Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems: Research and Practice [1st ed. 2020] 978-3-030-36251-5, 978-3-030-36252-2

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxiv
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Germany’s Road Towards Transnational Provision of Higher Education and Its Footprint in China and Turkey (Susanne Kammüller, Susanne Otte, Wiebke Bachmann)....Pages 3-27
Transnational Education in the 21st Century and Its Quality Assurance from a German Perspective (Katrin Mayer-Lantermann)....Pages 29-41
The Emergence of Transnationalisation of Higher Education of German Universities (Nadin Fromm, Alexander Raev)....Pages 43-62
Front Matter ....Pages 63-63
Outside the Nation: Taking Stock of a Sense of Duty and Diversity in German Studies Abroad (Benjamin Nickl)....Pages 65-83
The State of Diversity and Decolonization in North American German Studies (Ervin Malakaj)....Pages 85-101
The Language-Culture Nexus: German Teaching in a Culturally Rich Environment as Part of the German Model of Cultural Diplomacy (Irina Herrschner)....Pages 103-116
Front Matter ....Pages 117-117
Bilingual German Childhood Education and School Transition: Literature Review and Policy Suggestions for Australia (Ivy Zhou)....Pages 119-131
Juggling Selves: Navigating Pre-service Teaching Experiences in Overseas Contexts (Michiko Weinmann, Rod Neilsen, Isabel Martin)....Pages 133-154
Transnational Institutions of Higher Education and Their Contribution to the National Innovation System: The Case of the German University of Technology in Oman (Ann Vogel)....Pages 155-172
Back Matter ....Pages 173-178

Citation preview

Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues Series Editors: Benjamin Nickl · Irina Herrschner · Elzbieta M. Gozdziak

Benjamin Nickl Stefan Popenici Deane Blackler Editors

Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems Research and Practice

Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues Series Editors Benjamin Nickl, School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Irina Herrschner, School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Elzbieta M. Gozdziak, Institute for the Study of International Migration, Washington, DC, USA

Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues presents original research work from contributors in a cutting-edge collection of case and monograph studies in humanities, business, economics, law, education, cultural studies and science. It offers concise yet in-depth overviews of contemporary ties between Germany and nations in flux, such as Afghanistan, Korea, and Israel, as well as societies with long-standing ties to the Federal Republic. It serves as an arena for both scholars and practitioners to apply comparative and interconnected research outcomes connected to topics such as educational policies, Muslimness, refugee integration, nation branding and digital societies to other transnational contexts. This series is an interdisciplinary project to offer a fresh look at Germany’s relations to other countries in the 21st century. The bilateral concept is anchored in a renewed interest in Germany’s innovative stance on identity politics, fiscal policies, civil law and national cultures. The series caters to a renewed interest in transnational studies and the actors working across the boundaries of nation states.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15756

Benjamin Nickl Stefan Popenici Deane Blackler •

•

Editors

Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems Research and Practice

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Editors Benjamin Nickl University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia

Stefan Popenici Charles Darwin University Darwin, NT, Australia

Deane Blackler Independent Scholar and Teacher South Yarra, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2522-5324 ISSN 2522-5332 (electronic) Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues ISBN 978-3-030-36251-5 ISBN 978-3-030-36252-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Image © Anton Thomas 2017 This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

The German higher education system has a remarkably rich history. The first research university was established in Berlin in 1810 by Wilhelm von Humboldt. From an international comparative perspective, the idea of the Berlin University, that means a university where research and teaching took place under one roof and were embodied in one role, namely that of the professor, was historically new. Therefore, the German system had a strong impact on very different national systems worldwide—from Scandinavia to American research universities and Japan. After the early twentieth century, however, the system began to lose its appeal and, at the end of the twentieth century, the German system appeared outdated in international higher education policy. Since the 2000s, one can observe an increasing international interest in higher education in Germany owing to a variety of reasons. (For an extensive overview of the main characteristics of the German system, see Hüther and Krücken 2018). The priority on internationalisation across all levels of the system, the Excellence Initiative in research and the absence of tuition fees, despite the rapid rise in the student population and “Duales Studium” programs that integrate higher education and vocational education, have made the German higher education system relevant and fascinating again. Furthermore, with academic freedom currently under siege in even the most unexpected countries, German academia may well consider itself lucky that the principle of academic freedom is enshrined in the National Constitution and, if necessary, defended by the Institutional Court. Despite these attributes, as compared to other countries and their higher education institutions, Germany began to engage rather late in transnational education. Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems: Research and Practice, edited by Benjamin Nickl, Deane Blackler and Stefan Popenici, gives an intriguing overview of this ever-important field in higher education. In three parts, its history and structural features are discussed and practical examples given. In addition, comparisons with other education systems play an important role, but also more recent topics like postcolonial discourses and their impact on the curriculum of German language and studies programs are included. The reader gets fascinating insights into a vibrant and highly diverse field where different layers and facets of a highly complex issue are brought to the fore and discussed critically. v

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This wonderful and diverse collection of contributions made me reflect on the wider implications of transnational education. Surely, there is a strong instrumental component, for example regarding transnational mobility and skill formation. The German system, with its different layers of higher education institutions and its historically strong linkages to the labour market, especially in technical disciplines, is an interesting case, as well as some of the examples from other countries, for example China; however, and though it is hard to measure, I am convinced that the importance of higher education institutions for an increasingly globalised world does not stop here. As offered by cosmopolitan and discursive institutions, higher education is of pivotal importance for social integration and for provision of appropriate ways of dealing with diverging opinions and perspectives in a world where parochialism and dogmatism seem to prevail. Philosopher and political theorist Jon Elster (1983), for instance, makes use of the concept of “the essential by-product”, which means that a goal that can only be achieved indirectly by aiming at some other, typically more tangible, objective. Following this line of thought, the by-product of teaching, learning and research should never be underestimated also in our case, as educators. Beyond that, transnational education can be, in the words of philosopher Laurie A. Paul (2014), a truly transformative experience. For her, making decisions can lead to transformative experiences when they are based on decisions we make that shape our future selves in an irreversible way and transform the persons that we were. We can hardly imagine the impact of such decisions on the way we see the world, as our worldviews are profoundly altered by them. Transformative experiences are unsettling and, at times, painful. Transnational education can be such an experience, as it interrogates hitherto unquestioned assumptions that, in everyday life, are taken for granted. According to my personal experience, such processes can be unsettling and, indeed at times, painful. On very different levels, individual, organisational and systemic, one is confronted with some kind of otherness that challenges dominant identity constructs. On the one hand, German students, universities and the entire system of education, for example, can be confronted with open and mostly hidden colonial legacies that extend into the present, questioning naïve ideas of progress and doing good in the world. To quote the title of a highly influential paper from post-colonialist feminist Chandra Mohanty (1986), much of our understanding and representation of “the world” is “Under Western Eyes”, and we can hardly deny the explicit and implicit assumptions and constructions of otherness in transnational education. On the other hand, partners in transnational education might be confronted with a broad understanding of academic freedom, which not only includes a clear division of academic and religious affairs, and liberty of thought and expression, but also the refusal of given and clear-cut gender roles and sexual identities, as well as the protection of minorities as core ideas in academic life. Such ideas might conflict with the basic cultural ideas of other national systems and the organisations and individuals therein. One should expect neither diffusion nor fusion, not even approximation, but rather misunderstandings, incomprehension and conflict. Higher education is a cosmopolitan and discursive field. As such, it is

Foreword

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prone to shape transformational experiences in a globalised world. We should be grateful for this book by Benjamin Nickl, Deane Blackler and Stefan Popenici and its contributors for addressing such a timely and relevant issue. Georg Krücken Universität Kassel Kassel, Germany

References Elster, Jon (1983). Sour Grapes. Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hüther, Otto, and Krücken, Georg (2018). Higher Education in Germany—Recent Developments in an International Perspective. Cham: Springer. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. (1986). Under Western Eyes. Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Boundary 2 12(3): 333–358. Paul, L.A. (2014). Transformative Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Editors’ Notes

Reflecting on the Challenges and Opportunities for Comparative Education Studies Or Why We are Arguing Against Limiting Silo-Studies A Circumspect Viewpoint is Crucial Most publications in Comparative Education focus on either microscopic issues of education or they take a decidedly sweeping view of macro-units of education. Some approaches dwell on the local and the miniscule detail of social contexts, while others include only political and economic views on education and education systems which are international or supranational. The range of research narratives is equally broad and has become, and is still becoming, more polarised with Comparative Education courses at universities taught along lines of self-interested bifurcation: one quarter of education studies and its literature looks to individuals, groups and communities, while most others gravitate towards the education system of regions, areas and countries, or the overall system of education. Inasmuch as case studies are present, they are typically used to incorporate voluminous bodies of data and descriptors of markers denoting educational success or failure. Yet, we find ourselves in an age of transnational connectivity. There is a growing competition in education as both an export and an import industry in most countries of the world. Actors and agencies involved with education domestically and outside their host country are going about their business in ways comparable to multinational industry giants. Actions in educational policy are multi-layered and must serve a host of interests. Thinking about education has become vertical and omnidirectional, influenced by politicians, social forces, economic decisions and cultural changes, though perhaps no other influence reverberates as much through every single level of education, and globally intertwined education systems, than

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that of neoliberalism. What, then, happens to education and education systems if their underlying principles are transformed through privatisation, supranational agents of educational governance and a hitherto unforeseen level of decentralisation in the global education circuit? These questions are rarely commented on in studies of Comparative Education as one side considers its micro-unit approach far richer and more productive than the other side’s macro-unit perspective and vice versa. The large and the granular perspectives, just like the national and the transnational dimensions laid out in this book, however, are vital factors in the configuration that is the global education complex in the twenty-first century. There is a complacent duality in the common approaches to Comparative Education studies, which has created the impression that one can discuss and analyse decades of changes and interrelated developments in education settings from only one viewpoint. In so many important respects, and with a specific look towards Germany and Transnational German Education, we are certain that this model of Comparative Education is outdated. Questioning the Market Model Working on a volume on German transnational education opened the opportunity for us to invite contributions from junior and senior scholars, education experts, teachers, education practitioners and government officials. Some wrote about how they challenge the dull and dangerous consensus on market-based higher education and its ideological approach that is withering the intellectual function of the university. The managerial, efficiency-obsessed narrative of neoliberalism, which has colonised higher education across the world for the last several decades, is placing transnational cooperation and dialogue within a narrow transactional logic of profit and market arrangements. In effect, the ideological framework at the heart of most higher education systems is taking democratisation and multi-voiced dissent as a threat to the proper functioning of the education industry market. Alternative thinking is presented as a threat against all, not against a particular perspective or ideological fundamentalism. Genuine critiques and alternative solutions are presented or approached as an attack against prosperity, progress and institutional development. This is, in fact, just a natural point of convergence for all totalitarian narratives. Soviet intellectuals discovered very soon that any inconvenient idea was not taken as an attack on leaders (or managers), but as an effort to undermine the common good, the social order, prosperity and success. Such an approach had to be ignored (for a while), publicly ridiculed and ultimately sanctioned. The irrationality of the free and unregulated market model overruns education, health, access to clear air and water and even some of the most personal spaces such as individual privacy, emotions and personal agency. The rule is that, if any space is opened to markets and profit, all other rules or considerations are trumped by a mythology that ignores, with remarkable obstinacy, any evidence that can suggest an alternative approach. Commercialisation has been leading to a long list of serious dysfunctionalities as a principle governing higher education. It has created a new context for higher

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education, with positive changes, such as the expansion of access and research, as well as negatives ones such as the withering of intellectual discourse and the marketisation of thinking. Taking into Account the Global Political Climate We are at a point where the increase in isolationism, border separations and the compulsion to build disunion walls—metaphoric or concrete—is all requiring a new, insightful and far-reaching effort to defend civilisation. Transnational education can be a tool to actually create new colonising narratives or an efficient way to deal with risks presented by mindless agreement on various marketing and political sloganeering, neoliberal and free-market fundamentalisms and intolerant discourse. Higher learning is now facing challenges ranging from the fascist nature of what the mass media are superficially labelling “populism” or an “anti-establishment” wave, the “supremacist”, nationalist and fascist backslide, to the set of tech-solutions that are subtly promoting the pseudo-science of eugenics or the aggressive anti-intellectual tendencies of various extremist movements. These are all shaping a treacherous future and require an answer; however, academia mostly ignored as marginal the risk represented by new vast manipulations, misinformation, post-truth narratives and—most of all—totalitarian approaches. One possible explanation can be that higher education itself adopted a culture shaped by an intolerant ideology, focused on “efficiencies” and profit. Nevertheless, it becomes clear now that academics have to restructure and reaffirm the culture of genuine and courageous inquiry, intellectual dissent and originality, thereby countering simplistic solutions and magical thinking. A Critical Transnational Focus In this context, a volume analysing transnational education is a refreshing opportunity to reflect on the fact that internationalisation and transnational cooperation were key principles in the establishment of the very first modern universities, since the University of Bologna was set up in the eleventh century. Since then, knowledge has been considered free and universal by universities, shared and explored for the benefit of human civilisation. We can restructure our perspective considering that, around the fifteenth century, Erasmus of Rotterdam was studying in France, England, Belgium and Italy—a transnational scholar. His name still inspires, in the twenty-first century, the EU program for education, training, youth and sport, the most developed program of student exchanges in the world. This sense of normality, even making the simple effort of thinking about cross-border higher education beyond the narrow understanding represented by commercial interests, is vital to rebuild the ethos of academia and the strength required to answer its challenges. A new survey of transnational issues, including topics such as education beyond national boundaries, the aim to decolonise discourse, building cross-border institutional cooperation, exploring language and transnational contexts or multicultural and cross-cultural competencies in teaching and learning in higher education, offers a different starting point for the necessary change.

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Editors’ Notes

This volume is not the solution to any of the challenges already presented, and it never aimed to be a solution. It is a collection of studies on what should be relevant for us to think about when academia pieces together the complex puzzle required for a sustainable and less worrying future for education. Stefan Popenici Charles Darwin University Benjamin Nickl The University of Sydney

Introduction

Transnational German Education Editors in Conversation with Prof. Xiaohu Feng, University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, PR China, President of Beijing Humboldt Forum TGE EDITORS: PROFESSOR FENG:

What did initially attract you to German Studies? Well, I must say, in the beginning, it was based on very practical considerations. I did the national college entrance examination, the so-called Gao Kao, in 1978. At that time, there were not many subjects that could be chosen at the universities. I asked my father for advice. He said that a foreign language like German could be a good choice for my future, because compared with English, German was still a less commonly used language, which means I could be very competitive in the job market after college study; furthermore, the country has also a very positive image in China. So I followed his advice. After graduating from college, I did get a decent job as translator for the government. But the more skilled I was in the language, the more I wanted to learn about the country and its culture. So I went back to college at 25 to take a post-graduate class at Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU). Between 1990 and 1992, I received a DAAD-scholarship as visiting scholar to the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. After 12 years studying its language, it was my first time seeing the country with my own eyes. In 1995, I became a doctoral candidate at BFSU in German linguistics and received my doctorate in 1999. In 2003, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

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provided me with a fellowship for postdoctoral research, which allowed me to undertake a project about cognitive metaphors at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Germany. Let’s say I did not fall in love with German Studies at first sight, but I have recognised its beauty during the study. And of course, the financial support from German foundations have enhanced my love of it. TGE EDITORS: PROFESSOR FENG:

TGE EDITORS: PROFESSOR FENG:

How does your background in German Studies relate to your current position at UIBE in Beijing? I have been teaching German language at UIBE since 1989. In 2013, I initiated and organised the Beijing Humboldt Forum (BHF) at UIBE, which is nowadays annually supported by the AvH-Foundation and UIBE. More than 5000 guests not only from Germany but also from the whole world have taken part in the BHF. Besides that, I am Director of the Sino-German-Center for Economics and Culture and Acting Director of the Austria Center for Culture. What role does German higher education play in China in 2019? It is a very good question. I think because of the stereotyping of Prussians, German higher education speaks for a system with virtues like efficiency and discipline in China. On the other hand, although the Chinese students, like other international students in Germany, are more likely to choose a university over a university of applied sciences, the latter, the so-called Fachhochschule (FH), has always been seen as a role model for the vocational education in China because of its dual system; however, there are two different types in the dual system: so-called “Duale Ausbildung” and “Duales Studium”. Actually, the “Duale Ausbildung” is the traditional vocational education in China, which mainly focuses on the praxis and technical skills; “Duales Studium” is, however, a modern education form which brings the academic theory-learning and praxis together, which means besides the practical experience, the students could also receive an academic degree that is acknowledged by most of the countries in the world.

Introduction

TGE EDITORS:

PROFESSOR FENG:

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Please present to us the history and impact of The Beijing Humboldt Forum from the perspective of a local Chinese scholar involved with German Studies. What do you find is the Forum’s main purpose? The first Beijing-Humboldt-Forum (BHF) in 2013 was held as a side event of the EU-China Summit co-chaired by Premier Li Keqiang of the State Council and President José Manuel Barroso of the European Commission. As an international conference, BHF has been successfully held six times and takes place regularly every year on the third weekend of September at UIBE. Focusing on “Green Economy” and “Cultural Heritage”, Beijing Humboldt Forum pays close attention to social hot topics such as “Urbanisation”, “Sinology”, and “Sustainable Utilisation of Raw Materials”, “Area Studies”, “Green Building”, “Industry 4.0”, “AI and Linguistic Research”, and so on. Besides the conference reports, Beijing Humboldt Forum cooperates with domestic and international high-end scientific research institutions and organizes different sessions every year. Each year, BHF invites a number of representatives from different universities and research institutes, as well as domestic and international business leaders together, to join the sessions to review and analyse the key points and hot issues, which provides all the members with an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective during the discussions. Beijing Humboldt Forum, as a standing conference of UIBE, also offers an academic platform for all the young students, including the students from UIBE, to learn, communicate and expand the international horizon. Many students of UIBE have successfully set up ties through the active participation of academic reports on BHF with academic institutes in Germany and then gone abroad for further study. Seven of them have gained scholarships from the China Scholarship Council (CSC) and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Germany.

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TGE EDITORS: PROFESSOR FENG:

TGE EDITORS:

PROFESSOR FENG:

TGE EDITORS:

PROFESSOR FENG:

Introduction

What do you think the Forum will look like in 10 years from now? Well, I always preach that the BHF will be another Davos, but not only focusing on economy, but also on culture. Meanwhile, the BHF will always have a close cooperation with the universities, because one of the main purposes that will be never changed is giving our young students an international platform to present themselves as well as to have the chance to view the world from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective. You are collaborating closely with German higher education institutions like the DAAD. What do these collaborations look like and how have they changed over time? At the beginning, my collaborations with German higher education institutions like the DAAD, AvH or other institutions were more from the individual aspect, like scholarships or invitations for short-term visiting. I sincerely appreciate the help I received from German institutions and devote myself to repaying it. Nowadays, I am glad that our collaboration is not only on the individual level, but extended to an institutional level. The Beijing Humboldt Forum mentioned before is, for example, the result of our international cooperation with different German institutions. You are part of UIBE’s Foreign Studies faculty and UIBE offers a German Studies program. Can you describe the structure of the program? Of course. The German Studies program that UIBE offers consists of a four-year bachelor degree program and two-year Masters degree program. In the bachelor program, the students will learn not only rules of German grammar but also the culture. Furthermore, as a University focusing on Business and Economics, we also provide courses for Business Management and Economics in German and encourage the students to take part in courses given by other Faculty like Principles of Management, Financial Accounting, Corporate Finance, Applied Statistics, Probability and Statistics, Principles of Marketing, Business English and so on. In the Masters program, there are four subject areas that could be chosen: German literature, German linguistics, German law, and German economics.

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The highlight of the German Studies program is our Business Management (Betriebswirtschaftslehre) 4+2 class, which is jointly organized by the Foreign Studies faculty and three related German universities (FriedrichAlexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, JustusLiebig-Universität Gießen and Universität Potsdam). After graduating from UIBE with a bachelor degree, students who meet the requirements of German universities have the opportunity to choose the Master of Business Management (BWL) program in one of the three related German universities. TGE EDITORS: PROFESSOR FENG:

What careers do students in this program pursue? It depends. Out of their skilled German language and academic training about international business economics, a lot of our students make a career in international companies like BMW or VW. There are also quite a lot of students who work in education institutions like DAAD or Neworiental, a famous language training company and have done a really good job in making contributions to the international cultural exchange. Except for applying for a job, a proportion of our alumni devote themselves to academic research in the areas of economics or German studies, and apply for Ph.D. programs abroad. I am proud of all of them.

TGE EDITORS:

What do you think motivates Chinese undergraduate and Chinese graduate students to study in Germany? First of all, I have mentioned, the German higher education has a very good reputation in China. Furthermore, comparing with England or USA, where the tuition fees for college are so high that lots of parents have to give up the idea of sending their children abroad, most German universities offer free higher education to domestic and international students alike, which makes Germany become a very popular study destination standing alongside the US, the UK, Canada and Australia for Chinese students. According to Statista 2019, China is the largest source of international students at German universities and the proportion of Chinese students amounts to 10% of the total population of international students in Germany. In the Winter Semester of 2017/2018, there were nearly 40,000 Chinese students enrolled in German higher education institutions.

PROFESSOR FENG:

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Moreover, Germany is one of the most advanced countries in Europe, which means the students with experience studying in Germany could have a good chance of a career in Germany; on the other hand, they would also be competitive in the domestic job market. Of course, there are also some private motives which make Chinese students want to study in Germany. For example, the love of football or German cars. TGE EDITORS: PROFESSOR FENG:

TGE EDITORS:

PROFESSOR FENG:

TGE EDITORS: PROFESSOR FENG:

And why do you believe German students come to China for exchange programs? China is a vibrant country and one of the world’s oldest civilizations. Taking part in exchange programs in China, German students will have the chance to explore life in the fast-paced commercial hubs of China with an intriguing history, like Beijing, Shanghai or Chengdu. It is also a good opportunity for them to get an overview of Chinese language and culture as well as an understanding of China’s place in the modern world. In recent years, more and more international students come to China for study or exchange. Almost 20 percent students at UIBE are international students from all over the world. Do you think transnational joint university collaborations are the future for the Chinese-German higher education sector? Yes, of course. Transnational joint university collaborations are truly mainstream now for the Chinese-German higher education sector. In 2015, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) released a “China Strategy 2015–2020”, which strongly supports the collaboration between Chinese and German universities from the political aspect. What do you think is the main attraction for China to collaborate with German higher education institutions? In my opinion, the main attraction for China to collaborate with German higher education institutions is that the students who are interested in the country, the people, the culture, the most developed technics and the language, for instance, could have the chance to study abroad at partner universities as well as to join courses in China, which are offered by experts from partner higher education institutions in Germany.

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TGE EDITORS: PROFESSOR FENG:

What can each country learn from the other? Well, in this world of globalisation, I think lots of stereotypes are changing. So it is hard to say “one country” learns from “the other”. But I think the elementary education in China has a lot of advantages that could be introduced to Germany. You can criticize the Chinese elementary education system all you want, but the fact is that the students with this elementary education background are always the top performers in international competitions. As far as I know, many British Schools have already adopted Chinese Maths Textbooks to improve the Maths skills of their children. On the other hand, the German higher education system has a very long tradition and a global reputation for doctoral research and vocational education, which China is learning from.

TGE EDITORS:

Which of Germany’s university and higher education structures has China taken on board and why? The “Lehrstuhl”-structure, in English: a senior professor is a “chair”, which means such a professor is not only a teacher of one subject, but is responsible for one whole research area or direction at the university. Such a professor can lead a team which consists of students and junior teachers interested in this area, and could lead them directly to pursue research projects. In my opinion, it is a win-win-win model for the professors, students and universities.

PROFESSOR FENG:

TGE EDITORS:

PROFESSOR FENG:

What do you think are common misunderstandings about Chinese education systems from a German perspective? Well, I think it may be the criticism that the Chinese education system is just an “exam-machine” without encouraging the innovative characters of our children. Actually, our children today have so many possibilities to learn things that they really like - the things that I could not imagine in my childhood, like building model airplanes or cars, learning how to paint in oils, how to play the piano, and so on. But, of course, if you really want to achieve something, you need to work hard. No pain, no gain—it works for the whole world.

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TGE EDITORS:

PROFESSOR FENG:

Introduction

What does the future hold for German higher education in China? And Chinese higher education in Germany? Are there any trends? German higher education could extend the partnerships in China and build up more cooperation with the universities in the so-called “second-class” cities. Not only the metropolitan ones, like Beijing or Shanghai. And China could be offering more exchange programs with bilingual courses in German and Mandarin. I think both sides will keep working in the future to keep this cooperation flourishing.

