Teaching Day 2025 - What if ...?!

Irene Heidt, Ph.D., was honoured with the Teaching Award 2024 for the module "Subfield English". In addition, three female STEM students received prizes for their outstanding achievements and social commitment.

Under the motto "What if - what would actually happen if...", the Teaching Day offered a platform for open discussions and intensive dialogue on open questions relating to university teaching in interactive workshops. With the aim of opening up new perspectives and jointly developing innovative and practical solutions, students, lecturers and experts entered into an exciting dialogue: How could the use of artificial intelligence (AI) affect studies if it is either completely banned or authorised without restrictions? And: Should the degree programme strictly follow a set plan or be completely flexible? Peer Schmidt, Vice-President for Academic Affairs at BTU, then presented the 5,000 euro teaching award to Ph.D. Irene Heidt. The prizes for the best female STEM students went to Smilla Kuhnt in the Bachelor's programme, Elisa Korb in the Master's programme and as a special prize to Archana Paimpillil Abraham. Jutta Lumpe, Enrico Schötz and Luisa Näke received certificates for international expertise.

The BTU 2024Teaching Award honours the "English Subfield" module, which combines academicand didactic principles with practical and innovative teaching and learning formats. It prepares student teachers of various subjects specifically for the encounter lessons in grades 1 and 2 at primary schools in Brandenburg. The bilingual form of teaching combines English with the content of a subject (e.g. maths or German) and thus imparts linguistic, didactic, interdisciplinary and intercultural skills. The module qualifies students to design communicative and intercultural learning spaces for young people in their future careers and to act as cultural mediators in heterogeneous educational settings.

Prof. Peer Schmidt emphasises the structure of the learning concept and the students' creative design framework: "The students transfer the basics of English teaching that they have previously acquired and deepened through experimentation to the design of teaching units. In addition, the students worked with the Language Centre to develop communicative speaking tasks, which they implemented together with international students from BTU at the weekly Senftenberg Language Café, in line with our internationalisation strategy."

The BTU Teaching Prize honours innovative teaching concepts and has been awarded at the university since 2009. A total of 12 modules were submitted for the Teaching Award 2024, from which eight concepts were selected in the first stage. Following a public presentation of these seminars at the university, the jury, consisting of three students and three lecturers from the university, made the decision. The selection criteria included, in particular, the forms of vertical, horizontal and lateral learning transfer used. Gender and diversity aspects as well as the accessibility of the study programmes were also taken into account.