The first Czech-German Erasmus+ Staff Week will take place from May 13-17. An interview with the initiators Lucie Koutkova and Stephanie Ludwig.
Stephanie Ludwig: Erasmus+ is the largest and most important mobility program in Europe. It's about giving students and university staff the opportunity to get to know universities in other countries and gain intercultural experience. To this end, we cooperate with a large number of partner universities in Europe. This intercultural exchange seems particularly important to me in these times when the European idea is being discussed rather critically.
Lucie Koutkova: From my point of view, it is very important that we organize the Staff Week together. This is actually the first cross-border Erasmus+ Staff Week to be organized by a Czech and a German university. As this is also the idea of Erasmus+, to create an international higher education landscape, we have said here for the first time: we are doing this now, literally.
Lucie Koutkova: The basic idea of Erasmus+ is that students do an internship or study abroad in order to gain new experiences. However, we also looked for ways to make the same experience available to employees. And this search for opportunities led to the creation of the International Staff Weeks.
Lucie Koutkova: Exactly! Both teaching and non-teaching staff can take part. The basic idea is that you invite your partners and they get to know the institution. It's also about solving problems and building relationships.
Stephanie Ludwig: Staff Weeks enable employees of the International Offices, but also employees from other areas of responsibility such as libraries, marketing departments or student services at universities, to network and thus also have the opportunity to exchange ideas at an international level. This already happens on a daily basis in the International Offices. The other areas of the universities are usually left out of such international exchanges. However, the big goal is to make the universities more international overall and to give employees more international intercultural insights in the future.
"The border is not the edge, but the center of our cooperation"
Stephanie Ludwig: We are close to the border here: who, if not us, could set up such an international format? Two universities, three countries, one Staff Week. In a new edition, it would also be conceivable for us to include other universities close to the border, such as our partners in Wroclaw. This year, we will officially bid farewell to the guests during our closing dinner in Zgorzelec.
Lucie Koutkova: Universities usually position themselves within a national framework. The Technical University in Liberec compares itself with other universities in the Czech Republic and is thus in competition with the large universities in Prague or Brno. We are practically not in the center of the country, but on the outskirts. This is always an issue in Liberec. With Staff Week, we are turning this edge, the border, into the center. Our region has great potential. We want to make more intensive use of this potential in the future.
What we are doing here is a kind of shift in thinking. This is a very important idea for me: the border is not the edge, but the center of our cooperation. And the border becomes productive. This allows us to work together better and achieve results on a completely different level if we do it right.
Stephanie Ludwig: We want to ensure visibility. To show that there are also very good universities here near the border that are internationally positioned and offer interesting and high-quality courses.
Stephanie Ludwig: Various workshops are planned, we want to show the participants the regions, i.e. Zittau, Görlitz, Liberec, a small part of Poland. We want to network with the participants and of course learn from each other. Present ourselves as good hosts.
Lucie Koutkova: All universities have many partnerships at the moment. But of course you can't achieve the same quality with all partners. That's why we are looking for strategic partnerships. I see the cooperation between TU Liberec and HSZG as a productive and strategic one in the future.
Stephanie Ludwig: We want to show the participants, who are coming not only from Europe but also from Asia and Africa, what is possible here. That both the TUL and the HSZG are attractive universities and have great potential. The essence of a Staff Week is always to present one's own university as well as possible. It is therefore important to fill this week with life, with workshops, campus and laboratory tours, as well as an attractive supporting program. All these activities thrive on the cooperation of all university groups, students and staff alike. In this way, our guests experience that the international idea is not only transported into the universities by the International Offices, but is basically lived by everyone.
The interview was conducted by Sophie Herwig.