Contents

Positioning Transnational Education in Germany Germany’s Road Towards Transnational Provision of Higher Education and Its Footprint in China and Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Kammüller, Susanne Otte and Wiebke Bachmann

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Transnational Education in the 21st Century and Its Quality Assurance from a German Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Katrin Mayer-Lantermann

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The Emergence of Transnationalisation of Higher Education of German Universities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nadin Fromm and Alexander Raev

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Teaching Transnational German Studies Across the Globe Outside the Nation: Taking Stock of a Sense of Duty and Diversity in German Studies Abroad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Benjamin Nickl

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The State of Diversity and Decolonization in North American German Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ervin Malakaj

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The Language-Culture Nexus: German Teaching in a Culturally Rich Environment as Part of the German Model of Cultural Diplomacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Irina Herrschner Comparative Perspectives on Education Policy and Strategies Bilingual German Childhood Education and School Transition: Literature Review and Policy Suggestions for Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Ivy Zhou

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Juggling Selves: Navigating Pre-service Teaching Experiences in Overseas Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Michiko Weinmann, Rod Neilsen and Isabel Martin Transnational Institutions of Higher Education and Their Contribution to the National Innovation System: The Case of the German University of Technology in Oman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Ann Vogel Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Subject Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Dr. Benjamin Nickl is a Lecturer at the University of Sydney. He holds several qualifications in secondary teaching and higher education and a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is interested in contemporary narratives of Transnational German Education as they relate to issues of social connectivity among majority and minority populations and the role of German Studies programmes and lecturers outside the German nation state. e-mail: [email protected] Dr. Stefan Popenici served for over 22 years in teaching, research and leadership in higher education across Europe, Canada, USA, Philippines, New Zealand and Australia. He is currently working at Charles Darwin University as a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education. Dr. Popenici was associated with various think tanks, research groups and universities and was awarded a knighthood for his services to education and research by the President of Romania. e-mail: [email protected] Dr. Deane Blackler was a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Australia, before she returned to secondary education in a senior role. She also taught in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Tasmania where she completed a Ph.D. in Literary Studies, on the writing of W. G. Sebald. She holds Masters Degrees in Education and English from the University of Melbourne and works now as an independent scholar, maintaining a dual interest in education and literature, believing that each must continue to inform the other in a civilised world. e-mail: [email protected]

Contributors Wiebke Bachmann Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Bonn, Germany Nadin Fromm Universität Kassel, Kassel, Germany xxiii

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Editors and Contributors

Irina Herrschner The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Susanne Kammüller Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Bonn, Germany Ervin Malakaj The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Isabel Martin Karlsruhe University of Education, Karlsruhe, Germany Katrin Mayer-Lantermann Stiftung Akkreditierungsrat, Bonn, Germany Rod Neilsen Deakin University, Victoria, Australia Benjamin Nickl The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Susanne Otte Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Bonn, Germany Alexander Raev Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany Ann Vogel Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany Michiko Weinmann Deakin University, Victoria, Australia Ivy Zhou The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Positioning Transnational Education in Germany

Germany’s Road Towards Transnational Provision of Higher Education and Its Footprint in China and Turkey Susanne Kammüller, Susanne Otte and Wiebke Bachmann

Abstract The development of German activities in the transnational provision of higher education has been subject to specific national conditions, which also influence the prevailing modes of engagement chosen by German universities in Transnational Education (TNE) or International Programme and Provider Mobility (IPPM). The chapter begins with a discussion of terminology with reference to the conditions for German TNE-IPPM activity. The main motivations and drivers which have shaped the development and profile of Germany as a provider of TNE-IPPM are outlined, followed by an overview of the scope, geographical distribution and general profile of German TNE-IPPM provision. The chapter then discusses two aspects which feature prominently in the overall picture: The involvement of German higher education institutions (HEI) in the establishment and running of new universities abroad operating on German models of higher education, and the large share of universities of applied science (UAS) in the overall German TNE-IPPM activity. Concluding the chapter, both aspects are further explored in two case studies of China and Turkey which address the German TNE-IPPM engagement in China and Turkey against the backdrop of these countries’ strategies to develop and internationalise their higher education sectors.

S. Kammüller (B) · S. Otte · W. Bachmann Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. Otte e-mail: [email protected] W. Bachmann e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Nickl et al. (eds.), Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2_1

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Development and Profile of German TNE-IPPM Terminology: Transnational Education as International Programme and Provider Mobility For almost three decades, “transnational education” has been a topic of scholarly and political discourse on the international dimension of higher education. The term TNE has found a place in institutional development plans, national strategies and policy papers as well as international declarations of intent for cooperation and joint policies. Given the visibility and prominence of the term, it seems only rational to assume that there exists a shared definition and understanding of what exactly transnational education is and which modes of international engagement in higher education are to be subsumed under the generic term. This assumption, however, is misleading. The search for an appropriate terminology to name, describe and analyse the new forms of international academic mobility arising since the 1990s has been a recurring topic in higher education research and discourse. Closely related to the issue of a lacking common terminology is the lack of comparable data on TNE-IPPM.1 On the one hand, the generic term “transnational education” stands alongside several other terms like “crossborder (higher) education” (CBHE), “offshore (higher) education” or “borderless (higher) education” which are used in literature to cover a similar, but not always quite the same, range of phenomena and in addition “have different meaning both within and across countries and between different national, regional and international organisations” (Knight and McNamara 2017, p. 6). The situation gains in complexity from the fact that numerous terms and definitions for different modes of activity are in use, some of them coined by academics for research purposes, some introduced by official bodies who adopt and use the terms they deem best suited to their working context and needs in fulfilling their tasks in overseeing, regulating or assuring the quality of higher education offers under their respective purview. The most commonly used generic terms, TNE and CBHE, share the implication, however, that borders, whether political, linguistic, cultural or regulatory, do exist, and that these borders are crossed—which leaves the question of who or what does the crossing. According to a frequently cited definition, TNE refers to all “types of higher education study programmes, or sets of courses of study, or educational services (including those of distance education) in which the learners are located in a country different from the one where the awarding institution is based” (Council of Europe 2002). Discussing the phenomenon from the perspective of German higher education in a position paper, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) has embraced a definition with a slightly shifted focus: “Transnational education (TNE) refers to 1 See numerous works of Jane Knight, for example Knight 2005 and 2016, and articles by Nigel M.

Healey (2015), to name just two authors who repeatedly dealt with the typology and terminology of TNE-IPPM.

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universities, courses and individual study modules that are offered abroad essentially for students from the respective country or region, while the main academic responsibility lies with a university in another country. Academic responsibility first of all refers to content (curricula), but typically embraces at least some of the following elements as well: German faculty, degrees awarded and quality assurance conducted by the German university” (DAAD 2014). This understanding of TNE-IPPM is complemented by a “Code of Conduct for German Higher Education Projects Abroad”, jointly initiated and approved by the DAAD and the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK) in 2013, which lays down a couple of qualitative and ethical minimum standards for German TNE-IPPM activities ranging from aspects of governance and quality standards to guaranteeing academic freedom and non-discriminatory access (DAAD and HRK 2014). In contrast to the cited definition of the Lisbon Convention, the defining criterion adopted here is not primarily a degree award—even though degree award is one of several features ascribed to TNE as possible, but not necessarily indispensable features—but academic responsibility for the contents and quality of study programmes delivered abroad. This understanding of TNE endorses inter-institutional forms of collaboration which, notwithstanding a high level of involvement, input and oversight by a foreign “providing” university (or universities), might lead to a degree that is not awarded by the “providing” university involved but by a local partner university at which the TNE programme is operated. As will be seen below, this shift of focus from degree award to academic responsibility reflects the surrounding conditions and predominant features of German TNE engagement. The common ground between the two cited definitions of transnational (higher) education is the shared understanding that TNE essentially is about academic content, structures and institutions from one country moving across national borders to students in another country and, thus, needs to be distinguished from an understanding of international mobility which focuses on individual students who move from one country into another for their academic education. This seemingly simple, but fundamental, differentiation lies at the bottom of the generic term “International Programme and Provider Mobility”, adopted in this paper as TNE-IPPM, which has been proposed by Knight and McNamara (2017) along with a classification framework intended to enable the categorisation of different forms of activities in different contexts. The classification framework and recommendations are one of the results of several years of collaboration in jointly commissioned research of the DAAD and the British Council. As a fundamental organising principle, the framework differentiates between academically “independent” or stand-alone activities, which operate under the academic responsibility for content, delivery and external quality assurance of a foreign HEI and lead to a degree of the foreign provider, and “collaborative” TNE-IPPM provision, in which a foreign sending HEI and a local hosting HEI work together on one or all of the above aspects and which involves several different models of degree award (Knight and McNamara 2017). As will be shown below, this distinction is of specific relevance to the TNE-IPPM activity of German HEI.

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Overall Conditions and Major Players Influencing the Development TNE-IPPM unfolded from the late 1980s onwards as a response to economic globalisation. A rising need for qualified labour and, hence, increasing unmet demand for higher education in emerging and developed economies coincided with decreasing public funds for higher education in some countries with highly developed higher education systems. In the wake of the global liberalisation of trade relations, higher education emerged as a tradeable good on a new international market. On the one hand, this led to a rapid increase in international student mobility. On the other hand, universities in major destination countries of international student mobility, notably Australia and the UK, were encouraged by their governments to find new revenue sources in order to balance shrinking state funding for higher education, and in addition to recruiting fee-paying international students to their own campuses increasingly offered their university programmes and degrees abroad in franchise arrangements, twinning programmes, branch campuses or other forms of “off-shore” delivery. In comparison to other major providing countries, Germany at first sight made a later entry on the scene of TNE-IPPM. The starting conditions for German HEI to engage as providers of TNE-IPPM study programmes were determined by a largely state-funded higher education system dominated by public institutions which offer tuition-free university education to German and international students, accompanied by limited possibilities to enter into commercial activities due to a lack of venture capital, a lack of entrepreneurial experience and—depending on differing higher education legislations of the German Federal States or Bundesländer—varying degrees of legal restrictions to acting as commercial enterprises abroad. Confronted with the expansion of an international market for higher education in combination with an intensifying “global race-for-talent” and notwithstanding politically unquestioned state funding for higher education, German universities as well as the German government began to feel the need to participate and position themselves in the expanding international higher education market in order to stay in touch with international developments and safeguard the compatibility and reputation of Germany and its higher education and science system. To be able to establish their own study programmes and create constant presences abroad, however, German HEI needed financial support and political encouragement. Around the turn of the millennium, a major impulse for the development of German TNE provision came from the Federal Government of Germany, more precisely the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), in the context of a new national strategic move for the internationalisation of German universities. In 2001, a pilot call for applications for monies provided by the BMBF offered German universities seed funding for establishing their own study offers abroad. This first dedicated funding programme for TNE-IPPM, developed and managed by the DAAD, later on evolved into a regular funding scheme with annual application options and is to date the most important tool of systematic government support for TNE-IPPM

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activities of German universities. Besides numerous other TNE-IPPM presences of German universities, the scheme enables the ongoing involvement of German HEI in several binational universities. From the beginning, the funding scheme has highlighted the creation of international presences of German universities on the basis of already existing inter-institutional or interpersonal collaborations of university staff in teaching or research. Beginning a decade earlier, global political transformations, among them the end of the East-West block confrontation in Europe and the rise of China to new economic and political weight, fostered the creation of novel political, economic, scientific and cultural ties between countries. In combination with the increasing relevance of science and education for knowledge-based economies, international cooperation in education and science gained additional attention and importance as a tool of cultural diplomacy and development cooperation which became another decisive factor for the formation of TNE in Germany. In response to stimuli given by the German government as part of its foreign cultural, education and science policy, mainly but not exclusively by the Federal Foreign Office, German universities from the 1990s onward took up international activities at partner universities abroad which in practice constitute collaborative forms of TNE. With funding from the Federal Foreign Office, German universities have set up more than thirty degree programmes taught in German at partner universities in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia, engage in running a German faculty for Engineering and Business Studies (FDIBA) at the Technical University Sofia, and participate in the establishment of a German-speaking university (Andrássy Gyula University) in Hungary. Other major activities supported by the Federal Foreign Office include the involvement of a German university consortium at the German-Kazakh University and the establishment of a Sino-German University College, which offers Masters degree programmes at Tongji University in Shanghai. The latter was later complemented by the establishment of a second joint college offering undergraduate programmes, the Sino-German College for Advanced Sciences, which will be discussed in more detail below. Another governmental player, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, also supports individual university projects with strong TNE-IPPM characteristics, the most notable example being the establishment of a new specialised university, the German-Mongolian Institute for Resources and Technology (GMIT), as a binational collaborative venture involving several technical universities from Germany. The funds allocated by the German Federal Government to TNE are not assigned directly to the German universities but are made available through the DAAD. A member organisation of the German universities dedicated to the internationalisation of the German system of higher education and research, the DAAD defines funding policies and designs the conditions, criteria and procedures for the distribution and monitoring of government funds allocated to TNE under the DAAD’s remit. Through its combined roles as intermediary agency and strategic advisor, the DAAD has been a major influencing factor for the evolvement of the German TNE-IPPM profile and strategy.

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German universities as autonomous entities utilise the government funds offered through the DAAD by designing project proposals for setting up TNE-IPPM presences based on their internationalisation strategies and interests. With little to no financial gains to be expected, the focus of interest for German HEI as TNEIPPM providers is related to internationalisation: By establishing a constant presence abroad, German HEI aim to position themselves internationally, enhance their reputation, expand their networks for teaching and research, add to the international experience and intercultural competence of their staff through assignments to the TNE-IPPM location, increase student diversity at the home institution by integrated study stays of students from the TNE-IPPM location in Germany and by post-grad students recruited from among their TNE-IPPM graduates, and also with the goal to opening up additional destinations of temporary study abroad stays for German students. The engagement of German HEI in the provision of TNE-IPPM thus developed within the interplay of very different political, sectorial and institutional interests. Their combined impact has resulted in an approach to TNE-IPPM which favours partnerships and an alignment of interest of all parties involved and sees the added value of TNE-IPPM not in revenue generation for German HEI, but primarily in its effects for the internationalisation of higher education and research in Germany and in its potential as a tool to reach broader political goals.

Statistical Overview of German TNE-IPPM Provision The exact scope of TNE-IPPM provision can only be estimated. Unlike national higher education statistics in Australia or the UK, the data collections on higher education of the German Federal and Länder statistic agencies do not include TNEIPPM as separate entities. A fairly comprehensive and to date the only regular collection of data on TNE-IPPM activities operated by German HEI is conducted by the DAAD through annual data requests to the German HEI which receive or previously received funding. As a consequence, the national data on German TNE-IPPM provision, which are annually updated and published in print and online at the website www.wissenschaftweltoffen.de, cannot be considered as covering the complete picture since they do not comprise any TNE activities by German universities which were established without DAAD support. In light of the general conditions for German HEI to engage in TNE-IPPM outlined above, however, the level of activity without any DAAD involvement at some point in time is expected to be low. The results of rare quantitative research on TNE-IPPM in Germany so far corroborate this assumption. To cite a recent example, a survey on franchise and validation models in German higher education conducted as groundwork to the formulation of recommendations on their regulation and quality assurance by the German Council of Science and Humanities identified merely 20 degree courses franchised by German HEI to education providers outside the country with a total enrolment of 692 students in the winter semester of 2015/16 (Wissenschaftsrat 2017), against 261 TNE-IPPM

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programmes with 28,500 enrolled students reported in Wissenschaft weltoffen for the same period (DAAD and DZHW 2016). The research covered franchise and validation models including those with non-university partners, which are, in general, not sponsored by the DAAD. The data from Wissenschaft weltoffen 2019 presented below can therefore be assumed to present the statistically verified majority of overall activities. The exception is distant education delivered by German HEI to students in other countries, which is not covered by any of the available data collections. It should also be noted that the data on German TNE-IPPM presented below exclude the majority of the more than 742 (as of June 2018) double degree programmes with foreign HEI registered with the German Rectors’ conference (DAAD, AvH and HRK 2019, p. 108). These programmes, the clear majority of which are operated jointly by German HEI with university partners within the European Union and in the USA, are predominantly geared toward reciprocal student exchange and usually reflect a more balanced form of inter-institutional cooperation than the sending-hosting relationship that dominate even in collaborative forms of TNE-IPPM. At the beginning of the academic year 2018/2019, German universities and binational universities and institutes with German involvement reported a total 33,000 enrolled students in more than 280 degree programmes (DAAD and DZHW 2019). With regard to study fields, STEM subjects dominate the German TNE-IPPM study offer with 63% of overall enrolment, with engineering holding the lion’s share with 52% of enrolled students in TNE-IPPM, followed by Law, economic and social sciences with 30%, and Mathematics and natural sciences with 11% (see Table 1). The overwhelming majority of 81% of students in the recorded TNE programmes study towards a first degree, that is, a bachelor’s or comparable. 17% are enrolled in Masters level programmes (see Table 2). German HEI engage in TNE-IPPM activities at about 65 locations in 26 countries worldwide. In terms of regional distribution, the largest share of students with 61% are enrolled in the Middle East and North Africa, followed by Asia with 20%, Central and South-Eastern Europe with 11% and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus with 8%. Small groups of less than 1% of students are enrolled in German TNE-IPPM programmes in Latin America and Sub-Sahara Africa. A comparison of the most important host countries and single locations of German TNE-IPPM in terms of student numbers (see Table 3a, b) reveals very high numbers of Table 1 Students in German TNE-IPPM programmes by field, in 2019 Field of study

Absolute

Engineering

In per cent (%)

17,528

53

Law, economics and social sciences

9888

30

Mathematics and natural sciences

3594

11

Arts, sports, music

1470

4

458

1

7

0

Languages and humanities Human medicine Source DAAD and DZHW (2019)

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Table 2 Students in German TNE-IPPM programmes by level of targeted degree in 2018/2019 Level

2018/19 Absolute

In per cent (%)

27,032

82

5683

17

PhD

264

1

Others

208

1

Bachelor’s (or equivalent) Masters (or equivalent)

Source DAAD and DZHW (2019) Table 3 a Student enrolment in German TNE-IPPM: top ten host countries, b Student enrolment in German TNE-IPPM: top ten single locations Host country

2018/2019 Absolute

In per cent of total enrolment (%)

(a) Egypt

13,093

40

Jordan

4346

13

China

3356

10

Oman

2172

7

Turkey

1860

6

Vietnam

1443

4

Romania

669

2

Singapore

658

2

Kyrgyzstan

633

2

Kazakhstan

630

2

Total enrolment worldwide Location

33,187

100

Absolute

In per cent of total enrolment (%)

12,935

39

4339

13

Muscat

2172

7

Shanghai

2024

6

(b) Cairo Amman

Istanbul

1794

5

Ho Chi Minh City

1386

4

Qingdao

1000

3

Singapore

669

2

Almaty

633

2

Bishkek

630

2

DAAD and DZHW (2019)

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students not only in countries, but also at particular locations, most notably in Cairo, Amman and Muscat. These three cities are the seat of the three largest binational universities with German participation at present. Further locations of binational university foundations in the Top Ten of cities with German TNE-IPPM activities are located in Ho Chi Minh City, Istanbul and Almaty. The five biggest institutions alone account for 67% of registered TNE-IPPM students. While the dominance of STEM fields may be interpreted to reflect the perceived strengths of the German higher education system and economy which attract students to choose a study programme with involvement of German HEI, the concentration of enrolment in certain places illustrates the significance of binational university founding in the context of German TNE-IPPM activities. This does not apply to China and the city of Shanghai, however. Instead, small to mid-sized activities with less than 500 students make China the third largest host country of German TNEIPPM and bring Shanghai to fourth position among the locations with the highest numbers of enrolments.

Forms of Engagement: Collaboration and Binational Universities Prevailing Modes Under the impact of the conditions and interests outlined above, the TNE-IPPM engagement of German HEI has developed a profile that is characterised by a dominance of collaborative forms. Examining the data of German TNE-IPPM provision in application of the Common TNE classification framework for IPPM (Knight and McNamara 2017), less than 8% of the 283 recorded TNE-IPPM programmes fall under the category “independent provision”. Of these, 13 programmes are operated at four branch campuses (of Technical University Munich in Singapore, Technical University Berlin in El Gouna, Egypt, Friedrich-Alexander University ErlangenNürnberg in Busan, Korea, and Heidelberg University in Santiago de Chile) and eight programmes are delivered in some kind of franchise agreement. The overwhelming majority of 226 or almost 93% registered degree programmes, however, belong to one of the two collaborative categories of TNE-IPPM. They are either “partnership programmes”, that is, degree programmes offered in academic partnership with existing local host universities which integrate the programme into their course portfolio, or study programmes offered at one of the “joint” or binational universities, as they are usually called in Germany. The latter account for staggering 73% of enrolment in the recorded TNE-IPPM activities of German HEI. The generic term “binational university” refers to a group of HEI which have been established and are run in close cooperation with German universities with the aim to transfer German models of higher education into the seat countries’ higher education systems. The existing binational universities in Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Mongolia and Turkey each has a history of its own, some owing their existence to the initiative of individual founders, others established on

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political initiative and intergovernmental agreements. The new-founded universities are independent, private or state-owned institutions which are fully integrated in the local higher education systems and fully governed by the national law of the seat country; in some cases—the Turkish German University discussed below among them—they operate on special legal status. The main cost for infrastructure as well as basic operations and staffing are usually borne by the seat country, either by private investors or public funding, while the German side funds the involvement of German HEI and additional elements which reinforce a perceptible element of “Germanness” at the binational institution, like German language tuition or summer schools, study stays and work placements in Germany. The involvement of German HEI in these institutions is quite complex, takes different forms and may include responsibility for curricular design, quality assurance, capacity building of local teaching staff, delegation of teaching staff from Germany, and participation in the institutional boards and committees, among other things. Typically, several German HEI work together. By sharing the load, they reduce the strain on each institution’s financial, administrative and academic capacity and jointly ensure a lasting and sustainable participation of the German side. The models for degree-awarding powers at binational universities vary, depending on their different contexts and histories. Some of the new institutions award exclusively their own degrees, in some cases with a German accreditation. At others, students earn a degree from one of the German partner universities, alone or in a double-degree arrangement with the binational institution. The most visible examples of German engagement, and by far the largest in terms of student numbers, binational universities have become something like the flagship model for Germany’s collaborative TNE-IPPM profile. One of them, the Turkish-German University, will be discussed in more detail below.

Universities of Applied Sciences in German TNE-IPPM Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) (in German: Hochschulen für Angewandte Wissenschaften or Fachhochschulen) were introduced in Germany as a second strand of university education from the late 1960s. The establishment of an alternative academic path followed the goal to complement classical, theory-oriented university education by an application-oriented, science-based form of higher education which especially in industry-related disciplines would educate a highly-qualified and skilled workforce. In the following decades, UAS have become an integral part of the higher education landscape in Germany, as well as in several neighbouring countries which later introduced their own forms of UAS. UAS degrees are aligned with the Bologna system and treated as fully coequal to other university degrees. Especially in the engineering fields but also in other disciplines like social work, management or public administration, UAS today provide for a sizeable portion of 34% of all enrolments in university education in Germany.

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The specific pedagogic model of UAS combines theoretical learning with a high level of practical application under real-life working conditions, including compulsory industry internships of several months as an admission requirement and as part of the curriculum. The study programmes offered by UAS as well as their research activities are closely aligned with industry needs. To ensure this nexus, the requirements for the appointment of professors at UAS include several years professional experience in the respective field outside university in addition to academic credentials and teaching experience. Notwithstanding their success within their domestic context, UAS often face specific hurdles in terms of internationalisation for reasons connected with their particular pedagogic model, their often smaller size and their high degree of specialisation. In addition, UAS rely on close networks and industry engagement for the realisation of their pedagogic concept to ensure that their teaching and research constantly reflect and integrate the latest developments in industry. These in turn often come with and depend on strong regional bases. In classical cooperation models with university or industry partners in other countries, the specific traits of the applied academic teaching offered at UAS are often insufficiently known or understood. The specific strength of UAS on home ground thus might even stand in the way of creating international teaching and learning environments for UAS students and staff seeking to enhance their capabilities to work and interact with ease in globalised working environments. The degree of internationalisation of UAS therefore does often not adequately reflect their well-established status and success as knowledge producers and educators of highly-qualified and employable staff within their economic surroundings. Hence, the internationalisation of the model itself by offering it across national borders through TNE-IPPM activities, which are expected to reflect back on the home campus, makes UAS a possible and attractive solution to counter these inherent challenges. At this point, the institutional interests of UAS as potential TNE providers merge with the interest of potential host countries. Confronted with growing gaps between the skills of university graduates from traditional higher education and economic needs, governments, employers and students in emerging as well as developed economies look into alternative concepts of higher education that focus on the application and utilisation of high-level academic knowledge and skills in the work context. The sustained economic success of German industry and equally sustained low unemployment rates among youth and young university graduates in Germany add to the attractiveness of the UAS model as a potentially valuable addition to the university systems of other countries. As a result of these coinciding interests and needs, German UAS are more active in TNE-IPPM activities than the overall degree of internationalisation and their quantitative role in the higher education landscape of Germany might suggest. Annual statistical surveys of the internationality of German HEI show that UAS in all indicators reach lower levels of internationalisation than classical universities (cf. DAAD et al. 2019). Similarly, DAAD data on the participation of German HEI in funding programmes supporting institutional structures for internationality in the years 2010–2015, presented by the DAAD President to the annual conference of UAS

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chancellors in September 2015, display a disproportionately low participation of UAS (Wintermantel 2015). The notable exception is the funding programme for TNE: among all projects supported within this scheme, 52% were UAS-led in the years 2010–2015. The second largest of the binational universities with more than 4000 students, the German Jordanian university in Amman, fully adopts the UAS model and in doing so is supported by a network of more than 100 German UAS. In China, UAS are responsible for most German TNE-IPPM activity, which will be shown in the following paragraphs.

