Re-Imagining Community

Goals:

The general objective of this field of action is to create a strong community, spanning our campuses, based on common values, knowledge, languages and interests, between and among students, teachers, researchers and non-academic staff. We consider community-building and the creation of a collective feeling of belonging among students and staff a key objective for the construction of our European University. As a result, this field of action takes on a central role within the project: by developing a shared identity of ERUA students and staff and by yielding sustainable impact, it shoulders one of the main tasks in the implementation of our consortium and reinforces the processes that contribute to developing a shared European identity among all the members of the Alliance.

Measures:

We believe that the community building should put the main attention on staff and professional development – always including academic and non-academic staff. This is why we place specific emphasis on staff, since this is where identity and the feeling of belonging are fostered in a durable fashion.
The main activities are located in the field of staff capacity building, language policy, mobility and diversity. More precisely, we are focusing on four specific targets:

  • Empowering academic and non-academic staff: non-academic staff (university services) as well as professors and researchers are considered as an underused leverage tool of the European mobility project and are therefore taken as the main starting point of our ERUA staff empowerment actions. We achieve this through activities such as an intercultural training module for non-academic staff in all partner universities and opportunities for exchange on the administration, the teaching, and the research level.
  • We strive for an intelligent mix of different forms of virtual and physical mobility: We are devoting substantial resources to the promotion of “Internationalisation@home” by offering virtual teaching and learning experiences to our students and staff. At the same time, we focus on short-term study programmes at our universities in order to give opportunities for physical mobility to all groups of students and staff and to provide new types of mobility tailored to their respective needs.
  • Sharing a common strategy on language policy: we are fostering the national languages of the consortium, our goal being a multilingual language policy reflecting the diversity of both our alliance and the student and staff body. This includes concrete measures such as online language training, language tandems, or on-site language courses to name but a few.
  • Enhancing diversity: dealing with highly diverse student and staff bodies, we are focusing on standardizing support structures for all students and staff with special needs as well as persecuted researchers and refugee students

Contacts:

Dr. Eva Dade: ERUA@uni-konstanz.de

Marcia Tiburi – TERRADORADA (paintings exhibition) – Auditorium MR002

Deavan Michelle La Tray – Chroma Depth (paintings exhibition) – Hall Auditorium MR002

Eva Dimitrova – Beauty without filters (photgraphy exhibition) – Hall Auditorium MR002

Michail Bakas – Equality in Life, Society and Education Human stories. Another road to the European Dream (photography exhibition) – University Entrance Hall

Indira Sofia Molina Caliz – Au sud du sud (dance performance) – Hall Auditorium MR002 – Closing session, cocktail time.

All performances will be available on November 8 except for the dance performance which will be held just before the cocktail.