Teaching Award 2021

An award was presented for the best course concept (2,500 euros). In 2021, an additional award was presented in the thematic priority area ‘Dealing with diversity’ (2,500 euros). The panel of experts of the Academy for Teaching Development (ALe) selected two excellent teaching concepts for the 2021 Teaching Awards: 

Dr Nils Töpfer of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences has won the award for the best course design (2,500 euros) with the seminar entitled “On the scientific foundation of psychotherapy: a somewhat different introduction to effectiveness and process research”.

The selection statement says: The seminar addresses a strategic challenge in teaching at our university, the "promotion of academic independence among students". In particular, it succeeds in an outstanding way in enabling students to critically engage with subject-specific questions in a science-led manner. Psychotherapy is treated as a field of application of evaluation research, in that students understand the systematic application of social science research to evaluate the conception, design, implementation and benefit of social intervention programmes using the example of psychotherapy research. On the one hand, meta-models are used here as a frame of reference for assessing the effectiveness of psychotherapy procedures, by means of which the students repeatedly and systematically work out questions and critical points in the course of the seminar. On the other hand, despite the research-methodological focus, detailed practical references are established through several group works. Through the combination of different didactic methods, the teacher succeeds excellently in stimulating the students to re-enact and, if necessary, to re-enact the professional discourse in an argumentative way. It should be particularly emphasised that the students themselves explicitly recognise their progress in competence with regard to scientific approaches as well as their associated gains in knowledge and experience in the scientific-critical discussion of professional practice.

The prize in the priority topic area “Dealing with diversity” (2,500 euros) goes to Prof. Michael Wermke, Dr Sophie Seher and Fahed Al’Janabi for the seminar “Cultural and religious sensitivity in work with parents”.

Here, the selection is justified as follows: The award-winning seminar is embedded as a course at the University of Jena in the project "Strengthening Us Together" (funded in accordance with the directive on the granting of subsidies by the Free State of Thuringia for the promotion of people with a migration background (01.01.2020 - 31.12.2022)) and deals with culturally sensitive parental work. The course content itself addresses the thematic focus of "dealing with diversity", as it enables students to deal with and pedagogically deal with religious and cultural diversity. In addition, a variety of teaching and learning methods are used for the acquisition of competences by the students and an interlocking of teaching, research and transfer is achieved in a special way: a scientifically guided examination of the experiences gained in practical events takes place, whereby the knowledge gained in this way in turn flows into the methodological-didactic preparation of further practical project work. Last but not least, it should be emphasised that this course transports a fundamental understanding of diversity of our university teaching to the outside world through cooperation with urban social and educational institutions and thus serves to open up university teaching and research to society in an exemplary way.

left to right: Prof. Dr. Kim Siebenhüner, Prof. Dr. Michael Wermke, Fahed Al-Janabi,, Michael Rabich

Image: Jürgen Scheere (University of Jena)