Applied Sciences in China: Model Transfer Through TNE-IPPM Expansion of Higher Education in China: A Balancing Act Between Quality, Quantity and Industry Demand China looks back on three millennia of educational tradition, but modern, Westernstyle universities have existed on Chinese soil for only a little longer than one century, and during that short time, the country saw several fundamental upheavals. The first universities were established from the last decade of the nineteenth century onwards. In the first half of the twentieth century, China saw a virtually uncontrolled growth of tertiary education with private and state-run, faith-based and secular institutions of varying type and quality existing in parallel. Despite first attempts to modernise and harmonise tertiary education between the end of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of the Communist era (1911–1949), the Chinese higher education system never attained a level of unified development. The foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the establishment of a centralised state marked the beginning of centralisation in higher education, as well. The strong bonds that existed at the time between the Chinese and the Russian Communist parties made Russia the first role model for Chinese higher education until the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when most universities were closed down and university life came to a virtual standstill. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the beginning of the reform period under Deng Xiaoping (1978ff) laid the foundation for the evolution of China’s present-day university system. Several higher education reforms under Deng and his successors since then have targeted universities as part of a greater effort to modernise the Chinese economy and society. China introduced new curricula and established a modern degree system, reinforced the national university entrance examination gaokao and introduced tuition fees. Universities were granted a certain degree of independence from the state, although the government still controls and heavily regulates the development of Chinese higher education. Since the 1990s, China has massively expanded its higher education system and at the same time made increasing efforts to enhance the quality and international competitiveness of its HEI. Several strategic programmes and heavy investment paved

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the way into international rankings for the first Chinese elite universities. At present, the “Double Excellence Programme” introduced in 2017 continues this policy by supporting a small group of about 100 of China’s more than 2560 HEI with the aim to position them as leading universities in international rankings. The increased financial support of just a relatively small group of universities has led to an imbalanced development. On the one hand there are the “leading universities” with a standard of education comparable to Western universities; on the other hand there are numerous underfinanced institutions of questionable quality, and with no reputation to speak of, which release graduates with little chance of a successful professional career. As a result, a paradoxical situation can be observed on an annual basis. Although the country is in dire need of qualified employees, university graduates cannot find employment because their education has not sufficiently prepared them for the job market. At the same time, prospective students and their parents shun vocational training opportunities, which are widely considered inferior. Backed by a centuries-old Confucian educational tradition, and reinforced by the wish to secure a better life for their offspring, the large majority of Chinese parents want a university education for their usually only child. Official media reports state that about 90% of university graduates do find a job but many experts doubt those reports (Goldberger 2017, p. 167). If Chinese pupils are not very successful in the gaokao examinations and fail to secure a place at one of the leading universities, the obvious alternative is available only to those two per cent of students (cf. DAAD 2017) whose parents can afford it: they send their children to study abroad, preferably in the “West”. This small fraction of China’s entire student population amounts to more than 860,000 individual students in 2016, making China by far the biggest source country of international student mobility (DAAD and DZHW 2019). For most Chinese students and for the country as a whole, however, studying abroad is not a viable solution to the quality and access issues of the higher education system in China. The issues outlined above did not go unnoticed by the Chinese government and higher education experts. Initiated by the then Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, in a New Year’s address in 2010, which voiced heavy criticism of the lack of diversity among Chinese HEI and wanting applicability in higher education teaching programmes (among other things), the Chinese government, after much public debate, published a long-term plan for a fundamental reform of the Chinese education system covering all sectors from pre-school to higher education and vocational training in July 2010. In 2014, the Chinese State Council announced a new development strategy in the field of “Technical and Vocational Education and Training” (TVET) for the years 2014–2020. Regarding tertiary education, the strategy envisaged the creation of two columns in higher education: On the one hand, the classic university education with bachelor, master and PhD degrees; on the other hand. a new type of vocational university. Institutions of both types are to award degrees of equal value and students are to be given an option to change freely between the two strands (Schmidt-Dörr 2015, p. 89ff). One possibility to ensure and to improve the quality of the national higher education system in general, and of the numerous institutions not capable of releasing graduates with competitive skills for the job market, is to look for competent and—in

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this case—foreign partners. Accordingly, the Chinese government from the 1990s onwards has encouraged partnerships with foreign universities; however, cooperation between foreign and Chinese universities has remained heavily regulated by the Chinese government, and foreign higher education providers are not allowed to offer their own degree programme without a Chinese partner. Therefore, “the vast majority of joint institutes operate as institutions affiliated to the parent Chinese university, on which they are dependent financially, as well as being integrated into its governance and management structure” (QAA 2017, p. 11). Very quickly, higher education providers from the UK took the lead, with 275 approved joint degree programmes and institutes reported in 2017, amounting to 22% of all “China-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools (CFCRS)”. The second and third positions were taken by the USA with 21% and Australia with 12% of all TNE partnerships in higher education (QAA 2017, p. 10f). In July 2018, however, the Chinese government announced the termination (or expiry) of 234 TNE partnership programmes, among them 62 of 245 Sino-British TNE programmes and 44 of 149 partnership programmes established with Australian HEI (ICEF Monitor 2018). Of the seven German partnership programmes on the list of closures, most had already been terminated at the time or never started, and none of them belonged to the TNE programmes supported with government funds by the DAAD.

German TNE-IPPM in China In comparison to the numbers of British, US-American and Australian TNE-IPPM co-operations in China, the share of German universities is relatively small, with 5% of the approved TNE-IPPM programmes and joint institutes reported by QAA (2017). According to German data, however, China, in terms of enrolment numbers, takes the third position of host countries for German TNE-IPPM (cf. Table 3). Among the German universities which are engaged in Sino-German cooperation projects, UAS form a particularly active group. At present, 14 out of 23 German TNE-IPPM degree programmes in China covered by DAAD data are run by UAS in collaboration with Chinese HEI. The majority offer bachelor’s degrees. A typical cooperation involves one, or more, degree programmes, mostly in engineering, leading to a double degree. The German side takes part of the teaching load in China with German flying faculty and integrated study stays of students in Germany for one or two terms. Initially established for Chinese students only, most of the programmes in the meantime have introduced study tracks for German students as well, mirroring the internationalisation interest of the German university partner. Even before the push for reform in 2010, the Chinese government looked to German UAS with their application-orientated teaching and strong relations to industry as a potential role model to prepare, or rather convert, a part of its tertiary education sector for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and the huge demand for highly-qualified and talented skilled employees.

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One of the most visible pioneering Sino-German TNE-IPPM collaborations for application-orientated higher education is the “Chinesisch-Deutsche Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften (CDHAW)—Chinese-German University for Applied Sciences”. Repeatedly listed as one of the three best Chinese-foreign university projects in Shanghai by the municipal government of the city, CDHAW was founded in 2004 as a pilot project on the joint initiative of the Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) and the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Both sides agreed upon Tongji University in Shanghai as the host institution, a Chinese research university with strong traditional ties to Germany and German universities. Another argument for choosing Tongji was its location in the Yangtse delta region, where German industry has a strong presence and German companies have been interested in well-qualified and employable Chinese graduates as employees. At present, CDHAW offers four bilingual bachelor’s programmes in engineering and industrial engineering, which are based on the curricula of programmes offered by German UAS in Germany. The programmes are ambitious, as Chinese students not only have to pursue their academic courses but are also required to learn German in preparation for the last year of their four-year study programme, which is spent at one of the German partner UAS as a precondition to qualify for a double degree. Since 2009, CDHAW has been opened for students from the German partner HEIs who can obtain a double degree, too. To date, more than 1625 Chinese and 609 German students graduated from CDHAW. The success of CDHAW inspired the German partner universities engaged at CDHAW to establish a formal German University Consortium for International Cooperation (DHIK—Deutsches Hochschulkonsortium für Internationale Kooperation) in 2014. DHIK aims to initiate further projects modelled on the example of CDHAW and to enhance the internationalisation of its German member UAS. With 30 member HEI (as of July 2019), the DHIK to date has set up another TNE-IPPM project in Mexico. Engagements in other countries are under discussion.2 While CDHAW came into being in a top-down approach upon government initiative, the majority of German TNE-IPPM activities in China were designed and started by the universities involved. Since the beginning of systematic support, the DAAD granted seed funding for 13 different TNE-IPPM projects of German universities with Chinese partners, among them 9 cooperations set up by UAS. Meanwhile, the majority of funded projects operate independently from DAAD-support after their successful establishment. One of the oldest Sino-German TNE-IPPM cooperative ventures based on institutional initiative is the “Shanghai Hamburg College” (SHC), a joint project started by the UAS Hamburg (HAW) and the University of Shanghai for Science & Technology (USST) in 1998 and funded by the DAAD from 2001 onwards. SHC offers bachelor’s programmes with double degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering as well as economics/business administration, which are supplemented by compulsory German language training. About one third of the teaching in Shanghai is delivered by

2 For

further information, see https://www.dhik.org/.

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German professors in the German language. The curriculum includes one practical semester which Chinese students usually spend at a German company. Other examples of successfully established permanent presences of German UAS in China include Technische Hochschule Lübeck, which offers several bachelor’s programmes with East China University of Technology (ECUST) in Shanghai and Zhejiang University of Science and Technology in Hangzhou, and Osnabrück UAS, which partnered with the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade and Anhui University in Hefei. The experiences gained in these Sino-German collaborations triggered off additional needs for substantiated academic discussion between the Chinese and German partners about the advancement of this new type of application-orientated higher education in China, and the development of the UAS model in Germany, which has been channelled in two major platforms. One is the “Chinesisch-Deutsches Forum für Anwendungsorientierte Hochschulausbildung” (CDAH), established with the participation of Technische Hochschule Lübeck in Hangzhou in September 2007, which offers a forum for dialogue to HEI focusing on the cultivation of applicationorientated talent in China and Germany. CDAH currently counts 57 Chinese and German UAS as members.3 The second platform was started by Hefei University, one of the first Chinese HEI which used the German UAS example as a model for institutional reform, together with Osnabrück UAS. Supported both by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony and the Ministry of Education of Anhui province, the two partners established an annual Sino-German symposium on application-orientated higher education. The 11th symposium was held in Hefei in October 2017 with more than 500 delegates from more than 167 HEI, industry and politics.

Perspectives The future of Sino-German cooperation in TNE-IPPM is not easy to predict. The interest of German universities—especially UAS—to collaborate with Chinese institutions in joint study programmes still exists, but the surrounding conditions are changing. During the last years, the transformation process of establishing applicationorientated Chinese HEI was pushed forward with incredible speed. About 600 Chinese universities are to be transformed into this new type of institutions. German support for the transformation is strongly wanted by the Chinese side. China also looks to industry as a strong and permanent partner with an inherent interest in the development of new curricula. The statuary framework for this transformation, however, still needs to be set up.

3 According

to CDAH website, accessed 16 August 2019. http://www.cdah-forum.com/en/cdahmembers.asp.

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After almost two decades with ever increasing numbers of young Chinese going abroad for their academic training, the Chinese government tries to reduce Western influence on Chinese students in China, especially at the bachelor level, by keeping them at home. There are ongoing discussions about the transformation of all bachelor’s programmes run with Western partners into a “4 plus 0”-model. This implies that foreign faculty would still be welcome in China, but study stays of Chinese students at the partner universities abroad, which are an important component of German TNE-IPPM, would no longer be allowed. If this new regulation of Sinoforeign academic cooperation came into force, German-Chinese study programmes will probably no longer be an attractive form of international engagement for many German universities.

The Turkish German University: An Example of TNE-IPPM as Science Diplomacy Internationalisation of Higher Education in Turkey International cooperation in higher education has developed in Turkey especially over the past fifteen years with restrictions concerning the kind and extent of encouraged or permitted activities as foreign higher education providers are not allowed to operate independently. Instead, there are examples for an integration of foreign models into the public Turkish higher education system: Robert College, the only historical foreign HEI in Turkey founded by an US-American investor in the 19th century, was transformed into a Turkish state university under the name of Bogazici University in 1971. Galatasaray University, a francophone HEI founded on the basis of a Turkish-French bilateral agreement, was established as a state-run university under Turkish law in 1992.4 The reluctance of Turkey to allow foreign higher education provision also shows in low enrolment numbers reported by the major providing countries. In contrast to the strong TNE-IPPM presence of UK institutions elsewhere with more than 700,000 students enrolled in degree-level British TNE-IPPM in 2015/16, the number of enrolments in Turkey reported for the same year was only 295 and included a majority of 255 students in “distance, flexible and distributed learning” (Universities UK International 2018, p. 4, 3f). According to Australian government data, Australian HEI in 2017 reported a total number of merely 51 “offshore enrolments” in Turkey (Australian Government—Department of Education). British or Australian overseas campuses do not exist in Turkey. The beginnings of conscious higher education internationalisation in Turkey are related to the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism in Eastern Europe in 4 In this context it is worth mentioning that there are several Turkish universities which offer higher

education programmes taught in languages other than Turkish. The majority are English-taught programmes, often delivered by a considerable number of foreign, English speaking teaching staff. Other languages used as medium of instruction include French, German and Arabic.

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the early 1990s. Turkey became increasingly active on the international education market and gradually opened its academic sector for foreign students. Informed by an overall political strategy which aimed at securing Turkey’s place as an influential regional power, Turkey first targeted mainly regions which had belonged to the former Ottoman Empire, the Turkic countries and countries with a predominantly Muslim population in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to recruiting students to Turkey, the Turkish government also began to pursue an active foreign education policy, opening schools and also two “joint universities” (Turkish: ortak üniversite) abroad, in Kazakhstan (Ahmet Yasevi Turkish-Kazakh University, 1991) and Kyrgyzstan (Turkish-Kyrgyz Manas University, 1995). The key authority for higher education in Turkey is the Council of Higher Education (YÖK). The council is composed of representatives from the Council of Ministers, from universities, and of delegates appointed by the Turkish President, with each group taking one third of seats. One additional seat is reserved for a representative of the Turkish general staff. YÖK decides on student numbers, curricula and university budgets, confirms staff appointments and approves new study programmes. Around the turn of the millennium, several Turkish universities and YÖK began an open discourse on the internationalisation of higher education in Turkey. Subsequently, YÖK increasingly focussed on the development of an internationally competitive higher education system. Turkey implemented the Bologna requirements and joined ERASMUS in 2004. At the same time, YÖK began to support the establishment of international double and joint degree programmes, which so far has led to the initiation of more than 200 double or joint degree programmes at 56 Turkish universities (YÖK 2017, p. 26), the main partner countries being the USA (with 35% of “joint diploma programmes”), UK (24%), France and Germany (14% each) (Study in Turkey 2019). The development of internationalisation was reinforced by several strategic policy papers. In 2005, the government announced plans to expand the higher education sector by raising the number of universities in all regions of Turkey. In the next three years, 41 new public universities were established (Nguluma et al. 2019, p. 40). In 2007, YÖK published a higher education strategy report. The report forecasted a rise in student numbers which would soon exceed existing capacity in Turkey and concluded that, in view of the growing number of Turkish young people aspiring to higher education, the number of study programmes on offer would have to rise, as well. At the same time, the report acknowledged quality issues which impaired the international competitiveness of Turkish higher education, among them a general failure to meet international standards, university graduates’ lacking foreign language skills, and a mismatch between the range of programmes offered and student as well as economic demand (Erguvan 2015, p. 228f). The forecast turned out to be correct. Over the last few years, between 60 to 70% of applicants for university entry every year did not receive a study place. In 2018, only about 35% of the 2.38 million prospective students who took the national higher education entry examination were admitted to university (ÖSYM 2018), and the number of applications continues to rise every year.

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In 2013, the AKP government published a national political strategy titled “Vision 2023” (Turkey Vision 2023). With regard to its overall goal for Turkey to become one of the ten leading economies in the world, “Vision 2023” envisaged an expansion of the academic sector and declared a number of targets, among them a substantial enhancement in the number of higher education institutions in Turkey with a corresponding rise of academic teaching staff and the creation of additional study places. A dedicated internationalisation strategy for the higher education sector was published by the Turkish government in 2017. Among other aims, the strategy proclaims as government targets a doubling of the numbers of international students and of international university staff, improvement of the potential of Turkish universities for international collaboration, and a rise in the number of international cooperation agreements in higher education with foreign governments or other important international bodies. Further targets include an additional rise of the number of joint and double degree programmes from 202 in 2016 to 450 in 2021/22 (YÖK 2017, p. 52ff.) as well as a considerable increase of the number of vocational and degree programmes taught in foreign languages. The latter are planned to rise in leaps of 50 to 200 programmes per annum between 2017/18 and 2010/21 from around 1600 to 2500 at vocational and bachelor’s level, and from 1100 to 1500 programmes at Masters degree level (YÖK 2017, p. 61). The development of the higher education sector in Turkey points to the direction indicated by the government strategies outlined above. In the last fifteen years, the number of HEI in Turkey has almost trebled, from around 70 institutions in 2005 to 201 in 2019, including 129 state-run and 72 private universities owned by foundations. The number of enrolled students has risen from about 2 million in 2003 (according to data from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics) to 7.7 million at present, while the number of international students at universities in Turkey has increased from 16,656 in 2000/2001 to 108,076 students in 2016/17 (Study in Turkey 2019). The main source countries of international student mobility to Turkey are Syria, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Afghanistan (YÖK 2017, p. 34).

Turkish-German Relations The Turkish-German University can be seen as a result of a long history of intensive Turkish-German relations influenced, among other aspects, by the pivotal role of Turkey as the bridge between south-eastern Europe and the Middle East. Germany has been Turkey’s most important economic and trade partner for decades. More than 7000 German companies and enterprises are active in Istanbul and throughout Turkey, providing a fruitful ground for effective cooperation (Göbel 2019). In addition, more than three million inhabitants of Turkish background reside in Germany as a result of workers’ migration to Germany since the 1960s.

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The German academic tradition and the German language enjoy popularity in Turkey. There are several well-known secondary schools in the main cities of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, some of them dating back to the nineteenth century, which use German as the language of instruction. The history of Turkish-German academic relations goes back to the final years of the Ottoman Empire, when twenty German professors contributed to the development of Darülfünün, a new university dedicated to natural sciences in Istanbul. In the 1930s and 1940s, a large group of renowned scientists escaping from Nazi Germany found work at Turkish universities and subsequently made essential contributions to their academic fields in Turkey. German know-how has a high reputation in Turkey, and technical and engineering studies in particular have attracted Turkish students to Germany for decades. The scope of Turkish-German academic cooperation has grown considerably over the last years, owing much to the European Union’s ERASMUS schemes for international student exchange. The German Rectors’s Conference (HRK) registers 1521 Turkish-German university co-operations in June 2019, most of them ERASMUS partnerships (cf. Hochschulrektorenkonferenz). Between 2004 and 2016, Germany was the most popular target country for Turkish ERASMUS students after Poland, while the largest group of ERASMUS students in Turkey were Germans.5 Apart from institutionalised student exchange, which among other forms of cooperation include a couple of German-Turkish double degree programmes that are largely geared towards reciprocal student mobility, the DAAD supports two collaborative TNE-IPPM projects, namely a Masters programme in Social Sciences (GeTMA) offered by Humboldt University Berlin with the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, and a Masters programme International Material Flow Management (IMAT) offered by Trier University of Applied Sciences in cooperation with the Akdeniz University (AKD) in Antalya. Both programmes offer a German-Turkish double degree. The highly visible focus of German-Turkish cooperation in higher education, however, lies with another TNE-IPPM effort: the binational Turkish-German University (TGU) came into being as the result of converging interests in the national higher education policies of both sides, related in Germany to an overall internationalisation strategy for higher education, and in Turkey to the strategic targets depicted above.

The Turkish-German University (TGU) The Turkish German University might be seen as pioneering in the fulfilment of strategic goals set by the current Turkish higher education policy. The establishment of a binational university in Turkey with the support of the German government, 5 Between

2004 and 2016, 22,829 Turkish students spent their ERASMUS semester in Germany, while 14.483 students from Germany studied in Turkey with ERASMUS. Apart from that, Germany with 3.5% has only a small share in the numbers of international students at universities in Turkey (YÖK 2017, p. 21f, 35).

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DAAD and German universities, was a way to react to the rising demand for additional study places as well as the need to install degree programmes of a quality that meets international standards in the Turkish university sector. To reach these goals, Turkey was eager to build new capacity by using qualified input from abroad by cooperating with Germany as a technologically strong partner. After political consultations lasting several years, the Turkish and the German governments signed an agreement in 2008 on the establishment of a joint university as a public Turkish university governed by Turkish law (which actually had to be changed to make the joint project legally possible) as the first step to the admission of the first students of TGU in 2013. The memorandum of understanding and a subsequent statute, which determined the formal structure and proceedings, confirmed the binational character of the planned institution and ensured adherence to German quality standards. The declared mission of TGU is to combine the best of the Turkish and German academic tradition in teaching and research. To do so, TGU lays great store by developing its students’ proficiency in the German language, on by enabling its students to gather international experience and intercultural skills through study and research stays in Germany, and by integrating practical experience in its academic training through industry internships. The collaborative aspect is of eminent importance to the project. The organisational structure of a Turkish public university at TGU is complemented by corresponding German positions on the level of university as well as faculty management. The decision-making process is directed through different joint committees and regular consultations between the ministries and the managing partners. On the German side, 37 German HEI (as of June 2019) are organised in a consortium (K-TDU) to support the establishment and development of the young university. Each of the five faculties at TGU—natural sciences, engineering, cultural and social studies, law, economics and administration studies—as well as the centre for foreign languages has one German “mentor” university from among the K-TDU members which is responsible for coordinating the contribution of the German partner institutions in terms of programme development, curricula, international networking, definition of appropriate research areas etc. The German HEI actively engaged at TGU as faculty coordinators or programme coordinators play a vital role in securing the academic quality of teaching and research at TGU and thus the success and reputation of the new institution. With regard to finance, the Turkish government is responsible for the infrastructure and Turkish staff of TGU. German investment is concentrated on curriculum development, German language teaching and scholarships for TGU students for study stays in Germany, in addition to measures for skills development and research stays in Germany for Turkish academic staff. The German budget for TGU, which is provided by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and managed by the DAAD, is the highest German investment in an individual TNE-IPPM project so far. The study programmes at TGU are to a large extent taught in German, with Turkish and English as further languages of instruction. Students are required to complete a language preparation programme offered at TGU successfully before starting their degree programme and to reach a level of proficiency corresponding

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to the language requirements for university admission in Germany. The German language programme is delivered by more than seventy qualified staff, among them more than thirty lecturers and language assistants from Germany. The extensive German language training is considered an essential component of TGU’s profile as a binational Turkish-German institution and prepares students for immersion into university life in Germany. Students and young researchers at TGU are offered a range of opportunities to spend part of their academic training in Germany, for example, with study trips to Germany integrated into the curricula of degree courses, scholarships for entire semesters in Germany or research stays. In Turkey, a constant contact with the German academic culture is ensured by flying faculty from the German partner HEIs who, each semester, take around thirty per cent of the teaching load at TGU. Two further features underline the specifically German component of academic training at TGU. The first is the introduction of compulsory industry and laboratory internships as part of the curriculum which is a common feature of higher education in Germany meant to provide students with a better and deeper understanding of their subject as well as important networks for their future careers. Integrated practice modules of this kind are as yet uncommon at Turkish universities. The other feature is an increasing institutionalisation of the Turkish-German binational trait through double degrees, which so far are in the process of being introduced in five Bachelor’s and Masters programmes. Further programmes are to follow over the next years. In support of this aim, YÖK and DAAD jointly initiated a scholarship programme for high-potential Bachelor and Masters candidates who are enabled to spend a semester or an entire year of their study in Germany as a prerequisite to obtain a double or joint degree from TGU and one of its German partner universities, which is expected to provide a better starting point for graduates’ international careers. Since the first intake in 2013, the number of students has increased from about 160 to 1800 in the academic year 2018/19. TGU is expected to reach its planned size of about 5000 study places in the next couple of years, which is not much in comparison to the often more than 70,000 students at other state-run Turkish universities. The small size underlines the high expectations of both the Turkish and the German side for the potential of the students to be educated at TGU and the quality of the academic training they are to receive. The special concept of TGU attracts many Turkish students. Only a few years after its opening, TGU has already reached a high-ranking position in the Turkish university entry examinations. More than two million Turkish school leavers every year apply for admission to higher education by sitting the exam and receive a placement at their favoured university depending on their examination results. TGU can choose their students among the 5000–100,000 candidates with the highest examination score, which illustrates the success of TGU as well as the high reputation of the German academic system in Turkey. The high level of TGU students is expected to rise further when research facilities and staff of the campus are fully developed.

