Students gain experience in Ukraine

Through the project “Students for Exchange – Shaping Inclusion Together,” founded by HSZG students, aspiring social scientists gained valuable experience at Oleksander Dovzhenko National Pedagogical University. From September 16 to 24, 2017, five students majoring in Special Needs Education/Inclusion Studies and Social Work traveled to Hlukhiv, a small medium-sized city with approximately 33,000 residents, located 300 km northeast of Kyiv on the border with Russia.

A cooperation agreement has been in place between the Ukrainian university and the HSZG since 2011. Based on positive exchange experiences of faculty and students in the past, Andrei Meyer, Donata Junghardt, and Paul Neumann (Special Needs Education/Inclusion Studies degree programme) developed the project “Students for Exchange – Shaping Inclusion Together” in the winter of 2016.

“Our goals include raising awareness of the cultural and political realities of each other’s countries and facilitating a shift in perspective in order to consider new solutions to theoretical and practical problems in implementing the concept of inclusion,” said project co-founder Andrei Meyer. The students receive financial support from both the DAAD’s Eastern Partnership Program and the evz Foundation (Remembrance, Responsibility, and the Future) as part of the “MEET UP! German-Ukrainian Youth Encounters” program. The foundation is supporting the social scientists’ project for one year.

In May 2017, the Görlitz campus of the HSZG welcomed eleven Hlukhiver students from the fields of Social Sciences and philology as a result. During their current ten-day visit to Ukraine, the guests from Görlitz observed operations at various service providers for people with disabilities and seniors and jointly organized classes / courses and recreational activities. “I like to describe the trip to Hlukhiv with two simple words: interesting and fascinating. It was fascinating to get to know a culture that was almost completely new to me. It was interesting to gain so many valuable insights into the topic of inclusion there. The trip left a lasting impression on me,” says Paul Neumann, summarizing the visit to Ukraine.

“Whether the ‘Students for Exchange – Shaping Inclusion Together’ project—which has been very successful so far—will continue beyond this year depends largely on whether students from more recent classes are willing to get involved in this initiative,” notes Prof. Dr. Ingolf Prosetzky, calling on all students interested in cultural exchange to help shape the concept of inclusion at the HSZG.

Text: Cornelia Rothe, M.A.