an impression of this rich diversity with this online publication series, which will appear in print at a later date.

To the editing program

A group of students from the University of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) is on a study trip through western Ukraine. On the last day, the program includes a visit to Horodok, the setting of Georg Trakl's famous poem “Grodek”. A touching text about the traces of history and the attempt to follow them 100 years after the events.

Stephan Kurz, who has been working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 2018 and is in charge of its digital editions at the Institute for Modern and Contemporary History at the Academy, writes about the current and historical self-image in Austria and Croatia, forms, the “Crown Prince's Work” and current research.

Elisabeth Dorner (former OeAD lecturer in Pécs, Hungary) on a lexicology seminar in which language teaching was combined with the sensory perception of the foreignness of a foreign language and the question of how this can be expressed.

The teaching project “The beautiful blue Danube: A river that unites” carried out at the Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA) in Mulhouse in Alsace aimed to familiarize Bachelor students of German studies with the unifying character of the great European river. In their text, Magdalena Zehetgruber and Nina Kulovics describe the concept, implementation and consequences of the project.

The novel “Das Mundstück” was published by Otto Müller Verlag Salzburg in fall 2019. Bianca Kos tells the story of an Austrian foreign language editor who spends a year in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and sets her mind to writing a travel guide for this city, which is little known in the West. A great novel whose power is fed by loving descriptions and the author's great sense of humor. Bianca Kos is currently an OeAD lecturer in Rijeka/Croatia.

The idea of a UK and Ireland-wide literature competition was born as part of the certificate course “Competence in International Teaching” in 2017. The aim of the project, which has been running since then, is to strengthen the network of OeAD lecturers, to focus on Austria and to encourage students to learn German through competition. In their joint text, Judith Eberharter and Kirsten Mericka describe the concept and implementation of the successful project.

The online edition of the OeAD publication series kicks off with three articles on the EU Strategy for the Danube Region (EUSDR): On July 1, 2018, Austria took over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union for six months. This presidency period is the third and last of a so-called triogram (eighteen-month program), which has set itself the goal of proactively addressing common challenges such as jobs, growth, competitiveness, citizen empowerment, freedom, security and a global capacity to act and finding constructive answers.

Another field of action - and this is where the EU Strategy for the Danube Region comes into play - is the stabilization of intra-EU neighbourhood relations. In terms of the OeAD-GmbH's areas of work, this results almost automatically in a focus on educational mobility, university internationalization and cross-border cooperation in education, science and research - because there is no doubt today that strategic support for these topics contributes significantly to stabilizing and deepening neighbourly relations, and of course far beyond the official end of the Danube Region Strategy in 2020.