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Perspectives Generally speaking, the establishment of any binational university poses a complex challenge. The differences in the academic systems to be harmonised and bureaucratic obstacles to be overcome demand time for the development of the new institution, and the changes of political factors which might have an impact on the project are not always predictable. Over the last years, TGU has turned out to be a stable bridge between Turkey and Germany and provided a platform for open discourse and exchange of positions even in times of difficult diplomatic relations. For the success and prestige gained, it even seems to have come to serve as a model for other binational projects in Turkey. In 2016, Turkey and Japan signed an agreement to found a Turkish-Japanese Scientific and Technological University (Güncelleme 2017). Recent plans include a Turkish-Russian university after the model of TGU (Güncelleme 2019). As an example of a strategical approach to TNE-IPPM relying on cooperation and long-term partnership, TGU from the German perspective enhances the reputation of Germany as a centre of science and research and the international visibility of the German HEIs involved. As an additional asset, it attracts highly qualified graduates as future international partners for German HEI as well as German companies. Turkish students are attracted to TGU by the prestige of its degrees as well as the additional linguistic and intercultural skills and international experience to be obtained from studying at the binational institution, which are regarded as strong assets for a future career after graduation. TGU successfully launched itself in Turkey in its starting phase while offering mainly bachelor’s degrees. The offer of a bilingual (or even trilingual) higher education, Turkish-German double degrees, a strong research focus and additional intensive cooperation with German and international industry are expected to add to the institution’s special profile as a binational endeavour. TGU therefore has a high potential for developing into a major research institution in Turkey in the future and by its multiple links to Germany, produce benefits for Turkey, Germany, and the German higher education institutions involved.

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DAAD and DZHW. 2016. Wissenschaft weltoffen: Facts and Figures on the International Nature of Studies and Research in Germany. DAAD and DZHW. 2019. Wissenschaft weltoffen: Facts and Figures on the International Nature of Studies and Research in Germany. DAAD, AvH and HRK. 2019. Internationalität an deutschen Hochschulen: Erhebung von Profildaten 2018. Erguvan, Deniz. 2015. Transnational Education in Turkey. Journal of Educational and Social Research. 5 (1): 227–240. Göbel, Johannes. https://www.deutschland.de/de/topic/wirtschaft/deutsch-tuerkischewirtschaftsbeziehungen-fuenf-fakten. Accessed 20 Aug 2019. Goldberger, Josef. 2017. Chinas Hochschulen im Weltbildungssystem: Analyse von Internationalisierungsstrategien und -absichten anhand von drei Fallbeispielen. PhD diss., Humboldt Universität Berlin. https://doi.org/10.18452/18179. Güncelleme, Son. 25 June 2017. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/egitim/turk-japon-bilim-ve-teknolojiuniversitesi-kuruldu-40501263. Accessed 20 Aug 2019. Güncelleme, Son. 22 July 2019. https://www.takvim.com.tr/egitim/2019/07/22/baskan-erdogan-veputin-aciklamisti-turk-rus-ortak-universitesi-kuruluyor. Accessed 20 Aug 2019. Healey, Nigel. 2015. Towards a Risk-Based Typology of Transnational Education. Higher Education 69 (1): 1–18. Hochschulrektorenkonferenz. https://www.internationale-hochschulkooperationen.de/staaten. html. Accessed 27 June 2019. ICEF Monitor. 2018. China Announces the Closure of More Than 200 TNE Programmes. https://monitor.icef.com/2018/07/china-announces-closure-200-tne-programmes/. Accessed 30 July 2019. Knight, Jane. 2005. Borderless, Offshore, Transnational and Cross-Border Education: Definition and Data Dilemmas. In The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education. Knight, Jane. 2016. Transnational Education Remodeled: Toward a Common TNE Framework and Definitions. Journal of Studies in International Education 20 (1): 34–47. Knight, Jane and Mc Namara, John. 2017. Transnational Education: A Classification Framework and Date Collection Guidelines for International Programme and Provider Mobility (IPPM). Nguluma, Hamadi Fadhil, Osman Titrek, and Zehra Kotaoglu. 2019. Implementation of Turkish Foreign Policies and Government Support as Driving Forces of Promoting International Students. International Journal on Lifelong Education and Leadership. 5 (1): 40. ÖSYM. 2018. https://dokuman.osym.gov.tr/pdfdokuman/2018/YKS/YER/ SayisalBilgiler31082018.pdf. Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). 2017. Country Report: The People’s Republic of China. https:// www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/international/country-report-china-2017.pdf?sfvrsn=12c9f781_10. Accessed 30 July 2019. Schmidt-Dörr, Thomas. 2015. Peking: Neue Strukturen für das Hochschulsystem. In 2014: Berichte der Außenstellen des Deutschen Akademischen Austauschdienstes, ed. DAAD, 90–98. Study in Turkey. 2019. https://www.studyinturkey.gov.tr/StudyinTurkey/_PartStatistic. Accessed July 2019. Turkey Vision 2023. https://www.turkey-japan.com/business/category1/category1_70.pdf. Universities UK International. 2018. The Scale of UK Higher Education Transnational Education 2016–17. Trend Analysis of HESA Data. Wintermantel, Margret. 2015. Internationalisierung durch strategische Kooperationen - Investitionen in die Zukunft. Speech, Saarbrücken, 16 September, 2015. Presentation Slides. Wissenschaftsrat. 2017. Bestandsaufnahme und Empfehlungen zu studiengangsbezogenen Kooperationen: Franchise-, Validierungs- und Anrechnungsmodelle. YÖK. 2017. Yüksekö˘gretimde uluslararasilma¸sma strateji belgesi, 2018–2022. Document on the Internationalisation Strategy of Higher Education, 2018–2022. p. 21f. www.yok.gov.tr/ Documents/AnaSayfa/Yuksekogretimde_Uluslararasilasma_Strateji_Belgesi_2018_2022.pdf. Accessed 22 June 2019.

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Susanne Kammüller is Senior Expert for cross-sectional tasks on transnational education at the German Academic Exchange Service—DAAD. Susanne has almost fifteen years of professional experience in international higher education with the DAAD. Before changing into the TNE division, she worked in different roles in the regional sections for South and Southeast Asia. Susanne studied English Literature, Indology and Political Sciences and holds a Magister degree from Bonn University. Susanne Otte studied German philology and history at Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany. She worked for several years at Chinese and Mongolian Universities. At DAAD she heads the section Transnational Education Projects in Europe, Asia and Central Asia. Wiebke Bachman studied history, political sciences and German studies and holds a Ph.D. in History. After gaining experience as project manager for the internationalisation of German universities in different organisations, she held the position of Director of the DAAD Information Centre in Istanbul. In January 2018 Wiebke joined the DAAD as Head of Section responsible for the project Turkish-German University.

Transnational Education in the 21st Century and Its Quality Assurance from a German Perspective Katrin Mayer-Lantermann

Abstract Since the nineties of the twentieth century, transnational education (TNE) has gained in importance. While Great Britain and Australia were pioneers in this field, the last decade has seen a relevant increase in corresponding offers in continental European countries. In Germany, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) began in 2001 with the systematic promotion of TNE. More than 31,000 students have been enrolled in TNE programmes involving German higher education institutions in 2017. In their 2013 internationalisation strategy, the federal and state science ministers have identified the establishment of offers of transnational education as a priority. This means that the issue of quality assurance in TNE is also attracting increasing attention in Germany. The aim of this chapter is to describe, in the first instance, how German higher education is delivered abroad. The chapter will focus on the export of German higher education as Germany is a significant provider of TNE. The chapter will give an overview of the national legal framework and regulations governing the quality assurance of such cross-border provision and elaborate on the obstacles and challenges for TNE and its quality assurance (QA).

Definition of Transnational Education The definition used in the “Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-Border Higher Education”, which were jointly developed by UNESCO and the OECD with the aim of promoting high-quality TNE offers and protecting students from poor quality in this area, is very broad: In these Guidelines, cross-border higher education includes higher education that takes place in situations where the teacher, student, programme, institution/provider or course materials cross national jurisdictional borders […]. (OECD 2005)

This definition thus also covers classic student mobility. K. Mayer-Lantermann (B) Stiftung Akkreditierungsrat, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Nickl et al. (eds.), Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2_2

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In contrast, the UNESCO/APQN toolkit “Regulating the quality of cross-border education” which is intended to assist national regulatory authorities in creating rules for the quality assurance of transnational education, covers only study programmes offered by higher education institutions outside their home countries and excludes study programmes that focus on student mobility: Cross-border education, for the purposes of this Toolkit, is the delivery in one country of education that directly originates, in whole or in part, from another country. This definition of cross-border education refers to the educational service going to the student across national borders, instead of the student going to the service overseas, as in another form of international education. (UNESCO and APQN 2006)

The phrasing corresponds to the definition of the DAAD. The DAAD defines TNE as follows: Transnational education (TNE) refers to higher education institutions, courses and individual study modules offered abroad mainly to students from the country or region in question and for which a higher education institution from another country bears the essential academic responsibility. (DAAD 2012)

The “essential academic responsibility” for the DAAD initially relates to the area of curricular development. Usually, the German higher education institution also provides lecturers for some of the lectures, awards degrees and is (co-)responsible for quality assurance. Since the award of a degree by the German higher education institution is not mandatory, this TNE term also applies to offers in which the foreign higher education institution is responsible for awarding the degree, as in the case of the German University Cairo (GUC) funded by the DAAD. This chapter follows the DAAD’s definition. On the one hand, there are pragmatic reasons for this, because the DAAD in Germany has played a decisive role in shaping the range of offers in the field of transnational education through its funding policy. Besides, the narrower definition of the DAAD and thus a distinction between the mobility of programmes and institutions on the one hand and study programmes that focus on student mobility (in particular joint programmes) on the other is also preferable because both categories concern different target groups and have different objectives. As to the objectives of the provider country of TNE programmes, the DAAD states: Engagement in TNE activities enhances the international visibility and pulling power of the ‘exporting’ university. (DAAD 2012)

On the part of the host countries, the demand for qualification opportunities for the population in their own country is growing and thus “‘education export’ is knowledge import” (DAAD 2012). Courses such as Joint Programmes, which focus on student mobility, in contrast, are more strongly focused on the intercultural learning experience of studying in one or more other countries.

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The QACHE Project The EU-funded project “Quality Assurance of Cross-border Higher Education“ (QACHE) was the trigger for the increased attention of the German Accreditation Council for TNE and its quality assurance. In addition to the Accreditation Council, institutions from three other European TNE provider states (France, Great Britain and Spain) as well as two networks from regions in which important recipient states of TNE are located (Asia and the Gulf region) were involved, with Australia as the main provider country outside Europe. The aim of the project coordinated by the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) was to develop recommendations for quality assurance in transnational education. The project ran for two years from October 2013 to December 2015. In the context of the project, the term ‘cross-border higher education’ (CBHE) was used, although CBHE is defined similarly to the term ‘transnational education’ by the DAAD: For the purposes of this project and in an effort to narrow the focus on CBHE to those aspects which pertain especially to quality assurance (QA) agencies, the definition of CBHE henceforth refers to any learning activity in which the students are based in a country different from that in which the institution providing (mainly) the education is located but excluding student mobility. (ENQA 2016)

The information basis for this chapter was the country report prepared by the author as part of the QACHE project and the interviews conducted for this country report. 1 Nonetheless, the data on TNE offers was updated as well as the information and analysis of the accreditation regime in Germany.

Projects of German Higher Education Institutions Abroad German TNE activities differ from those of other countries in terms of approach and evolution: based on existing, successful university partnerships, joint courses and university projects have emerged that are planned and conducted by the partners collaboratively. (DAAD 2012)

Since most German higher education institutions are financed by the state and generate neither tuition fees nor any other income, and the engagement in TNE projects in most cases requires considerable financial commitment, most German TNE projects would not exist without at least the initial support of the DAAD. The situation in Germany differs in this respect from the other main provider states of TNE, in particular Australia and Great Britain, where higher education institutions are dependent on tuition fees and TNE is seen primarily as a supplementary source of income for the offering higher education institution. 1 See

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Essentially, three TNE models are funded by the DAAD: “‘German study courses abroad’, ‘German-backed universities’ and, to a lesser extent, affiliated or branch campuses of German universities abroad” (DAAD 2012). The largest group of projects belongs to the category ‘German study courses abroad’. Here, a German higher education institution offers one or more of its courses of study at a partner higher education institution abroad. The partner higher education institution usually makes its infrastructure and teaching staff available, especially for basic courses. Particularly in this category, cooperation often emerged ‘bottomup’ from cooperation between individual scientists or higher education institution teachers. DAAD funding is used to intensify and institutionalise contacts between German higher education institutions and their foreign partners. One TNE model that requires even greater commitment and extensive and longterm financial investments is the German-backed universities. In this case, a new higher education institution abroad is founded, which is part of the national higher education institution system of the host country and is subject to local law. It has a German mentor higher education institution, which supports it intensively in the areas of curriculum development, quality assurance, and further training of teachers. The partner higher education institution often also provides teaching staff. In practice, often several German higher education institutions cooperate in projects of this kind; they even form consortia headed by one of the higher education institutions or the DAAD. This applies, for example, to the German University Cairo (GUC), the German-Jordanian University (GJU) in Amman, the Turkish-German University (TDU) in Istanbul, and the Vietnamese German University (VGU) in Ho Chi Minh City. German-backed universities are usually based on agreements between states. In some cases, degrees are awarded by German partner higher education institutions; in others, the German-backed university awards its own degrees. In the case of the branch campus, the German higher education institution has sole responsibility for all aspects of teaching and learning as well as for administration. It awards its own degrees. Unlike in Great Britain and the USA, for example, there are currently still few German examples of this type of TNE commitment. These include the German Institute of Science and Technology—TUM Asia in Singapore, and the campus of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Busan (Korea). The export of study programmes in the form of franchising and validation is currently not funded by the DAAD. The same applies to purely online courses. The reason for this is that those offers normally do not fulfil the DAAD’s funding conditions. As the German higher education institution in those models is not present at the location abroad, the requirements that the German higher education institution bears the academic responsibility for the degree programme, and that reference to Germany is made, are not normally fulfilled. In terms of discipline, there is an “increasing preference for Engineering subjects, in which 56% of all students in the TNE offerings surveyed are enrolled” (DAAD 2017). One reason for this is the good reputation of German higher education in this discipline. In addition, unlike Anglo-American providers, financial profitability is not a priority for German TNE projects, whereas Anglo-American providers tend to offer study programmes in less costly areas such as management or IT.

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According to the DAAD, the approximately 31,000 students in TNE degree programmes are distributed over more than 80 TNE projects that are, or have been, funded by the DAAD. The largest numbers of students can be found in Egypt, Jordan and China. China has a large number of small and medium-sized projects, whereas the high student numbers in Egypt and Jordan can be explained by the Germanbacked higher education institutions GUC and GJU located there. Most students in German TNE projects study in Bachelor programmes.

Actors Involved in Quality Assuring and Accrediting German TNE Programmes The German accreditation system was introduced in 1998, being part of a greater structural reform of study programmes. Kehm states: The decision to introduce accreditation as an instrument of quality assurance into the German system of higher education was regarded as an important element of modernisation of the system vis-à-vis growing European and international cooperation and competition. (Kehm 2006)

The Accreditation Council (full name: Foundation Accreditation Council, usually abbreviated as ‘GAC’ for ‘German Accreditation Council’) has the statutory task of accrediting study programmes (so called programme-accreditation) and internal QA systems of higher education institutions (so called system-accreditation). The Accreditation Council has 23 members: eight professors from German higher education institutions, one representative of the German Rector’s Conference, four representatives of the federal states or ‘Länder’ in the Federal Republic of Germany, five representatives from professional practice, one of whom is a representative of the state ministries responsible for service and collective bargaining law, two student representatives, two international experts and one representative from the accreditation agencies in consultative capacity. It is financed mainly by the Länder. The German accreditation system has recently been reformed. The reason was the decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court of February 2016 that the system did not have sufficient legal foundation. This legal foundation is now available with the ‘Interstate Treaty on the organization of a joint accreditation system to ensure the quality of teaching and learning at German higher education institutions’ (Interstate Study Accreditation Treaty)2 by all sixteen Länder which came into effect on the first of January 2018 and on decrees of the Länder based on this treaty. Those decrees are based on a specimen decree3 adopted by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder. The legal amendment prompted the Länder to change the structure of the tasks of the Accreditation Council 2 http://www.akkreditierungsrat.de/fileadmin/Seiteninhalte/Sonstige/en/161208_Interstate_Study_

Accreditation_Treaty.pdf. 3 http://www.akkreditierungsrat.de/fileadmin/Seiteninhalte/Sonstige/en/171207_Specimen_

decree.pdf.

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as well. In the past, the German accreditation system provided for a division of tasks between the Accreditation Council and agencies approved by the Accreditation Council in such a way that the Accreditation Council licensed the agencies in a relatively complex procedure. The agencies then made the accreditation decisions. Now, the Accreditation Council takes the accreditation decisions itself. Accreditation agencies still exist under the new system, but they are now only responsible for the assessment, no longer for the decision. Accordingly, the authorisation procedure for the agencies has been streamlined. The authorisation is now a formal act issued on the basis of the Agency’s registration in the European register of agencies, or EQAR in short.

Accreditation of TNE Programmes—Actors, Quality Standards and Procedural Rules The German accreditation standards are applicable to all study programmes which lead to a degree awarded by a German higher education institution, irrespective of whether the study location is in Germany or abroad. The rationale behind this is that the German state is responsible for the quality of all degrees awarded by German higher education institutions. The quality assurance approach applied is based on the ‘fitness of and fitness for purpose’ principle: the higher education institution has a large scope in the choice of qualification goals for its courses of study. It is crucial that the study programme concept and its implementation match these qualification goals. The higher education institution must also regularly review its degree programmes with a view to achieving its goals and, if necessary, improve them. Such a generic quality assurance approach is also suitable for special forms of study such as TNE courses. The special features of a TNE programme can be taken into account in the assessment via section 12 (6) of the specimen decree which stipulates that study programmes with a particular profile requirement have a self-contained programme concept that takes the particular characteristics of the profile into due account. For example, the qualification goals and study programme concept of a German study programme abroad should have a close relationship with Germany. Section 20 of the decree also indicates important principles for TNE offers on behalf of German higher education institutions. According to this policy, a higher education institution, which commissions another organisation to carry out parts of the study programme, is responsible for the quality of the study programme. A cooperation agreement must provide information about the nature and scope of the cooperation. Thus, the German accreditation standards prove to be relatively flexible and are suitable to take into account special forms of study programmes. Experience shows, however, that the German accreditation requirements are not appropriate in every respect for study programmes which are carried out in cooperation with foreign

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partners. In particular, instruments such as the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) and modularisation are not necessarily used in countries outside the European Higher Education Area. According to the former German accreditation system, the Accreditation Council had the possibility of granting exemptions for joint programmes; that is, to allow them not to apply a national German accreditation rule in exceptional cases if it contradicts a foreign requirement. Such an opening-up option was also adequate for TNE programmes, as these, too, may be affected by conflicting national requirements. This possibility does not exist any longer, according to the new German accreditation rules. Exemptions from the application of national German quality standards and the use of international standards are only foreseen for ‘joint degree programmes’ that is the small group of joint programmes which lead to joint degrees. According to sections 10, 16 and 33 of the specimen decree, higher education institutions offering such programmes can opt for the application of the ‘European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes’ adopted by the ministers responsible for higher education of the European Higher Education Area in 2015. The ‘European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes’ provides for the possibility of recognition of assessments by foreign quality assurance agencies for joint programmes, provided that • these are listed in the European agency register EQAR; • the assessment is carried out in accordance with the accreditation criteria stipulated in the European Approach and oriented towards the ‘Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area’ (ESG); • the Agency shall apply the specific procedural rules laid down in the European approach and appropriate to joint programmes. Thus, the future will show how to deal with conflicts between national accreditation rules in case of TNE offers and joint programmes which do not lead to joint degrees. The evaluation and revision of the new legal basis in a few years’ time provided for in the Interstate Study Accreditation Treaty and the specimen decree would provide an opportunity to address such problems. Flexibility is not only needed concerning the applicable quality standards but also the procedure. Unlike in the old system, the accreditation rules do not explicitly contain procedural rules anymore, which are especially suitable for joint programmes and TNE offers. The special profile of transnational study programmes is a sufficient reason, however, to adapt the procedure to the needs of such study programmes, e.g. concerning site visits. A German TNE offer is normally located outside Europe, which is why a site visit there may be cost and time-intensive. Thus, if the TNE programme is based on an essentially identical degree programme at a higher education institution in Germany, and the latter has already been accredited, it may be justified just to carry out a site visit at the German partner location. Also, in this case, discussions should be held with representatives (lecturers, students and programme managers) from the location abroad e.g. via Skype. In section 1.5.4 of the former ‘Rules for the Accreditation of Study Programmes and for System Accreditation of the Accreditation Council’

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adopted by the Accreditation Council, this possibility was explicitly foreseen for joint programmes. Furthermore, unlike in the case of accreditation procedures for nationally offered study programmes, experts with international expertise should be appointed in accreditation procedures concerning TNE offers. This condition was explicitly stipulated for joint programmes in section 1.5.5 of the former rules of the Accreditation Council. Joint accreditation procedures with foreign agencies, as was explicitly foreseen for joint programmes in section 1.5.6 of the former rules of the Accreditation Council, may also make sense. System-accredited higher education institutions, according to section 22 (4) of the specimen decree, have self-accreditation rights for the duration of the accreditation period, which means they no longer require programme accreditation for their degree programmes. According to section 17 (1) of the decree, they must ensure the application of the German accreditation standards for study programmes via their internal quality management system. They are therefore obliged to apply the German accreditation standards also to their TNE programmes without exception, and thus may face problems of conflicting national accreditation rules according to the above. As to the procedure, however, system accredited higher education institutions are relatively free in their choice of the procedure by which they ensure the quality of their courses of study. But it makes sense for them, too, to apply the above principles for the appointment of experts and the organisation of site visits and interviews. In the event that no degree from a German higher education institution is awarded in TNE degree programmes, the above mentioned accreditation standards will not apply. If agencies authorised by the Accreditation Council are involved in the assessment and quality assurance of study programmes and higher education institutions abroad outside the scope of competence of the Accreditation Council, they apply the standards of the host country, especially if the procedure is to have legal effect there. Alternatively, they use their own standards specially developed for procedures abroad. These are mostly based on the German accreditation standards or the ESG. This means that standards on aspects such as employability, academic feasibility, human and material resources and quality assurance are included, since these are regarded as necessary quality standards for each course of study. Purely German regulations, for example with regard to modularisation and ECTS, are not relevant in these procedures.

Challenges in the Accreditation of TNE Study Programmes The German accreditation rules basically offer appropriate standards and procedural rules also for TNE study programmes. The challenges of quality assurance in transnational education, however, which exist both at the normative level and in the implementation of procedures for the agencies, should not be concealed.

