UNITE Cologne PEERS

The UNITE Cologne PEERS concept arose in response to challenging questions at the start of the pandemic in our first funding year: ‘What do we do now…? How can we enthuse student teachers to take part in international travel?’ The consequences of the global crisis made it clear: a total rethink was required. Our basic idea was simple, but its impact was fascinating: it involved networking the preselected and highly motivated scholarship holders as peers, providing them with professional mentoring and creating a tailor-made range of courses. The UNITE ‘inner circle’ was established as a network that conveys identity.

The students developed digital formats with our assistance. The current peer concept is based on respectful exchange of experiences as equals: the UNITE alumni not only act as motivational peers for the future cohort, they also support incoming student teachers on their journey to Cologne. This intimate enthusiasm is of key importance to our peer format.

Student teachers from the University of Cologne acting as alumni and DAAD correspondents use hybrid information events to report on their experiences and thus make a major contribution to the project’s visibility. Outgoing and incoming student teachers have recorded their impressions at the partner universities. These recordings can now be used as multipliers to promote motivation and exchange: they are integrated within the website and serve as a lasting and low-threshold source of authentic information.

A UNITE peer workshop was implemented to augment existing counselling services in a higher education context – such as preparatory seminars organised by the School Network internships@schoolsabroad. A master’s degree student whose academic studies deal with raising intercultural awareness prepares outgoing student teachers for their stays abroad. Welcome and alumni meetings are ideal in terms of the PEERS concept due to their optimal linking of the heterogeneous cohorts. They enable the student teachers to develop their communication and reflection skills.

Our nine partner higher education institutions around the world naturally form the cornerstone of our network: we have moreover since 2020 forged close partnerships with colleagues from higher education institutions in the context of the Lehramt.International model projects: ILAP (University of Education Weingarten), IMPACCT (University of Gießen), Partners in Mobility (University of Flensburg) and BaTEG (University of Bamberg). These have in subsequent years become associated with the projects Humboldt International Teacher Training (HU Berlin), IDEAS, University of Jena and INVITE (Ludwigsburg University of Education). We are also collaborating closely with the model projects global.trex (University of Passau) and L-GrIn (University of Wuppertal). In addition to the realisation of theme days, conferences and online events, regular video conferences are arranged in which among other things common solutions to complex issues regarding project administration, but also substantive aspects, are discussed and shown. An exchange of views on challenges in the internationalisation of teacher education (such as recognition, motivation of students, teaching staff and project partners, and the like) is a natural occurrence. It was not just joint participation in professional development events that was possible in 2023. Following a joint presentation to the DICE Conference in Braunschweig (December 2022), a contribution was made to a not as yet published anthology dealing with multidisciplinary perspectives in academic mobility (publication due in September 2024). A jointly produced article has already been published: Wild, K., Nierste, W., Kaiser, K. and Dasouqi, N. (2023). Virtual Internationalization in Teacher Education – Experiences from Four Projects Conducted at German Higher Institutions. In: Mammadova, T. (2023). Academic mobility through the lens of language and identity, global pandemics, and distance internationalization: Multidisciplinary Perspective. Routledge. The exchange of participants’ experiences significantly improved the quality of the professional development events and regular meetings. Active collaboration with global partners in the various model projects repeatedly enabled synergies to emerge. This means that – cleverly applied – professional development workshops, for example, can be developed for multiple projects at the same time and thus be provided in an effective, climate-friendly and sustainable manner.