Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Theology awards first Faculty Teaching Prize for innovative teaching concepts
To honour the great importance of teaching, the Faculty of Humanities and Department of Theology has tendered a teaching award for the faculty for the first time in 2020. From now on, the new teaching award will be awarded every year to two innovative teaching concepts. The faculty’s own award complements the ‘Preis für gute Lehre’ awarded by the Bavarian State Ministry for Science and the Arts, and the FAU Teaching Award for Young Researchers.
“We are very pleased to be able to award Ms Helen Wagner, doctoral candidate and research assistant at the Chair of Modern History and Contemporary History, and Dr. Anna-Carlotta Zarski, post-doctoral fellow and research assistant at the Chair of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy,” says Dean of Studies Prof. Dr. Eva Breindl. “Out of a total of 24 successful proposals, these two were the most convincing.”
Congratulations to the two winners!
The award comes with prize money: 500 euros for professors, 1,000 euros for post-docs and full-time staff, and 2,000 euros for part-time academic staff. The jury consists of the deans of studies of the faculty. The Faculty’s teaching award is presented in a ceremony at the extended Kommission für Lehre und Studium (PhilLuSt) – due to the pandemic, the 2020 teaching award ceremony was recorded and broadcast via Zoom in the virtual session of the extended PhilLuSt.
Teachers can apply with a teaching concept from the past two semesters, the evaluation results and their own reflections on them. Applications for the Faculty Teaching Award 2021 can be submitted by e-mail to qm-phil@fau.de until 31 March 2021. If you have any questions about the teaching award, you can contact the Office for Quality Management.
A look at the winning classes of 2020:
Seminar „Praxisorientiertes Lehrvorhaben zur Geschichte der Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Erlangen“ (Practice-oriented teaching project on the history of the Erlangen sanatorium and nursing home) by Helen Wagner
This seminar concept convinced the jury with its ambitious and successful combination of an intensively conducted public debate about the structural remains of the ‘Hupfla’, an interdisciplinary academic reappraisal and examination of the history as well as the design of a lasting contribution to the culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur). As part of the project seminar, the students designed an audio walk on the history of the ‘Hupfla’ and realised it with the support of the Institute for Theatre and Media Studies. In addition, a podcast on how the history of Nazi medical crimes has been dealt with in the city’s public sphere since 1945 is currently being produced.
It is precisely the interdisciplinary approach that makes the concept so attractive: next to the collaboration with the Institute for Theatre and Media Studies, the seminar itself took place in cooperation with the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine (Dr Susanne Ude-Koeller), so the seminar could be offered as an interdisciplinary course of the Faculty of Philosophy and the Faculty of Medicine. Both the interdisciplinarity and the close interlocking of historical reappraisal and the communication of history in the new media format were rated particularly positively in the evaluation. The students were thus able to experience that their work is echoed and appreciated. One participant commented the class was “by far my favourite seminar” this semester.