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The German accreditation rules are, as discussed before, in principle only applicable if a German higher education institution awards the degree. The German state is initially responsible for quality only for German degrees. If the degree of a foreign higher education institution is awarded, the quality assurance procedures of the host country apply. The higher education institutions would be overburdened by an obligation also to provide accreditation according to German law. In this case, voluntary quality assurance according to German standards is possible, for example, for reasons of reputation or to ensure the unproblematic recognition of qualifications in Germany. The question of the scope of German quality assurance, however, is not so easy to answer if a TNE programme is offered which has a clear link to Germany and which is offered at an institution abroad which also makes reference to this link to Germany in its name; this is especially the case for German-backed universities. If German mentor higher education institutions exist but do not award their own degrees, the question arises as to how the respective higher education institution abroad can still keep its promise of higher education according to German standards. In case of funding by the DAAD, the DAAD conducts project evaluations which can serve as an important element of quality assurance. In contrast, an accreditation by the Accreditation Council is, in these cases, most unlikely because of the clear limitation of the competence of the Accreditation Council. In the majority of German higher education projects abroad, however, German higher education institutions award their degrees partly in the form of joint or double degrees. Also, in these cases, there may be uncertainties with regard to the applicable rules. These uncertainties can lead to a situation in which TNE programmes at German higher education institutions abroad are not accredited at all, for example, because the programme abroad appears to be identical to an already accredited programme in Germany. A simplified accreditation procedure that refers to the differences between the study programme in Germany and abroad may be appropriate in such a case; nevertheless, a complete waiver of the TNE programme’s accreditation is not justified. Aspects such as the material and human resources at the foreign location and, for example, the admission requirements for (foreign) students will have to be assessed in particular. As already mentioned, if German accreditation rules are applied, conflicts with foreign standards may arise. Regulations in Germany regarding the standard period of study, modularisation and ECTS, as stipulated in Part 2 of the specimen decree, may not be compatible with the foreign accreditation system or its regulations. For example, the workload in countries such as China is traditionally higher than in Germany. The standard study periods abroad may also differ. As explained, the accreditation rules, nevertheless, do not contain exceptions for TNE programmes. More flexibility and, where appropriate, also the use of international standards would be recommended here. The application of the ESG, or standards based on the ESG as included in the European Approach, could be helpful for TNE offers, or rather, as countries outside the European Higher Education Area are the main host countries for TNB, non-European international standards. The international network of quality assurance agencies INQAAHE has developed the ‘Guidelines of Good Practice’

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(GGP), which set international quality standards for agencies and quality assurance processes and contain promising approaches. The independence of accreditation agencies, however, which is one of the main features of the ESG, does not have the same outstanding importance in the GGP. Thus, ESG 3.3 contains a detailed definition of the notion of independence, which, in the guidelines, differentiates between organisational independence, operational independence and independence of formal outcomes, whereas section 1.3.2 of the GGP declares quite generally: The composition of the decision-making body and/or its regulatory framework ensure its independence and impartiality.

Another challenge may be that, in some cases, different national regulations reflect different values and norms, for example, when political education is regarded as obligatory in a scientific course of study. There may also be differences in the forms of teaching and learning and the relationship between learner and teacher. The lecturer is regarded partly as an unquestionable authority which a student does not have to criticize. Then, it will be difficult to establish teaching evaluations. For the Accreditation Council, for agencies, as well as for higher education institutions planning to cooperate, it is important to be aware of such differences and to develop an understanding of other norms and values. Hopbach states: The central challenge for quality assurance in transnational education is therefore not of a legal or methodological nature, but rather the consideration of cultural as well as scientific and educational traditions in the host countries. (Hopbach 2014)

The expert preparations should include these aspects. The difficulties described can also be a challenge for cooperation between quality assurance agencies. Such cooperations—for example through common procedures— can reduce the effort for higher education institutions and avoid the duplication of quality assurance procedures. They can only succeed, however, if the systems in the provider and host countries are not too different. The accreditation by the German accreditation agency, ACQUIN, of study programmes at the GUC can serve as an example. The GUC was also obliged to obtain accreditation by the National Egyptian Accreditation Agency, NAQAAE. Since the documents of the Egyptian agency were only available in Arabic, a direct comparison of the criteria between ACQUIN and NAQAAE was not possible. In the discussions between ACQUIN and NAQAAE, it became clear that the criteria of the two agencies differed greatly. In this case, cooperation would not have been feasible. Sometimes, an external quality assurance system does not exist in a country or is only being developed. Also, in these cases cooperation is difficult. According to the interview with ACQUIN conducted as part of the QACHE project, this was the case regarding ACQUIN’s accreditations at GUtech in Oman in 2009. The National Accreditation Agency was only in its infancy at that time and did not yet carry out any programme accreditations. A last issue in this context is the double burden which results from the fact that, as seen, the DAAD also attaches great importance to internal and external quality assurance. For example, funding can only be extended under the condition of an

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external evaluation commissioned by the DAAD. In this case, a group of at least three experts will be appointed, including two experts from the respective discipline. As in accreditation procedures, the evaluation includes a site visit and discussions with all relevant stakeholders. The focus of the evaluation by the DAAD differs from the one of the Accreditation Council. The DAAD assesses whether both the general objectives of the respective funding programme and the specific objectives of the project have been achieved. Nevertheless, ways of exploiting synergies between both procedures should be sought.

Challenges for Higher Education Institutions Also, higher education institutions face a variety of challenges in taking up the opportunities of engagement in TNE. Whether a TNE project can be implemented and successful over a longer period of time depends, first of all, on the fulfilment of a few basic conditions. For example, German TNE projects are often started bottom-up, based on the personal commitment of individual teachers. Sustainable involvement in TNE projects requires, however, the support of the faculty, the administration and the management level of the higher education institution. Another challenge is the financing of the project. According to the DAAD funding guidelines, a project should become self-sustaining in the medium term after startup funding by the DAAD. According to the experience of the DAAD, however, even established projects with a secure financial basis partially require long-term financial support in order to maintain the close ties to Germany and to be able to offer continuous higher education according to German standards. The risks associated with differing standards and values for TNE projects have already been addressed. Different objectives of the partners or a difficult political situation can prevent cooperation or challenge an existing project. For example, the German-Russian University, which is funded by the DAAD, may face challenges due to the not uncomplicated relationship between the participating states. In addition, there are requirements for higher education institutions which directly affect the quality of the TNE study programme and which, in principle, do not differ from those for the implementation of national study programmes. The study concept and curriculum must be coherent, the teachers qualified and the admission procedures suitable. Adequate material resources must be created and quality assurance procedures established, yet the question under which circumstances a curriculum is coherent and a teacher qualified will be assessed differently in TNE programmes if compared with the assessment of purely German courses of study. Thus, as a rule, the curriculum will have to meet the labour market requirements of the host country. It should be practice-oriented; the German university of applied sciences education often serves as a model here, for example, for the GJU. At the same time, it should fulfil the promise of a first-class scientific and holistic German

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university education. There should be a close connection to Germany, for example, through study visits and German language courses. Teaching may be organised partly through the ‘flying faculty’; however, the financial compensation for teaching abroad is generally low and constant travelling can be tiring. If local teaching staff are hired in addition, their quality must be ensured. The cooperation of local and German teaching staff can be challenging due to different cultural backgrounds. There may also be problems to make sure that there are sufficient local material resources, especially in disciplines such as engineering and natural sciences. The introduction of quality assurance procedures such as teaching evaluations will often not be part of the tradition of the host country, which is why their establishment requires time and respect for the cultural identity of the host country. A clear written agreement between the host institution and the German partner institution(s), which contains the division of responsibilities in all the areas mentioned, is essential. German higher education institutions are often involved in the development of the curriculum, in the selection of teachers and students and in quality assurance. In the event that a German degree is awarded, the German partner will assume greater responsibility.

Conclusion In summary, it can be stated that the implementation and quality assurance of a TNE project has some specificities compared to national programmes, but that the fitnessof-purpose and fitness-for-purpose approach of the German accreditation standards in principle is also adequate for TNE. As explained above, however, the obligation to apply formal German standards to such provisions raises some problems. If one dares to look into the future, it can be assumed that those problems will not be solved at the regulatory level in the short term. There are two main reasons. On the one hand, despite assertions to the contrary, the Länder still have certain reservations about TNE and other international programmes, such as joint programmes. Behind closed doors, one sometimes hears that TNE offers cost German taxpayers’ money without benefiting German students. Joint programmes, in turn, are partly seen as an attempt by German universities to undermine German accreditation requirements by arguing that stays abroad are offered. On the other hand, the accreditation system in Germany at the moment faces other, far greater challenges than the question of how to deal with such specific study models. The greatest challenge for the Accreditation Council is to cope with its new task and to make a multitude of accreditation decisions with relatively few resources in such a way that it meets the high quality standards that apply to such administrative decisions. The conclusion for the users of the accreditation standards can only be to apply the accreditation standards with the greatest possible flexibility and in the absolute

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determination to make good TNE offers as well as joint programmes possible, and not to prevent them. At the same time, the Accreditation Council should use every opportunity to draw the attention of the political level to the particularities of such programmes.

References DAAD. 2017. Wissenschaft Weltoffen, Daten und Fakten zur Internationalität von Studium und Forschung in Deutschland/ Facts and Figures on the International Nature of Studies and Research in Germany. Retrieved from file. https://www.C:/Users/Katrin/Documents/Veröffentlichung% 20Springer%20Series/wiwe_2017_verlinkt.pdf. DAAD. 2012. Transnational Education in Germany, Position Paper. Retrieved from https://www. daad.de/medien/der-daad/analysen-studien/tne-position_paper.pdf. ENQA. 2016. Quality Assurance of Cross-Border Higher Education, Final Report of the QACHE Project. Retrieved from http://www.enqa.eu/indirme/papers-and-reports/occasionalpapers/QACHE%20final%20report.pdf. Hopbach, A. 2014. Externe Qualitätssicherung von transnationalen Bildungsangeboten. Retrieved from https://www.daad.de/medien/der-daad/analysen-studien/externe_qualitätssicherung.pdf. Kehm, B. 2006. The German System of Accreditation. Retrieved from http://www.unc.edu/ppaq/ docs/GermanAccreditation.pdf. OECD. 2005. Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-border Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/education/innovation-education/35779480.pdf. UNESCO, and APQN. 2006. UNESCO-APQN Toolkit: Regulating the Quality of Cross-Border Education. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001464/146428e.pdf.

Katrin Mayer-Lantermann is head of legal and international affairs at the German Accreditation Council. She is representative of Germany in the BFUG Peer Group on Quality Assurance, was a member of the project group of the EU-funded QACHE project on transnational education from 2013 to 2016, and chaired a panel in a quality review of the branch campus of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) in Bahrain in 2017. She is a fully qualified lawyer and has published in the field of legal and international affairs.

The Emergence of Transnationalisation of Higher Education of German Universities Nadin Fromm and Alexander Raev

Abstract Over the last 30 years, transnationalisation of higher education has become a major issue within constantly internationalising tertiary education sectors worldwide. Contradicting global dynamics, German transnational higher education activities are less driven by market deliberations, but show evidence of strong national public actors and their self-interests. Therefore, German TNE projects are largely implemented for strategic purposes on the nation state level, with links to political and socio-economic fields of public action, going beyond the research and education sector itself. Hence, transnational education affiliated with German universities often functions as a policy-instrument for nation state level decision makers to solve multiple policy problems (Salamon 2001). By applying the Actor-Centred Institutionalism (Mayntz and Scharpf 1995; Scharpf 1997, 2006) as a heuristic frame, we study the field of German transnational education, analysing coordination mechanisms between the most important actors. We focus on their fields of self-interest and modes of interaction while establishing German higher education abroad.

Transnationalisation of Higher Education in a Global Context Originally, the concept of transnational higher education (TNE)—termed crossborder higher education program and provider mobility (Knight and McNamara 2017, p. 1) was based on the idea of a globalised knowledge society and was developed as a response to demand structures relating to internationalised higher education, addressing the needs of increasingly globalised and fast changing labour markets of the emerging 21st century (Ziguras and McBurnie 2015). TNE activities N. Fromm (B) Universität Kassel, Kassel, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. Raev Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Nickl et al. (eds.), Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2_3

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began in the 1990s, when TNE became a relevant element of internationalisation activities within the tertiary education sector, initially started by Australian universities (Knight 2010, p. 508). Since then, there has been an impressive increase of TNE projects as universities, institutes and individual study programs originating in various countries could be observed worldwide. These projects differ in size, range, location and fields of study and are often characterised by specific features depending on the particular sending or receiving country (DAAD and DZHW 2018, p. 40). In the last couple of years, the scientific debate acknowledged the fact that the concept of TNE includes various not yet consistently categorised types of higher education programs implemented abroad, often shaped by national policies of both sending and receiving countries of TNE. Idiosyncrasies of national policy systems result, therefore, in a wealth of different TNE types, making a general classification and a systematic comparison for scientific purposes increasingly challenging (Knight and McNamara 2017). TNE provisions are usually initiated by higher education institutions or academic entrepreneurs, as is the case with the three leading nations in TNE (Australia, UK and USA). Some universities of the most active provider countries aimed for more visibility in a global (education) market while competing for the best students (USA, UK), whereas others used franchised education to supplement financial resources in their domestic branches (Australia). The approach is characterised by private actors’ efforts with market or profit orientation and is often referred to as the Anglo-SaxonModel (Marginson 2007, pp. 10, 17–18).1 During the last few years, selected country providers for TNE emerged, such as Germany, France, Russia or the Netherlands, following a path very different from the classic TNE approach dominated by the idea of market regulation and profit orientation. The alternate approach includes a strong nation state involvement, largely overriding market functions as governing forces of TNE initiation and development (France: Ramanantsoa et al. 2016; Russia: Fominykh 2017; Netherlands: Tsiligiris and Lawton 2018). Mostly unrecognised by the international scholarly debate, Germany has developed into a major supplier of TNE, providing an insightful model of a state-centred approach toward TNE initiation and operation. The German engagement seems less driven by international market mechanisms or profit margins, but rather ruled by an alternate set of mechanisms. This approach is characterised by a multitude of policy aims concerning the common good and public welfare and is linked to an actor constellation, which includes state actors such as national ministries as well as intermediary agencies and various higher education institutions. This state-centred perspective is taken as a starting point for the following chapter, which aims to enhance the understanding of the German TNE model by explaining German nation state actor’s behaviour.

1 This

includes TNE activities of universities from Australia, the UK and the USA, despite the common assumption among scholars of the transnational studies that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ refers to the UK in a specific ethno-national context, while Anglophone relates to countries with English spoken as the majority language.

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Driven by the empirical nature of the research topic, we use the Actor-Centred Institutionalism (ACI) as a heuristic device. The ACI was developed in the mid-1990s by Renate Mayntz and Fritz W. Scharpf, two of the most influential German social scientists of the 20th century, and was later further elaborated by Fritz W. Scharpf (Mayntz and Scharpf 1995; Scharpf 1997, 2006). The ACI is especially helpful in investigating the steering and self-organisation of societal segments, especially those close to the state (Mayntz and Scharpf 1995, p. 39). It provides an analytical perspective helpful in reconstructing different actor’s efforts in the field of German TNE and visualising the various policy aims within a complex multi-actor constellation that constitutes the German model of TNE. In addition, we scrutinise functionalities and strategic alignments, hence approaching the field by aiming at categorising and evaluating the use of specific policy tools and instruments. For the analysis of public action, we turn to Lester M. Salamon (Salamon 2001). His policy tool approach is understood as “an identifiable method through which collective action is structured to address a public problem” (Salamon 2001, pp. 1641–1642). This perspective constitutes the second part of our heuristic frame. The main purpose in combining these two arguments is to align an actor-centred perspective with the idea that German TNE projects are applied as policy tools to solve what Lester Salamon termed “public problems” (Salamon 2001, p. 1620). Finally, by letting nation state actors and their aims and interests take centre stage, we aim to contribute a template for further analysis of other, to date rather poorly researched, TNE providers such as France, China and Russia, which apply a similar state-centred approach and take different pathways other than those offered by the previously mentioned and predominant Anglo-Saxon model.

Defining Terms and Context The term transnational education first emerged during the early 1990s (Knight 2010, p. 509; see also Marginson 2007) when Australian HEIs increasingly invested in international activities abroad, mostly in neighbouring Asian countries. In the broader context of internationalisation of higher education, TNE therefore was used to emphasise the differentiation “[…] between international students recruited to Australian campuses and those who were studying for Australian degrees offshore” (Knight 2005, p. 5). Soon the term took on a life of its own, when TNE projects from a number of other provider nations, such as the UK, the USA, and Germany, appeared. Since the use of the term ‘TNE’ derived from a rather outdated empirical status quo, it was for years widely and controversially discussed within the higher education research community, aiming to integrate the phenomenon into a more unified theoretical concept. As a result of years of controversial discussions, and in strong reference to the quickly changing dynamics in the field of TNE, a number of different and often

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only partially fitting definitions governed the knowledge discourse.2 An attempt to standardise the various TNE definitions has lately yielded some success. In 2017, the British Council and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), two agencies central to TNE, published a viable definition of the field, taking into account most of the established projects and their specifics (Knight and McNamara 2017). Following this definition, TNE can be broadly defined as the mobility of “programmes and providers moving across national borders to deliver higher education programmes and credentials to students in their home or neighbouring country” (ibid., p. 1). Two distinct types of program mobility have to be differentiated in order to understand the existing realities of TNE provision. The first type includes “independent” TNE provisions (ibid., p. 14) which cluster into three subtypes, namely branch campuses, franchise programmes as well as programmes of “self-study distance education” (ibid., p. 16).3 This type of TNE pertains to projects which originated mostly in Australia, the UK or the USA. Despite quite substantial differences in range and scope of the educational services provided, TNE projects of the “independent” type share the fact that the main responsibility of their implementation lies with the foreign higher education institutions (HEI) with which they are affiliated. Hence, “the foreign sending HEI/provider is primarily responsible for the design, delivery and external quality assurance of their academic programs […]” (ibid.). The second type contains provisions which originate in countries with a strong nation state role regarding the initiation and the operation of TNE projects. This type of TNE provision is generally called collaborative and includes various subtypes which have evolved over time, including “partnership programmes” (ibid.), “joint universities” (ibid.) and “distance education with local academic partners” (ibid.). A main difference to independent TNE provision is the partnership approach between a foreign and a host country which entails the opportunity to customise the educational provision: “A foreign sending HEI/provider and host country HEI/provider work together on the design, delivery and/or external quality assurance of the academic programs” (ibid.) which includes nation state actors and their implementation organisations as in the case of Germany. Most German TNE projects fall into the “collaborative” group, and include sending country partners as nation state actors and their intermediate agencies, which is outlined in detail in the section below (Fromm and Raev 2018).

2 Knight/McNamara

identified more than forty different definitions and terms for TNE, see Knight and McNamara 2017, p. 1. For a more detailed overview of recent TNE literature, see Kosmützky and Putty 2016. 3 Branch campuses are the best known type of TNE provision, “which is essentially a satellite operation of a parent HEI in the sending country” (Knight and McNamara 2017, p. 2), while franchise programmes can be understood as “export programmes from sending countries” (ibid., p. 10), which are being “offered through […] stand alone foreign providers” (ibid., p. 14). Self-study distance education caters directly to host country students, without local academic support (ibid., p. 16).

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Theoretical Framework In order to enhance our knowledge about the German TNE activities, which have not yet attained the scholarly attention they deserve, there are two heuristic devices that guide our analysis and shed light on the specifics of the German model of TNE provision over time. “New” public problems, for example climate change, international migration or epidemic diseases, to name a few, have led to the institutionalisation of new or innovative policy fields. Although the scholarly debate on public policy has focused lately on processes within these fields, it mostly neglected processes during the institutionalisation of these “new” policy fields (Blätte 2015, p. 94). In light of the gap in research on nation state centred research approaches on TNE, we turn our attention away from research questions aimed at analysing TNE from the perspective of an already settled policy field. Instead, we focus on the genesis of German TNE while reconstructing the changing and growing constellations of actors, and analysing their various interests, strategies and instruments that drive and thus define the field of German TNE. Following Lester Salamon, we understand public problems as those challenges of various policy sectors (such as higher education policy, labour policy, migration policy or social security issues), for which a certain “collective action” (Salamon 2001, p. 1611), in our case the establishment of German TNE projects, is supposed to bring solutions.4 The increasingly complex nature of public problems is more and more being addressed by various actors or actor settings, attempting to meet those challenges in a “collaborative” manner (ibid., p. 1623). Following Salamon (2001), our argumentation is fuelled by the assumption that the constellation of actors constituting the field of TNE is equipped with potentially conflict-prone interests and contradictory policy agendas shaping the evolution of German TNE. This trend leads us to the assumption that the interests or the policy preferences driving actors within networks or multi-level governance systems5 have to be considered in greater detail. The Actor Centred Institutionalism (ACI) on the other hand facilitates the reconstruction of (potentially conflicting) forces and policy aims of different actors. Following Fritz W. Scharpf (1997, 2006), we understand actors involved in the TNE actvities as collective actors, thereby focussing on collectively binding decisions, rather than on individual behaviour patterns.6 As subjective actor orientations can often not be directly observed, information on institutional settings as well as on 4 While

TNE originates from Germany’s higher education sector, it was used to remedy challenges in the fields of intercultural understanding, labor shortage or climate change, to name just a few. 5 The perspective of a multi-level governance system refers to Uwe Schimank’s and Arthur Benz’s understanding of the field of science and education policy in general (Benz 2009; Schimank 2006, p. 283). 6 Individuals, active outside of formal organisational structures, are also known as policy entrepreneurs. They are not central to our analysis, as they appear only in isolated cases and are often not transparent enough in their activities to be included in a policy analysis. For a discussion of the concept of policy entrepreneurs in academic settings, see (Siegel and Wright 2015).

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Fig. 1 Overview of the Actor Centred Institutionalism (ACI). (Source Treib 2015, p. 280; cit. after Scharpf 2006: 85)

official communications can be used to uncover clues regarding the actor orientations on the level of government organisations (Scharpf 2006, p. 110–116). Actor orientations are composed of different units of reference used by these collective actors. Actor orientations relate to their institutional contexts (Scharpf 2006, p. 35), to action resources (ibid., p. 34) that collective actors have at their disposal, as well as to cognitive orientations and to preferences (ibid., p. 86). Cognitive orientations describe the way collective actors see and understand their world, assuming that even though facts “will be empirically correct” (ibid., p. 87), their perception of the outside world will be shaped by particular institutional settings which the researcher can access rather easily through public documentation (ibid.). Preferences can be disaggregated into three different modules: (a) basic self-interest relates to questions of institutional preservation, autonomy and growth; (b) normative role orientations often pertain to organisational goals in more abstract terms (ibid., pp. 117–119), like the general functions of government organisations—in our case ministries and the organisations implementing their decisions; (c) finally, identities describe idiosyncratic interests, preferences and courses of action, sometimes called “corporate culture” or “corporate identities”, which might contradict the more objective self-interest and externally imposed norms” (ibid., pp. 119–112) (Fig. 1). Connecting Scharpf’s ACI with Salamon’s focus on policy tools, leads to the understanding that collective actors’ cognitive orientations and preferences influence the formation of specific actor constellations or settings that in turn are characterised by multiple forms of interaction, which affect the choice of specific policy “tools” or “instruments” (Salamon 2001, p. 1613). In other words, each policy “has its own operating procedures, its own skill requirements, its own delivery mechanism, indeed its own ‘political economy’.” (Salamon 2001, p. 1613). Applying this argumentation, we expect to identify a whole host of different “problems” (disguised as policy aims) being addressed by different actors using TNE projects as policy tools or instruments. The theoretical frame evokes research questions we would like to address in the following chapter, such as: (1) What are the roles of different actors in shaping the tools/the instruments of German TNE? (2) How do state actors legitimise their

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interest in TNE? (3) What are the main functions of TNE as understood by the actors setting up TNE projects? Due to the important, if not central, role of nation state actors in the field of TNE, we limit our analysis to the relevant policy making ministries (Federal Foreign Office/AA; Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development/BMZ; Federal Ministry of Education and Research/BMBF) and the so-called intermediary agencies (German Academic Exchange Service/DAAD, Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) as well as the German university sector in general.

Discussion Historical Background Although this chapter focuses on developments in the field of German TNE after 2001, which marks the beginning of publicly funded and strategically backed support of TNE projects, it should be highlighted that the first round of successful German projects that fall under the label German TNE had been initiated already more than a decade earlier. The first genuine TNE projects abroad were established only shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain and can be seen as an attempt to foster the use of German language in Central and Eastern Europe (DAAD 2013). Those early TNE projects, such as the Faculty for German Engineering and Business Administration (Sofia, Bulgaria) as well as Study Programs for Electrical or Mechanical Engineering, for example at the Donetsk National Technical University (Ukraine) were taught partly in German (DAAD 2013, pp. 12 and 35; see also Fromm 2017, p. 85). Evidently, the German TNE sector appears to date from the same period as the Australian offshore activities, but developed under different circumstances (Raev 2017, p. 251); it went, however, mostly unnoticed by higher education research. Some of the more successful German Study Programs were allowed to expand their portfolio and developed over time into their own departments, or even institutes of higher education, within universities in the host countries. Examples are the Kyrgyz-German Institute of Technology at the Kyrgyz Technical State University in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) or the German language study programs at the National Technical University in Kiev (Ukraine) and the German Technical Departments at the National Technical Universities in Donetsk7 and Kharkiv (both Ukraine), which were extended to become the Joint Ukrainian-German Department for Machine Engineering at both universities.

7 We

mention the German Technical Faculty in Donetsk, as it is currently one of the few German TNE-projects that had to be closed down. It should be mentioned that the shutdown was due to the armed conflict between the Armed Forces of Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists in and around Donezk.

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Germany’s TNE activities at this early stage followed in part the classical pattern of “Foreign Cultural Policy” as a “third pillar” of Germany’s foreign policy,8 besides international diplomacy, here understood as the participation of nation state actors in international negotiations and foreign economics (Schütte 2015). Besides being a tool for strengthening the use of the German language abroad, early TNE activities were seen as part of a broader attempt to broaden scientific exchange within the field of the Foreign Cultural Policy with the aim of creating “[…] trust [between different states] through international exchange […] by creating interpersonal trust between scientists participating in exchange and cooperation and who knew and appreciated each other for years” (ibid., pp. 139–140), translated by the authors). Measures of scientific exchange were later included in a fuzzy and even often disputed approach called “Science Diplomacy” whereby scientific and academic projects, such as TNE, are seen as “effective agent[s] to manage conflicts, improve global understanding, lay the grounds for mutual respect and contribute to capacity-building in deprived world regions” (Flink and Schreiterer 2010, p. 665). First changes in the way German TNE projects were established became visible with the establishment of TNE projects in China in the mid-1990s, pointing towards new aims and purposes, going beyond purely diplomatic objectives in terms of foreign cultural politics. Instead, these projects incorporated aspects of economic policy aims corresponding with German development policies in China as well as with economic interests of German companies producing in China. The first TNE project in China, the Chinese-German Institute for Professional Education was initiated and financed in 1994 by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.9 In 1998, the Foreign Office funded the initiation of the Chinese-German College for Post-Graduate Studies.10 Both TNE projects are located at the Tongji-University (Shanghai, China), underscoring the similarity of activities initiated by different ministries, albeit serving different aims. The field of German TNE changed radically in the aftermath of the Bolognareforms of the late 1990s, which included the harmonisation of curricula and degree structures of European universities. Due to the rapidly increasing importance of higher education internationalisation (Wächter 2003, pp. 6–7), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research initialised a Federal program in 2001, called “Export of German Study Programs” which was implemented by the DAAD (Lanzendorf 2016, p. 212), creating a wholly new institutional environment for the German TNE provision, including a more systematic funding scheme and a new alignment of the field of German TNE. The newly initialised (state) program transformed TNE from a 8 For a more detailed description of the conceptual division of Germany’s Foreign Policy, see Grolig

and Schlageter 2007, p. 549. The authors emphasise that the term Foreign Cultural Policy is a central, however rather young, concept within German foreign policy discourse, appearing for the first time in 1913. The perhaps best-known policy instruments within the Foreign Cultural Policy framework are the German Goethe Institutes, German Foreign Schools, as well as the media-programs of Deutsche Welle. 9 https://de.tongji.edu.cn/berblick/Chronik.htm, last retrieved April 2019. 10 https://www.daad.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/de/62620-0-jahre-chinesisch-deutscheshochschulkolleg, last retrieved April 2019.

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relatively modest instrument of foreign and cultural policy into a comprehensive and innovative instrument of the German higher education sector which further departed from the pattern seen in the Anglo-Saxon model of TNE. Especially, larger TNE programs under the auspices of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research were originally launched with a strong focus on exporting educational services to other countries. This included teaching and research as well. The aspect of German TNE as a tradable good was quickly dropped and was quietly substituted by the more equitable semantics of cooperation on an equal footing, which translated into a strong focus on collaborative TNE projects originating from the German higher education sector. Hence, this landmark funding scheme was renamed “Transnational Education–study programs by German universities abroad” in 2004 (ibid., p. 2012). Between 2001 and 2008, there was a phase of relative stability in the field of German TNE, resulting in the funding and operation of a number of larger TNE projects. Projects such as the German Jordanian University or the Vietnamese-German University redefined the German TNE for years to come and helped to shape what can be described as the German model of TNE. The so-called bilateral universities quickly became the backbone of the German model of TNE and can be understood as a direct consequence of the increase in available funding (Fromm 2017). The term ‘bilateral’ was introduced to indicate that the collaborative aspect of those TNE projects was not necessarily tied to academic partners in the partner countries. Rather, the funding for most of these projects has been connected to bilateral contracts between Germany and governmental actors in the respective partner countries. It should be emphasised that those collaborations mainly reflected a (general) demand for higher education originating in Germany, often combined with a high reputation in subjects such as engineering and geared towards a more applied sciences approach. In countries like Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Vietnam, these large-scale TNE projects reflected manifest policy aims formulated largely by German nation state actors, such as the Federal Ministry of Education and Research or the Federal Foreign Office. It should be noted that most of Germany’s bilateral universities are based on bilateral agreements between the German government and political partners, mostly governmental in nature, in the host countries (ibid., p. 82). They are seen as “Leuchtturmprojekte” or beacon projects of German Higher Education projects abroad (BMBF 2014, p. 89), currently being the most visible of Germany’s TNE projects. After almost seven years of stability, the field of German TNE started in 2008 to move into a new phase which was characterised by fragmentation and increased inter-ministerial conflicts (Fromm and Raev 2018). Those conflicts over policy competencies, caused by ineffective and contradictory actor constellations and lacking conflict mitigation mechanisms, led to a fragmentation but also to a politicisation of the German TNE, which has shaped but also challenged the contemporary appearance of German TNE. Next to the German bilateral universities, a new subtype of TNE projects was introduced under the label of academic excellence. On the one hand, the first Centres of African Excellence were established in order to create “modern educational

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capacities of supra-regional influence.11 The improvements in the educational quality and the greater research capacity available at these world-class hubs will enable the next generation of leaders to acquire training in line with international standards”.12 Currently, the DAAD lists ten Centres of African Excellence. On the other hand, four Centres of Excellence were established elsewhere, in Russia, Thailand, Chile and Colombia.13 These Centres of Excellence can be seen as a direct answer by the Foreign Office to the establishment of larger TNE projects by the BMBF, and represent the first implementation of policy aims formulated in the so-called Foreign Science Policy Initiative issued by the Foreign Office in 2009. Parallel to this, the BMBF funded the establishment of the West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL) and, three years later, the Southern African Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Managements (SASSCAL).14 Those two centres can be seen as an answer by the BMBF to the German Centres of Excellence. At the same time, they can be seen, too, as first steps of an evolution of German TNE, by moving away from a bilateral approach, involving a number of different partner organisations in different countries in the establishment and operation of TNE projects. The WASCAL, for example, has teaching sites in ten different locations, implementing a network solution to German TNE, while at the same time focusing not on individual academic disciplines but rather aiming to provide solutions to complex research problems regarding the environment and climate change. The latest TNE project in the sphere of smaller thematic TNE institutions is the Foreign Office Funded German-Colombian Peace Institute, aimed at providing the environment for the establishment of a German-Colombian academic network focusing on issues of peace and reconciliation.15 Just like the Centres of Excellence, the German-Colombian Institute is seen as an important contribution to the Foreign Office’s Foreign Science Policy. The latest TNE projects to originate from Germany are planned in the form of a University of Applied Sciences for Eastern Africa as well as a bilateral Tunisian-German University. The emergence of the field of German TNE can be understood as a phase model, reflecting both political policy aims connected to the initiation of new TNE projects as well as on institutional arrangements. In the initial phase of TNE in the early 1990s, the Foreign Office funded German language study programs in Central and Eastern Europe. While the second phase took place in the mid-1990s in China, the big institutional change occurred in 2001 with the appearance of the BMBF as a game change. With the support of newly allocated funds, new types of TNE projects 11 https://www.daad.de/der-daad/unsere-aufgaben/entwicklungszusammenarbeit/ foerderprogramme/hochschulen/infos/de/43833-african-excellence-fachzentren-afrika/, last retrieved April 2019. 12 See footnote 11. 13 https://www.alumniportal-deutschland.org/wissenschaft-forschung/neues-aus-der-wissenschaft/ daad-exzellenzzentren/, last retrieved April 2019. 14 https://www.bmbf.de/upload_filestore/pub/Afrika_Strategie_dt.pdf, last retrieved April 2019. 15 https://www.daad.de/laenderinformationen/kolumbien/kooperationen/de/66812-capaz-deutschkolumbianisches-friedensinstitut/, last retrieved April 2019.

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appeared, giving the German model of TNE a new and unique face, with bilateral universities on the one hand and specialised teaching and research centres on the other hand. Between 2008 and 2016, a power struggle, mainly between the Foreign Office and the BMBF, led to the development of more and more different types of TNE projects, a fragmentation that we see as the result of inter-ministerial conflicts which could not be resolved but which dragged on for almost ten years.

Actor Constellation By following the evolution of “German TNE”, it is surprising how German TNE functions as a tool box for various nation state actors. Over time, the field was fragmented into a plethora of different TNE projects and programs introduced to accomplish multiple and partially contradicting policy aims of foreign, economic and development politics. It should be emphasised that the majority of TNE projects originating in Germany were in the past initialised and at least partially financed, and therefore regulated, by German nation state actors. The implementation, however, was realised by so-called intermediate agencies functioning as state representatives in cooperation with (public) universities on the domestic side (Fromm 2017, p. 103).16 Figure 2 maps the actor constellation including those actors that are involved in the implementation process of German TNE projects (Fig. 2). Federal ministries, such as the Foreign Office/AA, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research/BMBF and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development/BMZ took on the role as policy makers and funders of TNE, while some selected TNE-projects were even initiated by the federal ministries. The Ministries of the Laender, key actors in the domestic higher education sector, were part of the funding scheme only in selected cases. As for the German TNE, the German Academic Exchange Service/DAAD and the German International Cooperation/GIZ functioned as intermediary agencies, implementing most of Germany’s TNE projects on behalf of the financing ministries. The ministries involved were highly dependent on the expertise of actors on the level of intermediary agencies. Both aspects—the states’ involvement as well the engagement by the intermediary agencies—are unique patterns in the German model of TNE.

16 Moreover, and despite global developments, the public attempt to transnationalise higher education follows in the German case strategic purposes that go beyond any profit or scientific reputation orientation. This is surprising, as the German government first started to put some serious, however only short-lived, effort into steering and regulating German TNE into a more profit-oriented direction by meeting the demands of international (higher) education markets in 2001. It then deviated from the pattern of TNB projects founded since 1990, and started to emulate the TNE model originating in Australia, the UK and the USA, which was seen as leading in the field of cross-border education. Profit and demand orientation seemed attractive in embracing reforms of market orientation in the public higher education sector. From this perspective, TNE was understood merely as an investment which was expected to produce profits.

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Fig. 2 Overview of the Actor Constellation. (Source Raev 2017, p. 255)

The leading agency within the policy process was the DAAD, beside the British Council in the UK, one of the world’s largest and oldest academic exchange organisations, founded in 1925. It received its funds mainly from the above-mentioned federal ministries, while it is at the same time “an association of German institutions of higher education and their student bodies”.17 The DAAD has an in-depth and longstanding wealth of expertise in its relationship with virtually all higher education sectors worldwide. It possesses far more practical knowledge than any German ministry, including the Foreign Office with its network of embassies and diplomats all over the world. As such, the ministries transferred most of their authority as well as the necessary funds to this agency, which signified the position of the DAAD as a powerful player within the regulation and policy formulation processes. Moreover, the DAAD was willing to use its power to act as a policy influencer, if not a policy maker in its own right, to shape the German TNE. Its most powerful “action sources” (Scharpf 2006, p. 34), as already indicated, were a pronounced expertise and a widerange network of specialists, while, additionally, most of the funds supporting TNE projects worldwide were channelled to the agency. Usually, newly founded TNE projects were implemented on the basis of negotiations between the DAAD and the relevant ministries. Moreover, a significant part of the input regarding operational opportunities and challenges in the partner countries seems to have been voiced by the DAAD, structuring the policy process for the relevant ministries. At the same time, the DAAD acted as a representative of its member universities, putting the organisation in a double role (Fromm 2017, p 143), implementing the interests of state ministries as well as of higher education institutions. This double 17 https://www.daad.de/der-daad/organisationsstruktur/en/,

last retrieved June 2019.

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role has led to an interesting function of the DAAD. As an intermediary agency, it has been active in selecting the academic partners of German TNE projects, further differentiating the German TNE model from the model of TNE originating in Australia, the UK and the USA, as, in those countries, such a practice would be deemed unacceptable. A second intermediary agency active in the field of German TNE was the German International Cooperation (GIZ), a privately organised company, which is, however, owned by the German Government (see Bach 2014, p. 95). For the German Government, GIZ plays the role of a “service provider in the field of international cooperation for sustainable development and international education work”.18 In contrast with the DAAD, the role of the GIZ was less complex despite a comparable double function as recipient and donor of funds for the establishment of German TNE projects. Similar to the DAAD, the GIZ received funds from German ministries, with which it implemented the establishment of TNE projects; however, due to its role as a service provider, the funding and distribution of funds to and from the GIZ was based on far more hierarchical processes, including contracts defining specific tasks and benchmarks according to which funds are transferred. Hence, universities were much less free than in projects financed through grant agreements, as is the case with DAAD. GIZ funded TNE projects adhered, much more than DAAD-funded projects, to the logic of development cooperation projects, including fixed project phases and shorter funding periods usually lasting two to three years, according to interview partners. At the same time, GIZ-funded TNE projects have enjoyed various funding extensions, ensuring the necessary duration of planning and implementation processes and funds for successful German TNE endeavors in the field of development policies. Due to the small number of German TNE projects financed by GIZ, this chapter will not go into a more detailed analysis of GIZ as a policy actor. An interesting side note should be made regarding the role of the German Laender, which hold the main funding and regulatory responsibilities for institutions of higher education within Germany (Kreckel 2016, p. 65). In the case of the German TNE sector, however, the German Laender played only a restricted role, financing TNE projects on an individual basis (Fromm and Ramin 2014).19 In order not to conflict with constitutional law, prohibiting prolonged and institutional funding of HEIs by the federal government, which is a specific trait of the German higher education system, TNE support was being framed as project funding, rather than prolonged institutional funding, even though the actual nature of the funding of German TNE projects by the German side has been, de facto, a long-term one. The project nature of German financial support, however, has led to a constant re-structuring, if not of the TNE projects as a whole, then at least of the German contribution to them.

18 https://www.giz.de/en/aboutgiz/profile.html,

last retrieved September 2018.

19 Only a small number of German Laender was involved in supporting TNE-projects, like Hesse in

the case of the Vietnamese-German University (for more information see Fromm 2017). Interview partners hinted at high costs and the relatively complex coordination tasks as a reason for the hesitation of the German Laender to be more active in the support of German TNE-projects (ibid.).

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An important and yet under-researched group within the actor constellation of German TNE is constituted by the governments of the partner countries in which TNE projects are being established. The role of the governments in the partner countries does not stop with the planning phase of new TNE projects. Much of the initial investment of the establishment of German TNE projects as well as the brunt of the operational costs was financed by either governmental actors in the partner countries or, in rare cases, by private investors. Interview partners have hinted at the fact that the German side funded only a fraction of the actual costs of German TNE projects; however, as data on funding and costs of German TNE projects are hard to come by, this aspect has, until now, been subject to speculation rather than fact-based research.

Actor Orientations and Actor Preferences The pattern of state actors’ involvement is followed by a strong reference to sectoral and regional policy strategies, which have been published by the three leading ministries (Foreign Office, BMBF, BMZ). Since 2000, more than sixteen different policy (strategic) documents have been published (Raev 2017, p. 263), mapping and elaborating the ministries’ interests in TNE. The programs and projects established worldwide can be seen as vehicles implementing the policy aims or as policy tools. Although already having been in place for ten years, the German TNE projects were explicitly mentioned in a strategy paper of the Foreign Office only in 2000 (ibid., p. 259), while a systematic legitimation occurred only in 2001, when the BMBF entered the field of TNE with the objective of funding new profit oriented TNE projects, emulating the model of TNE originating in Australia, the UK and the USA. From this perspective, TNE was for a brief period understood merely as a financial investment. To this end, the BMBF introduced a systematic funding scheme through a federal investment program named the “Zukunftsinvestitionsprogramm” (Future Investment Program). This new programme was made possible by the proceedings from the sale of mobile-phone licenses in the year 2000 (Lanzendorf 2016, p. 212). The newly allocated public funds enabled the DAAD to draw up its program “Export Deutscher Studienangebote” (Export of German Degree Courses) with an initial budget of ten million Euros provided by the BMBF.20 The renaming of the funding program as “Transnational Education—Higher Education Projects Abroad” only three years later, in 2004, indicated, however, that, under the auspices of the BMBF, Germany chose a rather different approach to TNE (Lanzendorf 2016, p. 214). By abandoning the profit orientation, German TNE returned to represent a politicised approach, placing increased attention on aspects of higher education internationalisation as well as the promotion of Germany as a leading scientific country.

20 http://presseservice.pressrelations.de/pressemitteilung/deutsches-institut-fuer-wissenschaft-

und-technologie-in-singapur-gegruendet-85263.html, last retrieved September 2018.

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One reason for this rather abrupt change of mind seems to have been the understanding that German TNE programs could not be financed solely by the revenue that the TNE projects produced by charging tuition fees (ibid.). Hence, the German approach remained embedded in a strategic framework that referred to multiple policy aims. Therefore, instead of focussing on the generation of profit, the semantics initially used by the BMBF upon its entrance into the field of TNE, the more equitable semantics of “cooperation on an equal footing” was quickly substituted (Bode 2010). This meant that the BMBF, as before it the Foreign Office and the BMZ, introduced and therefore reinforced a strong focus on collaborative TNE projects with foreign partner institutions—to further internationalised research and education as well as to accomplish political objectives, rather than pursuing purely economic purposes. The first major policy adjustment came in 2008 with the first “Internationalisation Strategy” of the German government, drawn up under the direction of the BMBF (BMBF 2008). In it were defined the central aims and instruments of the internationalisation of the German higher education sector. While the official document did not mention TNE explicitly, international activities of German universities abroad were subsumed under the term “promotion of Germany as a location for studying, research and innovation” (BMBF 2008), putting a distinctively domestic agenda on German TNE projects abroad. Incidentally, this strategy was followed by an initiative of the Foreign Office in 2009, called “Foreign Science Policy Initiative” 21 , which, being at odds with the Internationalisation Strategy, was never published, but rather used as internal guidelines for the activities of the Foreign Office. While the Internationalisation Strategy was seen as a more domestic instrument, the Foreign Science Policy Initiative was more outward looking. It aimed at the solution of global challenges like climate change, forced migration and demographic changes, while, in duplication of the Internationalisation Strategy, was also aiming at the representation of the German Science and Education sector abroad. The almost simultaneous publication of two major strategies by the two main sponsors of TNE can be seen as the manifestation of an aggressive domestic turf battle between the two ministries regarding competencies in the field of TNE. Soon after both strategies were published, the Foreign Office and, to a certain extent, the BMZ started to increase their activities in the TNE sector, planning and funding various TNE projects, in an apparent attempt to counter the increased influence of the BMBF in the field of TNE; however, rather than copying the BMBF’s instruments, the Foreign Office, in particular, introduced its own types of TNE project, circumventing a possible confrontation with the BMBF over steering competencies. The so-called Centres of Excellence were seen as an integral part first of the Foreign Science Policy Initiative. The Centres of African Excellence, especially, were soon integrated into the growing policy discourse surrounding the African continent, which has, over time, produced a large number of strategy papers by various German ministries. These were established along the lines of issues connected by the Foreign Office to the African continent. Rather than focussing on fields of 21 http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/DE/Aussenpolitik/KulturDialog/05_Wissenschaft/ UebersichtAWP_node.html, last retrieved August 2018.

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study in the applied sciences and in fields connected to engineering, as was the case for the bi-national universities, here every Centre was dealing with one specialised field, such as criminal justice, logistics or development studies. The choice of subjects represented in those Centres reflects heavily on the perspective the Foreign Office has on the African continent. It should be emphasised that this perspective has changed over the years. Current planning activities for two new Centres, the West African-German Centre of Excellence for Local Governance in Africa and the West African-German Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Rural Transformation, hint, therefore, at connections with the issue of migration. At the beginning of 2016, two years later than initially expected, the original Internationalisation Strategy was adjusted and republished by the BMBF.22 It now aimed at streamlining internationalisation activities in the German research and education sectors, in order to increase policy coherence and cooperation between the relevant actors in those fields; however, instead of effectively combining the resources of the BMBF and the Foreign Office in the field of TNE, a rather unexpected step was made by the Foreign Office. Instead of fostering the cooperation with the BMBF emphasising the common good, the Foreign Office seemed to have opted for an exit strategy, at least from the activity of TNE initiation. New, more urgent action fields emerged, such as the need for “humanitarian assistance, crisis prevention, stabilisation, and post conflict reconstruction”.23 TNE seemed, at least temporarily, to have lost its appeal as an effective toolbox for a soft power policy directed by the Foreign Office.24 The attempted exit revealed a resource gap between the BMBF and the Foreign Office as well as the rising authority of the BMBF within an increasingly internationalised German political field. As a consequence of the changes within the German field of TNE, two different functionalities of individual TNE projects become visible. One functionality can be connected to the usual pathway into policy analysis which aims at the solution of public problems identified by policy makers. Here, TNE projects fulfil functions of foreign, higher education or development policies and are in line with different and changing objectives which ministries try to achieve over time. Changes in TNE policies can be explained by changed preferences or changed worldviews of the relevant actors, mainly German ministries as well as partners in the host countries. A second functionality of the establishment of German TNE projects, however, is directed “inwards” and reflects on interministerial conflicts in Germany, caused by what Zürn calls “a problem of [the] sectoral allocation of competencies” (Zürn 2013, p. 15) in the field of German TNE. According to that logic, the establishment of new types of German TNE projects is aimed at expanding the power base (Haus

22 https://www.bmbf.de/de/internationalisierungsstrategie-269.html, last retrieved September 2018. 23 https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/aamt/auswdienst/abteilungen/-/232022,

last retrieved April 2019. 24 Most recently, however, the Foreign Office showed renewed activities which could be interpreted as re-gaining interest in the field of German TNE. Since data for new activities are as yet too scant, we will only hint at this development without more detailed elaboration.

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2008, p. 97) of the different ministries by broadening “their playing field for policymaking” (ibid.) in the contested policy arena of German TNE, thereby changing the nature of the whole field. Only a clearly defined allocation of competencies and resources, in other words an increased policy coherence by the actors, would be able to counteract the on-going fragmentation of the German field of TNE.

German TNE as National Playing Field The scientific debate over the origin and development of a specialised field within the field of internationalisation of higher education, namely TNE, has for too long been focused on issues of de-regulated higher education sectors and profit or reputation orientations as drivers of the expansion of TNE projects on a global scale within globalised knowledge markets. In our article, we discussed the German case from a national perspective and showed that the German TNE approach is public in nature. Rather, in analysing developments in the TNE sector on the level of HEIs themselves, we have changed the focus to the level of state actors in order to explore their role in supporting the setup of German TNE projects. Within the paper, we used the ACI (Mayntz and Scharpf 1995; Scharpf 1997, 2006) with a strong focus on actor orientations and preferences. Therefore, our analysis refers to the specific governance structure. We were able to show that German TNE projects are supported by federal funds to accomplish various political objectives which lie, at least partially, well beyond the classical functionalities of domestic higher education policies. Aims like the promotion of the German language and culture, the aim of stabilising partner countries in order to mitigate the reasons for forced migration and mass flight, or the representation of the German higher education sector as a whole, in combination with the increased internationalisation of the domestic higher education sphere, have created a complex field of TNE projects. Adding to the complexity is the fact that the German TNE field is, to this day, still evolving and has not yet stopped differentiating and changing according to political strategies and international demand for the provision of a TNE “Made in Germany”. In terms of internationally comparative TNE research, we propose to extend this perspective to the level of nation state actors extending the knowledge discourse beyond arguments of mere (de)-regulation and quality management in order to explain various TNE outcomes. Especially, less well researched, nonetheless significant, TNE exporting countries like France, China and Russia can be expected to have state actors influencing TNE activities of public universities abroad, with aims going beyond profit or reputation generation, constituting what we would call the “politicised” aims of TNE. It is the occurrence of a dual function of German TNE projects, fulfilling outwardoriented policy aims as well as an inward-oriented attempts at conflict resolution between actors who have, over a long time, failed at coordinating their activities, which characterises best the German approach to TNE, setting it apart from other nation state centred TNE sectors, such as the French, Russian or Chinese. Those two different functionalities guiding the development of the German TNE sector seem

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to reflect the complex nature of the domestic higher education sector of Germany and pose the question of the relationship of foreign and domestic influence in regard to foreign policy activities of nation states. This reasoning hints at a research gap regarding the national stage of policy making within the field of TNE. More research in this direction would not only enhance our understanding of various TNE sectors, but rather add to the understanding of transnationalisation processes of supposedly exclusive nation state based policy-making domains, helping to redefine the relation of domestic and foreign policy processes.

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Nadin Fromm works as a research associate at the University of Kassel (Chair of Public Management, Germany) and her research focus is on policy analysis and policy advice, politicisation of bureaucracy, decision-making behaviour and role perceptions of top civil servants as well as on governance of research and higher education systems. Nadin investigates, in the context of her dissertation, the transnationalisation of higher education with a focus on Germany’s bilateral universities (e.g. Turkish German University, German Jordanian University). Lately, Nadin has been studying the bureaucratic politicisation and its effects on the decision-making behaviour of senior civil servants. Alexander Raev is currently working on his Ph.D., analysing policy changes within the German TNE sector in the Doctoral Program for “International and Comparative Research on Education and Education Policy in the Welfare State” at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. His research interests include Education Policies, Policy Design and regional studies, with a focus on Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Teaching Transnational German Studies Across the Globe

Outside the Nation: Taking Stock of a Sense of Duty and Diversity in German Studies Abroad Benjamin Nickl

Abstract There has been a noticeable improvement in the ethno-cultural diversity and institutional openness of German higher education over the past two decades. It encompasses instruction and research activities as evidenced by the agenda of the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst), The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung), and the German Research Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). There is currently, however, no collation of the programs, departmental efforts, or list of initiatives which would take stock of a similarly progressive shift in transnational German higher education outside a national, Germany-centred perspective. In recognising the shift, this chapter offers a contemporary overview of important German Studies Abroad programs and trends at international liberal arts colleges and research universities. They transcend the field’s nation-centric history, as they redefine transnational German education in the 21st century with a sense of pluri-local attachments and intersectional duties. A possible explanation for this departure from nation-centred tradition is an increased geo-political awareness. There is now more concern for the local academic environments of German Studies Abroad than there is for replicating the higher education experience of German studies in Germany.

Nation-Centred Institutions of Transnational Higher Education in Germany Germany’s positive transnational education identity is the result of large-scale investment in higher education research and global cooperation. In 2018, in Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and Oceania, the higher education sector is abuzz with activities directed by three main bodies. They are the German Academic Exchange Service, The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the German B. Nickl (B) The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Nickl et al. (eds.), Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2_4

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Research Association. Next to politically affiliated foundations and smaller organisations in the private industry sector, these bodies have significantly increased the number of higher education partnerships and exchange programs since their creation. Founded in Heidelberg in 1925, the German Academic Exchange Service has turned into one of Germany’s most important funding organisations in the context of international exchange of students and researchers (See Fig. 1). The same is true for the Humboldt Foundation which was established in Berlin in 1860, only 18 months after the death of Alexander von Humboldt. The Humboldt Foundation’s extensive network operates on a global scale. It supports academic cooperation between scientists and scholars from Germany and from abroad (see Fig. 2). Currently, the Humboldt organisation’s network includes more than 29,000 alumni members, the so-called Humboldtians. Though it is internationally perhaps the least known member of this group of transnational education agencies, the German Research Association is certainly influential (See Fig. 3). The organisation employs 750 full-time staff, whose job it is to increase Germany’s international research profile through competitive funding allocations and strategic cooperation partnerships between German and international higher education researchers and research organisations. The agenda of Germany’s largest transnational education agencies includes the furthering of social, cultural, and economic ties between Germany and other nation states. On its website, the German Academic Exchange Service describes its mission based on three fields of activity, one of which is scholarships. The other two fields of activity revolve around internationalisation strategies and academic collaboration expertise, all to “meet the challenges of the future with new ideas while drawing on [the German Academic Exchange Service’s] strengths and extensive expertise”

Fig. 1 DAAD worldwide lektorate network map (Source DAAD https://www.daad.de/en/)

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Fig. 2 Overview of Alexander Humboldt foundation funding sources (Source Alexander Humboldt Foundation https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/home.html)

Fig. 3 Structure of German Research Association (Source German Research Association https:// www.dfg.de/en/)

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(DAAD Strategy 2020). The Humboldt Foundation and the German Research Association have put out similar mission statements, all centred on their core business of advancing Germany’s transnational education identity through academic exchange and collaboration opportunities on a global scale. The Humboldt Foundation defines its role as that of “an intermediary organisation of German foreign cultural and educational policy. [It] promotes international cultural dialogue and academic exchange”, so that any individual academic researcher worldwide can “become a member of the Humboldt Family” (Humboldt Foundation). The Humboldt Foundation also makes it a point to stress the organisation’s humanistic creed: “There are no quotas, neither for individual countries, nor for particular academic disciplines” (Humboldt Foundation). It is important to highlight this phrasing, as the term ‘quota’ has acquired a negative connotation since 2015 in the recent refugee and forced migration context, and the right-wing supposition is that Germany’s refugee and migratory intake quotas are unsustainably high. The German Academic Exchange Service’s motto, Change by Exchange, encapsulates the institutional underpinning of Germany’s transnational education identity. One may infer from this open-door language a commitment to academic cosmopolitanism, which arose from historical developments. In view of German Reunification and after the dissipation of the Cold War’s geopolitical stalemate in the early 1990s, Germany’s international relations efforts made apparent the need for joint international cooperation; it was essential to create excitement for other countries’ cultures and higher education research profiles, and similarly, to foster the promotion of German education culture abroad. Starting in the mid-1990s, concurrent initiatives of the German Academic Exchange Service, The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the German Research Association targeted economic collaboration based on a higher education research stimulus, or Anschub, model. Structural in this move were the DAAD’s international lecturer offices at universities across the world, the international research and visiting fellowship models of Humboldt, which worked like a think tank incubator, and the German Research Association’s interdisciplinary funding support. The three organisations brought to the table a new transnational education identity. Until today, this identity routinely turns on the role of benevolent mediator between cultures, countries, languages, different career and educational stages of individuals, and varied areas of study. In social and economic terms, and on an institutional level, Germany’s transnational education strategy as facilitator of inter-societal exchange paid off. Current world rankings of higher education facilities place Germany high up on the list in terms of perceived hospitality to students and researchers of other cultures and with different ethnic backgrounds. Factually, the numbers underscore the positive image of Germany’s higher education institutions as cosmopolitan hubs of research excellence, yet there is less information about another tertiary education pillar of German transnational education. That is the study of German culture and thought outside the German nation state in the 21st century. German Studies programs outside both Germany and German-speaking majority countries are essential in their role to connect countries and foster intercultural dialogue. There are no current studies, though, to examine if these German studies programs share agendas similar to those of the

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German higher education institutions described before, in that they foster mobility of non-German groups and support innovative research efforts and critical cosmopolitan thought. Moreover, there is a lack of research into how efforts of German Studies programs outside Germany, in teaching, researching, and publishing on German culture, play out in terms of social equity, integration, and reconciliation, to improve and perhaps establish long-term ties to Germany.

Current Directions in German Studies Abroad Programs, Groups, and Movements The term ‘German Studies Abroad’ includes departments and institutes at tertiary education level which pursue the study of German language, thought, and culture outside German-speaking countries in research and teaching (Jaworska 2009: 9). German studies in Germany was long held as the mother-discipline and intellectual model for German Studies Abroad. Hence, seen often as a carbon copy of the former, German Studies Abroad scholars had to work through associations with cultural missionary work and suggestions of neo-Germanic imperialism (Jaworska: 10). It was in the 1970s that things changed, when the French German studies scholar Pierre Bertaux initiated a disassociation of German studies in German-speaking majority countries and German Studies Abroad. Bertaux’s efforts lined up with the agenda of a heated debate among German studies scholars in Western Europe. These scholars sought to legitimise the relevance of humanistic study areas to modern societies in transnational contexts, which meant they questioned an allegedly unproblematic transfer and dissemination of German studies outside German-speaking societies’ borders. Repeatedly, as Lynne Tatlock points out in her historical assessment of German Studies Abroad, the assumption that disciplinary transfer and reception happens in a de-territorialised vacuum turned out to be naïve. Though decades on, she adds, “[...] this parochial idea of what it signifies when one engages in German studies ‘abroad’ (im Ausland)” is still reduced by many Germanistic nativists to little more than “Volkslieder and Apfelstrudel”, or “folk songs and apple strudel” (Tatlock 2018: 238). Nevertheless, German Studies Abroad has found many homes in intercultural contact zones. Transnational points of contact have multiplied through the internet, ease of travel, and access to professional exchange venues in the new century. As it is now well recognised, too, accusations of reproductive content did play a major part in the divorce of German Studies Abroad from nation-centric German studies in Germany. There was a kind of cookie-cutter assertion of German studies in Germanspeaking lands, which denied the academic multiplicity of German Studies Abroad. Methodological mimicry in the mother-discipline of classic and contemporary German literary studies and a replica of the German literary canon added to the debate for transnational academic legitimacy. The inclusion of local histories and a linkup with

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subjects from the field of cultural and social studies happened quickly as an innovative reaction formation, thus leading to a rapid diversification of German Studies Abroad. Jeffrey Peck’s description of the field right after the fall of the Berlin Wall foreshadowed the present-day evolution: “… with a greater focus on the events of the 20th century, the concept of interdisciplinary German Studies Abroad was born. [And] following the fall of the iron curtain, a tendency towards a culture-focused approach has emerged” (Peck 1989: 180). From having a fairly homogeneous structure, German Studies Abroad has transformed quickly over the past three decades. The large-scale stratification played out in scholars’ greater awareness of geo-political conditions for the study of German culture and thought abroad, including political and economic challenges. Individual departments have taken on unique academic profiles related to their staff members’ diverse teaching and learning traditions. Distinct contextual attitudes towards German-speaking cultures also had, and have, German Studies Abroad academics questioning the proximity of German Studies Abroad to the German nation state (Tatlock 2018: 235–238). Most importantly, in contrast to the three big institutional agents of transnational German higher education in Germany, German Studies Abroad has become contrastive to a metropolitically centred and nationally framed German studies approach. The German Academic Exchange Service, The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the German Research Association prioritise the study of the German language and access to research and work in Germany’s big urban hubs. German Studies Abroad, though, has turned into a multi-local and cross-sectional enterprise. The responsibilities associated with transnational embeddedness in the history and lived realities of local communities and cultures establishes one of the main aims of German Studies Abroad (Tatlock: 238). There is a sense of translocal responsibility to educate students of German Studies Abroad in a direct link to the social setting of the tertiary education institutions in which they are enrolled, and the larger, geo-political environment of their communities, countries, or even transborder regions. A circumspect description of this duty of German Studies Abroad and its manifestations across the globe has already begun. Initiatives by well-respected German Studies Abroad journals (for example The German Quarterly, German Life and Letters, Limbus, New German Critique, German Studies Review, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies) as well as researchers at the German Academic Exchange Service and The Humboldt Foundation, and the ones gathered in this book, prove as much. Thus, I do not claim the last word or the definitive statement in my overview of German Studies Abroad initiatives and their engagement with local communities and cultures. Indeed, it is impractical to allege definitive knowledge of all current efforts in German Studies Abroad. Instead, it is my goal to offer an indicative update on the progression of a transnational practice of German Studies Abroad in the 21st century, which gives preference to the local and the locals over the German national. I offer this update through the prism of transnational education innovation, reconciliation efforts in post-colonial societies, and the empowerment of minority communities and identities in the diverse contact zones of German Studies Abroad.

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Education Innovation According to Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research, survey reports done in the past ten years indicate that Germany was the first choice for 61% of international students studying in the country. The figure was up from 47% in 2009. The Ministry also reports that the recognition of foreign academic degrees was up from 60% in 2009 to 75% in 2012, which suggests that international students are taking more advantage of Germany’s open-door policy in transnational education. Another 2013 study by Prognos, carried out on behalf of the German Academic Exchange Service, confirms a positive effect on the national economy of Germany due to the spending of foreign students enrolled in a Masters or bachelor’s degree program. In 2013, the Federal Government of Germany and the German Federal States adopted a joint Strategy of the Federal Government and Federal States Ministers of Science for the Internationalization of the Higher Education Institutions in Germany (BMBF 2018). The international mobility of students is a key goal in this strategy. Higher education institutions facilitate it, for example, by an easier transfer and credit recognition system of students’ academic achievements as laid out in the Bologna Process. On the departmental level of German Studies Abroad programs, however, academic staff cannot rely on national, state-run measures. It is a program’s localised curricular framework which is meant to further the transnational mobility and exposure of foreign students to German culture and thought. The Department of German at Georgetown University illustrates a best-practice example for this argument.

Georgetown University’s Department of German Curriculum Revision Project Located in Washington, D.C., the Department of German at Georgetown University engages in a uniquely comprehensive curriculum project. This project started out in February 1997 as a review of a college-level foreign language program. Twenty years on, in 2018, and now named Developing Multiple Literacies, the long-term curriculum project reflects a “program of study [that] is neither merely an aggregation of courses, as is otherwise customary, nor does it differentiate between so-called ‘language’ courses and ‘content’ courses’. Instead, the revised curriculum presents “an integration of content and language through oral and written textual genres throughout the undergraduate program” (GUDG Curriculum 2018). There is a sense of duty to provide leadership in the area of curricular change and student readiness for global realities which the faculty staff recognise as essential for their German curriculum transformation. As the undergraduate program spans the entire four-year period of the Bachelor of Arts degree, the goal is for students to become “competent and literate non-native users of German who can employ the language in a range of intellectual, professional, and personal contexts” (GUDG Curriculum 2018). A large number of publications and expert opinions, stated in professional fora at large venues like the

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annual Modern Language Association conference in the United States, supports the urgent need for German Studies Abroad programs to do what the Department of German’s staff at Georgetown University does on an ongoing basis. It is to reflect in the curricular design of the transnational academic discipline the lived realities of students, both present and future. The latter, in particular, require German studies programs outside German-speaking majority countries to “rethink constantly the access of graduates to German-language resources and discourse-based competency skills” (GUDG Curriculum 2018). Another consideration must be the students’ local contexts and their personal backgrounds in relation to study content. In the case of Georgetown University, that means multicultural, oftentimes multilingual learners of German, at a very competitive institution of higher learning in the United States of America. Surprisingly little curricular work exists, though, in German Studies Abroad programs, which would indicate a similarly complex recognition of the linkages between contexts and functions of German language use, and the education of learners as critical world citizens. The teaching goals laid out in the Department of German’s Georgetown model curriculum hint at this undervalued competence outcome: “Students are encouraged to become autonomous, self-reflective learners who are aware of those strategies for acquiring German that are most effective and efficient for them, to compare and contrast their native language and cultural assumptions with those of the German-speaking world” (GUDG Curriculum 2018). John L. Plewis and Barbara Schmenk point out that German Studies Abroad programs have a history of “limited scholarly attention to curriculum” (Plews and Schmenk 2013: 1). They bemoan a lack of innovative thought going into “the conceptual or material foundations of traditional or new curriculum goals and orientations; content and materials selection and sequencing; syllabus or course design; curriculum enactment in the disciplinary interrelations between teacher and students; and language, culture, and place” (Plews and Schmenk 2013: 1). This is a fundamental issue of professional practice and academic engagement, and taking note of the problem, as Georgetown’s Department of German has done, is vital. Curriculum scholarship appears on occasion in outlines of German Studies Abroad programs’ websites, or members of departmental staff discuss it informally, yet Plews and Schmenk conclude that the “theorized, detailed, comprehensive, documented and published curriculum” (Plews and Schmenk: 3) articulation of the revision project at the Department of German at Georgetown University is very rare. Despite the positive effect on student attraction and retention rates, it seems only a few German Studies Abroad programs take curriculum innovation as an opportunity to add critical and creative thinking meaningfully to their transnational disciplinary profile.

Reconciliation Another way to look at the disciplinary evolution of German Studies Abroad programs is a move beyond crucial historical junctures in post-colonial settings. After

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the division of Germany into East and West on 7 October 1949, it took 51 years for the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany to reconcile as one nation. Governmental institutions including transnational education agents defended according to Hannfried von Hindenburg “the notion that there was ‘only one German state’ and creating a unified ‘Germany as a whole’ was the single most important policy imperative among Western German policy makers during the 1950s and the 1960s.” (von Hindenburg 2007: 20). To be sure, von Hindenburg argues, the German conception of the unified state, especially in the early 1990s after reunification, presupposes that unity of people and groups in society is synonymous with unity of the nation state: “… the merging of East and West Germany […] was not simply a political goal, but was seen as an ideal state of being” (von Hindenburg: 21). Eventually, though, the key epistemological development transpired at the onset of the 1960s. There was a growing realisation brought about by German studies in Germany that the claim to German unity could no longer rest on the national cult of a continuous and white-washed German history. German intellectuals, historians and political scientists, and higher education students in particular, “reckoned that reconciliation could not be won without facing the country’s dictatorial past” (von Hindenburg: 21). The unity of the German nation state has therefore long been the object of much scrutiny in German Studies Abroad to examine local conditions of colonised societies. Where European countries had imposed colonial rule overseas, they also implemented their socio-cultural structures of higher education. Using the reunification of German society as a model of intellectual reflection, orchestrated efforts in recent years demonstrate that working through the past of local and even national communities has made German Studies Abroad a potential locus for productive reconciliation initiatives in the 21st century. This is. Of course, not to say that German social policy models of Versöhnung or Aussöhnung, as Lily Gardner Feldman describes it with case studies in the context of international affairs and German domestic policy since 1949, are a silver bullet to remedy deep social divisions and entrenched divides (Feldman 1999: 333–336). Feldman argues that focusing on an ideal type of reconciliation without profound consideration for concrete and coherent internal social policy reform may look good on white papers and in public statements. It does little, though, to advance an “unachievable ideal” (Feldman: 336) which political and colonising elites pay lip service to in prominent public displays of political pragmatism. The meaning of reconciliation among Germany’s internal populations and across borders is meaningless if not considered through the lens of another country’s specific lines of division and disunity. German Studies Abroad scholarship has come to understand this, as it has discussed the saliency of German-German and international reconciliation between Germany and other countries for decades. A trove of research publications by an increasingly diverse group of scholars with an understanding of historiographic sensitivities and ethnographic expertise suggests that reconciliation efforts are (1) unique to each local situation, (2) transnational in nature, and (3) transnational events with multiple geopolitical actors involved. The position statement of Andrea Bandhauer and Maria Weber, attached here, details this with

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reference to the historical development of German Studies Abroad in Australia’s post-colonial era and the deep divide between indigenous and colonial (university research) communities.

Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum Over the past two decades, there have been many initiatives to decolonise the university as an institutional network of great social and economic power. The most prominent examples of this currently play out in India’s higher learning institutions, in South African and Australian universities (Bhambra et al. 2018: 1–4). Most recently in German Studies Abroad circles in Northern American societies, the Diversity, Decolonialization, and the German Curriculum1 project has created a forum for postcolonial reformulations of the discipline and the duty of American and Canadian leaders to change social contexts. The transnational concern with societal reconciliation sets the DDGC forum apart from Germany’s institutional higher education agendas. In addition to many other attributes, there is an immanent focus on German Studies Abroad education as part of the inherent social justice element in higher education, and a transnational educational identity which preserves the sovereignty of local identities. Coupled with a call to unite critical race theorems with indigenous pathway models to progressive higher education, the DDGC’s mission statement reflects a widespread cultural change in tertiary education settings. It reads like a timely and compelling commitment of transnational German Studies scholars and practitioners to pursue social change in a global context: “DDGC considers work intersecting German applied language, cultural, feminist, queer, gender, black, and/or ethnic studies engaging the questions above. The primary goal is to leverage integral theoretical discussion into concrete lessons, modules, mission statements or manifestos suitable to engender curricular and other change at institutions nationally and internationally” (DDGC 2018). While the situation and status of indigenous communities differ from country to country and region by region, the DDGC’s underlying rationale turns on principles of education as a human rights issue. The DDGC recognises the non-inclusion of indigenous knowledge in the higher learning institutions of Northern America as a flaw in national culture policies. It is crucial to note that the number of colleges and universities in America acknowledging decolonisation officially as part of their future higher education strategies is small. In hundreds of higher education settings in the United States, for instance, the barriers for the voices of non-Western locals and local communities are still anchored firmly in place. As detailed by the DDGC’s members’ initial reports, the idea of multi-cultural higher education in North America is misleading. The term ‘multiculture’ is dominated by Western thought and tradition. It is open to international, fee-paying student segments and ethnic identities congruent 1 See

Ervin Malakaj’s chapter in this volume for a detailed analysis of the DDGC’s post-colonial German studies initiatives in Canada and the United States of America.

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with Anglo-philic value systems, but it has never been the much-needed cultural interface between the local indigenous people as the quintessential Other and the non-indigenous colonisers or contemporary newcomers. In the view of the DDGC, though, effective action to close the gap can come from every German Studies Abroad faculty member or German Studies Abroad program graduate student. The action group has identified several steps towards reconciliation, of which some include “redefining and problematizing the German Studies Abroad canon; politicization of class content and strategies for dealing with U.S. politics in the German classroom; or, recognizing and teaching about racism in Germany today” (DDGC 2018). Part of the work is to identify those academic procedures and social practices, norms, beliefs, and choices, which mark anything non-European and indigenous as inferior. It also means that German Studies Abroad programs have to deconstruct continuously their status as an extension of the global North’s imperial and therefore colonising heritage. We will have to keep asking questions about the image of Germanness they promote, vis-à-vis the one promoted in Germany and Germany’s transnational institutions of higher education.2

Minority Group and Minority Identity Support A dominant concern for Germany’s transnational education institutions and their political actions since WWII were common perceptions of post-war Germanness. Germany’s post-war identity discourse also influenced the initial acceptance of German Studies Abroad, as Rachel J. Halverson and Carol Anne Costabile-Heming write in their stock-taking of the German Studies Abroad situation in America: past challenges for American Germanists were “to define an identity distinct from that of the parallel discipline in Germany” (Halverson and Costabile-Heming 2015: 3). In the 1950s and 60s, this was necessary to maintain academic credibility and to reassert and, to a larger part, re-establish the discipline on its own transnational terms outside German Germanistik. In the 1970s and 80s, such thinking became especially crucial because “German Germanistik (was) accused of forcing its scholarly and ideological imprint upon German studies in America” (Halverson and CostabileHeming: 3). The new millennium saw, yet again, another shift, as multiple German Studies Abroad programs, both in America and in other countries, adopted a multiperspectivism beyond the German canon and German majority culture: “[...] as the twentieth century drew to a close, most Germanists (did) focus on broader aspects of cultural transmission as their goal.” (7) It seems only consequential to look further for configurations that would allow German Studies Abroad students to “hone the skills necessary to become the global citizens so many are calling for in the new century” (7). Some groups within the larger context of German Studies Abroad are pursuing this goal in relation to equal access to education of minorities, and by taking a strong 2 See

as an example for this Irina Herrschner’s chapter on the Goethe Institute’s transnational eduction and culture policy agenda in Australia.

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stand against minority identity bias in different local contexts. This is not because of German Studies Abroad per se, but because every study of cultural otherness offers an opportunity to reflect on emerging and evolving processes of globalisation and transnational interconnectedness.

Women in German’s Feminist Research and Practitioner Coalition The association of Women in German defines itself as a “democratic forum for all people interested in feminist approaches to German literature and culture or in the intersection of gender with other categories of analysis such as sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity” (WIG). Founded in 1974 in North America by a group of German Studies scholars, the organisation supports progressive impulses and forwardthinking identity research nodes at its national professional meetings and annual conference. The members of Women in German subscribe to the eradication of discriminatory elements and practices in German Studies Abroad in school, college, and university curricula, while seeking to “create bridges, cross boundaries, nurture aspiration, and challenge assumptions while exercising critical self-awareness” (WIG). WIG is active internationally by addressing in public, and in the members’ classrooms, issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. There is a continuous sense of duty among WIG members to speak out and use their platform as a smaller yet highly regarded grouping within a socio-critical strand of German Studies Abroad. In a recent statement on the state of affairs in American society under the leadership of Donald Trump, for instance, WIG member Beverly Weber penned the Women in German Statement on Antisemitic, Racist, and Transphobic Language and Violence. The piece was published on the official WIG blog. It postulates the need for feminist scholars within German studies to recognise and call out anti-Semitic violence and a surge in anti-Black racism in the United States. It is one of WIG’s trademark features to oppose xenophobia and white supremacy as seen in 2018 in the murders of eleven Jewish people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the murders of two African Americans in a Kentucky grocery store. Weber, like her colleagues in the Women in German Coalition, is trained in a critical history of Nazi Germany and its racism and ethnic bias. This training is important. It enables German Studies Abroad groups to speak out against local manifestations of racism in their countries of residence by harking back to intertwined histories of German national crimes against Jewish and other nonwhite communities. “As a feminist organization”, Weber writes, “we are committed to scholarship that challenges interlocking systems of oppression and power. We recognize that feminist goals must include the end of racism and white supremacy. We express our solidarity with all groups who stand against these systems of oppression” (WIG). From the precariousness of being a displaced refugee to a sense of dutiful leadership in library leadership positions, a#FeminismToMe Initiative, or the WIG

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Webinar 2018: Teaching and Working for Diversity, Equity and Inclusions, Women in German, demonstrates its much-needed contribution to the transnational field of German Studies in the new century. As the field moves forward to face new developments, scholars and practitioners associated with groups like WIG may be poised to assume leadership of critical intellectual production with a transnational German perspective on many matters of institutionalised oppression.

Going Local in Transnational German Education The procedures and processes of institutional higher education in Germany are strongly regulated by national agendas and policies. Strict rules and legal codes govern The German Academic Exchange Service, The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the German Research Association. In fact, most processes and procedures in German studies programs in Germany are decidedly national because they lead back to a centralised government scheme. From bigger decisions, such as hiring new university staff members and forming cross-institutional research clusters, to smaller tasks like ordering departmental equipment, national provisions for spending apply. This comes as no surprise. All public service in Germany, which is taxpayer funded, has to be subject to strict oversight rules. It must also align with the institutional vision for German higher education, set out in the respective federal German state’s Länder Department of Education’s mission statement and research agenda. Everything is connected to the benefit for the nation; however, as is apparent in the indicative overview of German Studies Abroad programs, groups, and movements offered there, the German Studies Abroad context is something of a transnational laboratory in many local contexts. This laboratory of ideas and actions is progressive, and it is intersectional. It is imbued with a sense of social justice. It is decidedly global. This is true when it comes to a disciplinary improvement of curriculum design, as in the Department of German at Georgetown University sharing its resources and knowledge openly and freely. It is true for the cross-border efforts of the Diversity, Decolonialization, and the German Curriculum project, with German Studies Abroad scholars linking up to form an interdisciplinary support network of all across Northern America, and it holds true for the Women in German’s ongoing mission to develop a feminist sense of engaged academic self-governance on academia’s inter-institutional levels. To pair a transnational with a dutiful perspective on German Studies Abroad programs is a forward-thinking exercise. In the process of forming new identities and cross-border, as well as inter-disciplinary, alliances, the German-studies abroad movements, groups, and developments gathered here point to an emerging framework. This framework is marked by a sense of duty to engage with socio-local conditions and to transcend borders of disciplines and nation states, if necessary. It is useful in thinking about the practice of transnational German higher education both on the level of supranational organisations with great financial resources and that of grassroots-driven interest groups. Both seek to better the social, economic,

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and cultural conditions of students and colleagues in different local settings. The scope and impact of movements like DDGC and WiG, though, should be importantly distinguished as a strong moral and ethical trend in pursuing transnational German studies. The dominance of nation-centric institutions in German higher education has been documented in detail. To complement this viewpoint, as I hope to have made clear in this chapter, it is prudent to examine further opportunities for and recent formations of critical thought about pluri-local associations and attachments of transnational German higher education beyond national borders in the 21st century.

Appendix: Commentaries and Position Statements Dr. Carrie Smith, Chair of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, Professor of German Studies, University of Alberta I am writing this statement from Treaty 6 territory, a traditional gathering place for diverse Indigenous peoples including the Cree, Blackfoot, Metis, Nakota Sioux, Iroquois, Dene, Ojibway/Saulteaux/Anishinaabe, Inuit, and many others whose histories, languages, and cultures continue to influence the vibrant community of (Amiskwacîwâskahikan is the nehiyawewin itwewin or Cree word for Edmonton), of which the University of Alberta is a part. I am also writing this statement from multiple subject positions: chair of a large modern languages department, feminist researcher of German Studies deeply invested in social-justice oriented collaborative practices, and settler scholar in what is currently called Canada. My work as department chair comes at a time when in the Anglophone world, language-learning is on a steep and steady decline. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in January 2019 on 651 program closures between 2013 and 2016 in the US alone, and the UK charts a 30–50% decline in language teaching in secondary schools. When I began my post 11 years ago, more than half of my colleagues were looking backwards, embroiled in conversations about imaginary futures that were based on perceived realities for departments that had long since been dismantled. Those same faculty members saw their majors cut due to dwindling numbers, entrenching them more and more in a distant, “better” past. My department has now spent the last five years restructuring our graduate and undergraduate programs away from conceptions of national belonging, working to move past the growing-together pains of this amalgamated department’s now 20+ year adolescence. Department members developed programs that focused on local and international community service, “for the public good.” But much of what emerged in our often-contentious conversations was: For the good of which public? Who is the implied “we” of these communities? In much of the navel-gazing scholarship on the university, “we” is often singularly used to refer to faculty members, leaving out administration, students, and staff, and, more problematically, the greater non-university communities nevertheless impacted by

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research and teaching. The “we” invoked is often white, male, and cisgender. As the territorial acknowledgement at the outset of this statement attests, “we” must also include Indigenous people and their epistemologies. Such acknowledgements pay respect to and name original inhabitants of the land while also pointing toward the imperialism that lives on in the form of institutional and cultural forms and teachings in our daily lives. German Studies is a discipline that depends on the frame of the “nation” as the hegemonic political form of the last 200 years to partition itself off from other humanities disciplines. If the concept of the national is at the heart of German Studies, then scholars must not only recognize but work to rectify the role that German Studies played, and continues to play, as product and project of settler-colonialism.

Dr. Andrea Bandhauer and Dr. Maria Veber, The University of Sydney Transcultural German Studies in Australia The orientation of tertiary German Studies/Germanistik in Australia towards a linguistically and culturally monolithic idea of German literature and language shifted dramatically and irrevocably, if slowly, and not uncontroversially, with Leslie Bodi’s new focus on “the pluricentricity of literature and languages,” and on “consider[ing] this diversity from different perspectives and not unilaterally,” informed by the idea that “a “language” can accommodate multiple cultures and literatures.”3 Bodi, who had taken up his position as Professor of German in 1960, pioneered an intercultural approach that clearly preceded developments in Germany. There, in 1984, Alois Wierlacher introduced the term ‘Intercultural German Studies’ at the founding conference for the Society for Intercultural German Studies/Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Germanistik. This led to a broadening of the discipline taught in Germany to include consideration of the contexts of disciplinary engagement in countries outside Germany, the so-called ‘Auslandsgermanistik’. Here, “intercultural” meant specifically opening up German Germanistik to an audience outside the German speaking countries, asserting that German culture should be more interested in and open to addressing students who learn the German language, and should reach out to ‘the world’, maybe ‘their’ world. Through the 1980s, and pre-dating the 1984 conference, a number of studies on Germans in Australia were published, overwhelmingly by scholars in Australia, but also including the volume Australia Germany. Two Hundred Years of Contacts, Relations and Connections, edited by German scholar Johannes H. Voigt, a volume which was the result of exhaustive archival research. These pioneering publications fostered a greater awareness of German migration to Australia, and its historical

3 Rudolf

Muhr, Obituary, TRANS, 2015. http://www.inst.at/trans/19/obituary-for-leslie-bodi/.

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and cultural impact,4 subtly contesting the idea that German culture was represented solely by the more traditional fields of German Studies/Germanistik, that is, German history and literature/film. Subsequent studies have focussed on aspects of contact between Germans and Indigenous people of Australia, such as Walter Veit’s extensive scholarship on German Lutheran missionaries in Hermannsburg. Our collaborative work on the Hermannsburg Mission, focussing on textual materials produced in the context of the colonising mission work, explores the reasoning that drove these men and women to travel to unknown and faraway places such as outback Australia in order to preach salvation to people they considered ‘heathens’. We are consistently aware that such research cannot be called transcultural by any means. Indeed, any research of Germans in Australia contributes to a history of colonisation. Learning of Indigenous languages would be a prerequisite to creating inter-cultural narratives of the history of Indigenous people and German settlers; however, the creation of inter-cultural narratives of the history of Indigenous people and German settlers would only be possible through the reception of Indigenous voices. The history, culture and languages of Australia have become an important starting point for the creation of a philology that connects the place where we conduct our research to German-speaking countries and contributes to transcultural aspects of German Studies. German Studies is, however, not the only subject area where interest in Australia is growing. The School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney has embarked on a project called “Multilingual Australia: Past and Present”. Numerous language departments are involved in creating a history of Australia which does not privilege Anglocentric narratives of Australia, its migrants and their relationship to its First Peoples.

Thinking intersections and what remains: Dr. Kate Roy, Franklin University, Switzerland Writing as a P¯akeh¯a New Zealander working in a Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at an international American university in an Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland, I first need to acknowledge that I enter any form of Germanic Studies with a set of small, complexly sited—yet privileged and powerful—positionalities that must introspect and understand their accountabilities in a globally uneven, migratory world. My subject position as product of a settler culture, in particular, calls for me to listen—and not to speak for—, to critically process the discomforts of the layered nature of postcolonial society, the privilege of the settler position and its complicity with the colonial project and continued hegemonic power structures. 4 Alan

Corkhill. “Major Critical Writings of the 1980s on the Germans in Australia.” AJPH (Australian Journal of Politics and History), Vol 37, issue 2 (August, 1991), pp. 356–362. (Alan Corkhill accessed 22/09/19 https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/doi/abs/10.1111/ j.1467-8497.1991.tb00037.x?sid=vendor%3Adatabase.

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The Germanic Studies departments that I came from (as a student in Aotearoa-New Zealand), and that I now find myself in, had and have long since moved beyond the canon, turning rather to texts and contexts of political power shifts, painful memories and (im)migration. Yet Aotearoa-New Zealand still seems so far from the Germanspeaking lands, while Ticino—particularly at the height of the summer tourist invasion and the reflections on language and power within Switzerland that this should bring—is almost too close. Perhaps it is just this nexus of distance and proximity that could help us go beyond exploring these movements, histories and ideas in Germanic Studies as “trends,”5 as products of other cultures, as ideas we can study and unpick at arm’s length. Instead, we need to start “voyaging into” the field (in a Saidian sense) “to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories,” both looking at how knowledge has been produced in Germanic Studies, and by whom, and embracing the “epistemological turn” (Piesche)6 to return alternative forms of knowledge production on ourselves.7 With colonies and outposts in China and the Pacific, the German Empire was, in fact, once at Aotearoa-New Zealand’s back door and its project remains. The national museum of Aotearoa-New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, holds records and material vestiges of German Samoa, and seeks to (begin to) employ them to reflect on our country’s own (post)colonial role in that region: how did we continue the colonial project, it asks, and how do we see it still? With T¯amaki Makaurau-Auckland’s “Pacific islands” of “ethnoburbs,” pushing the question is fundamental: the colonial desires of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s white settler structures and their unacknowledged past of incursions in the Pacific—a space that still remains to be decolonised—have arguably already shaped its future.8 What Piesche terms the unacknowledged “relevance of whiteness”9 in Germanic Studies still causes blind spots (“weiße Flecken”)10 that impede understanding in our spaces. The role of Georg Forster on the Cook voyages, for example, which is (astonishingly) still up for debate in Germanic Studies,11 arguably perpetuates the problematic tendency of seeing the Germans (and indeed natural scientists) as better—or at least less power-invested—colonisers in spaces not directly under their control; however, the productive discourse emanating from postcolonial focus groups 5 C.f.

Peggy Piesche and Sara Lennox, “Epilogue, Of Epistemologies and Positionalities: A Conversation”, in Sara Lennox (ed.), Remapping Black Germany (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), pp. 274–281 6 Piesche and Lennox, “Epilogue”, pp. 275–276 7 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 216 8 Damon Salesa, Island Time: New Zealand’s Pacific Futures (Wellington: BWB, 2017), pp. 1–13 9 Piesche and Lennox, “Epilogue”, pp. 276–277 10 HM Jokinen, “Weiße Flecken der Erinnerung”, www.afrika-hamburg.de, http://www.afrikahamburg.de/eidelstedt.html [Last accessed 20 November 2019] 11 See, for example, Russell A. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998) and Gabrielle Dürbeck, “Postkoloniale Perspektiven in der Germanistik: Gegenstände, Positionen, Perspektiven”, in Gabrielle Dürbeck and Axel Huber (eds.), Postkoloniale Germanistik: Bestandsaufnahme, theoretische Perspektiven, Lektüren (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2014), pp. 19–70

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around the naming of streets and other (city) spaces and the continued presence of colonial statues in urban spaces continues to demonstrate to us that these choices are never “just about history” but always also about “present social organizations” within shared spaces of belonging.12 My classes in this area might focus on (predominantly German) city spaces, but my own complicity in the colonial project means that I am thinking about how Aotearoa-New Zealand and Swiss-German spaces and histories are linked in this sense by the “hinterlands”—for example, by the debate about the naming of a West Coast glacier after Swiss “ethnographer” and geologist Louis Agassiz. Swiss-Haitian artist Sasha Huber and pounamu master carver Jeff Mahuika (K¯ati M¯ahaki, Poutini K¯ai Tahu) performed the unnaming of this glacier in 2015 as part of a project to bring awareness of the complicity between racist discourses of racial hierarchy (as embodied by Agassiz) and “the history of colonial land seizure by the application of European nomenclature.”13 Highlighting these power structures of the unseen—a “colonialism without colonies”—is also what informs the work of the Postkoloniale Schweiz group, which explores Swiss hinterlands enablers of colonialism and enslavement, while also uncovering continuities with contemporary Swiss discourses on migration.14 For me, it is precisely acknowledging the relevance of our (overwhelming) whiteness in the field and listening to “alternative knowledge production” from within past histories and spaces that is of the utmost importance for Germanic Studies, and all of its extra-Germanic intersections, in the consequences of our present and future.

References Alexander von Humboldt Foundation: Humboldt Foundation Mission. https://www.humboldtfoundation.de/web/about-us.html. Bhambra, Gurminder K., Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Ni¸sancıo˘glu. 2018. Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press. Coalition of Women in German: WIG. https://www.womeningerman.org. Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum Initiative Forum: DDGC Initiative. https:// diversityingermancurriculum.weebly.com/ddgc-blog. Feldman Gardner, Lily. 1999. The Principle and Practice of ‘Reconciliation’ in German Foreign Policy: Relations with France, Israel, Poland and the Czech Republic. International Affairs (75/2): 333–356. Georgetown University, Department of German: GUDG Curriculum. 2018. https://german. georgetown.edu/page/1242716500101.html. German Academic Exchange Service DAAD: DAAD Strategy 2020. https://www.daad.de/der-daad/ ueber-den-daad/portrait/en/29146-strategy/. 12 Jenny Engler, “Renaming Streets, Inverting Perspectives: Acts of Postcolonial Memory Citizenship In Berlin”, Focus on German Studies, 20 (2015): 41–61, p. 41 13 Sasha Huber, “Karakia—The Resetting Ceremony”, Sasha Huber, http://sashahuber.com/?cat= 10046&lang=fi&mstr=4 [Last accessed 20 November 2019] 14 See, for example, Patricia Purtschert, Barbara Lüthi and Francesca Falk (eds.), Postkoloniale Schweiz: Formen und Folgen eines Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013)

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German Federal Ministry of Education and Research: BMBF. 2018. https://www.bmbf.de/en/ germany-is-first-choice-for-international-students-1446.html. Halverson, Rachel J, and Carol Anne Costabile-Heming. 2015. Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities for the Study of German. Taking Stock of German Studies in the United States: The New Millennium. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 1–14. Jaworska, Sylvia. The German language in British Higher Education: problems, challenges, teaching and learning perspectives. Vol. 5. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009. Peck, Jeffrey M. (1989) There’s No Place Like Home? Remapping the Topography of German Studies. German Quarterly 178–187. Plews, John.L., and B. Schmenk (eds.). 2013. Traditions and Transitions: Broadening the Visibility and Scope of Curriculum Inquiry for German Studies. Traditions and Transitions: Curricula for German Studies, 1–20. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. Tatlock, Lynne. 2018. Beyond Passing: Transculturation in Contact Zones. In Transatlantic German Studies: Testimonies to the Profession. Paul Michael Lützeler & Peter Höyng. Rochester, 231–248. New York: Camden House. Von Hindenburg, Hannfried. 2007. Demonstrating Reconciliation: State and Society in West German foreign policy toward Israel, 1952–1965. New York: Berghahn Books.

Benjamin Nickl is a Lecturer at the University of Sydney. He holds several qualifications in secondary teaching and higher education and a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is interested in contemporary narratives of transnational German education as they relate to issues of social connectivity among majority and minority populations and the role of German Studies programmes and lecturers outside the German nation state.

The State of Diversity and Decolonization in North American German Studies Ervin Malakaj

Abstract Recent shifts in the neoliberal North American postsecondary landscape have ushered in German language and culture studies, curricula increasingly aligned with instrumentalist visions for humanities education. While these measures have provided some justification for the existence of German language and culture studies programs at a time when such programs are being eliminated—in some instances they have yielded robust and successful model programs with high enrollments, they are not grounded in principles of diversity and decolonization. This chapter provides an overview of established and emerging diversity and decolonization discourses in postsecondary German language and culture studies programs in North America. It provides an analysis of the parallel developments of instrumentalist and diversity/decolonization models for language and culture study in German, demonstrating the incommensurability between the two models.

Diversity and Decolonization Advocates of diversity and decolonization initiatives in German Studies consider diversity and decolonization to be central guiding principles for language and culture studies curricula and program advocacy. In the appendix to this chapter, I provide responses by three such advocates: Regine Criser, David Gramling, and Beverly Weber. Diversity as a framework for curricular design and program advocacy considers the complex and intersectional web of personal experiences, backgrounds, and statuses learners bring to the classroom, and produces pedagogical models which attend to the unique needs of such students. Diversity-centered pedagogy entails attending to the histories of structural and historic injustice, non-privilege, and exclusion which some groups have endured in and beyond the academy. Decolonization, as Tuck and Yang (2012) have shown, first and foremost refers to land repatriation. Curricular formulas for language and culture study grounded in decolonization thus E. Malakaj (B) The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Nickl et al. (eds.), Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2_5

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align with calls for reparative land relations. They also foreground learning frameworks centered on principles which help students understand, critique, and take a stance against settler-colonial violence. Broadly speaking, diversity and decolonization initiatives in postsecondary German Studies programs across North America have developed in the context of two trends. On the one hand, they take place parallel to extensive discussion and debate about the future of German Studies against the backdrop of program defunding and elimination. On the other hand, they are prompted by a steady growth in overall postsecondary enrollment by learners from underprivileged and underrepresented backgrounds. In the first section of this chapter, I will begin by analyzing the economic context in detail with a focus on the anxiety about the future of humanities education, which has prompted a number of initiatives attempting to rearticulate humanities education for life in the twenty-first century. For the most part, the steps undertaken to improve the public image of humanities education broadly, and modern language and culture studies specifically, are part and parcel of what Bérubé (2002), Looseley (2013), and Hutner and Mohamed (2016), among others, have described as neoliberal, instrumentalist visions for postsecondary learning in the humanities. Proponents of such outlooks see value in modern language and culture studies either in terms of vocational preparation, as Di Leo (2013) has shown, or as an intellectual endeavor reserved for the elite who can afford it (Cohen 2009). Especially wide-reaching initiatives in German Studies, which draw on programs ushered in by scholarly associations, have been characterized by an attempt to articulate the usefulness of language and culture studies in terms of job preparation and economic enrichment. These initiatives have led to curricular revision and language advocacy increasingly embracing instrumentalist visions for language and culture studies, which do not center diversity and decolonization if they consider them at all. In fact, diversity and decolonization initiatives in German Studies are, as I will show below, at odds with the instrumental model of language and culture studies. The second section of this chapter will focus on demographics. Despite a number of isolated calls for German Studies curricular and advocacy reform in the past, the field has for the most part ignored the steady growth of overall enrollment of underprivileged and under-represented learners at colleges and universities. Recent diversity initiatives in German Studies—chief among them is the work of the scholarly collective Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum (DDGC)—have, in fact, partially emerged as a result of the scarcity of inclusive resources and curricular models capable of addressing the personal and intellectual needs of diverse student learners. The third and final section of this chapter will present key discourses on decolonizing higher education before showing how these ideas are being articulated for German curricula at the present. The section will outline decolonial pedagogy’s investment in a type of learning which is at all times keen on developing criticality among learners about how knowledge and culture are produced, how they are embedded, and how systemic injustice proliferates at the cost of some and to the benefit to others.

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Enrollment Crises and Instrumentalist Curricula for German Studies Anxious about the state of their fields across institutions, North American humanities scholars and practitioners frequently report a shared concern that a time of crisis is upon them. Hayot’s (2018) recent work studying humanities enrollment patterns of the last four decades has shown how the “language of crisis” has been an integral component of “our shared lexicon,” reminding us that the humanities have been precarious for the better part of recent history (para. 1). In his analysis, Hayot carefully outlines the historic specificities that fueled the time of crisis for the humanities for previous generations, noting that scholars during each era proclaimed a unique disciplinary crisis in the light of shared problems. Notwithstanding his critique of each generation’s proclamation of unique disciplinary problems, Hayot has shown that the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis amplified the negative trends of the past and worsened an already bad outlook for the future of humanities education. Surveying post-2008 state budget cuts and their impact on some of the largest state university systems in the United States, including those in Arizona, Illinois, and Florida, Pratt (2009) projected that modern language departments and programs were among the most vulnerable during the time of financial crisis. Because such programs were already characterized by low enrollment in comparison to, for instance, programs in English, they were a target for program downsizing in order to maximize university expenditures at times of budget reductions. Since Pratt’s projections in 2009, US modern language and culture studies have seen different negative impacts across different types of institutions. Some state university systems were so overburdened by the difficulty of making up for state budget cuts that they eliminated entire programs. An extreme example lies in the treatment of language and culture studies programs by the administration of the State University of New York (SUNY), Albany. Bowles (2015) has outlined the 2010 administrative decision process to eliminate programs in French, Italian, and Russian, among other humanities programs at SUNY, Albany. The financially burdened institution looked to its smallest and most vulnerable programs first to reduce cost. Program elimination, however, was not the only negative trend in the state of modern language and culture studies to emerge as a result of the financial crisis. Lewis (2015) has outlined how administrative austerity measures effectively contributed to a process of “slow defunding” of the liberal arts, which had a special impact on modern language and culture studies. Broadly speaking, universities’ austerity measures have yielded strict enrollment minimums in individual courses and in programs of study, which dictate under what conditions courses and programs of study can be offered. Hard pressed to recruit substantive numbers of students to courses and programs, language and culture studies programs slowly caved as a result of challenging enrollment minimums. The result was a progressive defunding scheme, which began by cutting budgets for program administration down to reducing programs entirely. Examples for the steady defunding mechanism can be traced not only in the USA, but also in Canada. Hutner and Mohamed (2013) have shown how the University of

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Alberta suspended admissions to twenty liberal arts programs. Where some programs were salvaged and reorganized as a measure of consolidation of degrees, programs with smaller overall enrollments were entirely eliminated. Modern language and culture studies programs have been eliminated at an alarming rate. As recently as early 2019, a report by the Modern Language Association (MLA), which surveyed effects on program closures after the 2008 recession, notes that between 2009 and 2013 only one modern language and culture studies program was closed, but between 2013 and 2016 the number of similar programs closed reached a total of 651 (Johnson 2019). According to the same report, 128 French and 118 Spanish programs closed, while German held third rank with 86 total programs closed. The situation is not as clear in Canada, where program closures were not tracked as systematically by scholarly associations. What remains well-documented in Canada is the steady overall decline in total enrollments in humanities programs. Universities Canada (2016) issued a report in which it documents that Canadian higher education has seen an overall decline of 20% in enrollments in humanities disciplines over the last decade. The drastic closure of modern language and culture studies programs is not underway in Canada as it is in the US, but if the enrollment decline in the humanities continues, more programs will be eliminated. Significant cuts in funding for modern language and culture studies or the reduction of such programs based on the obscure criteria of “underperformance”, i.e. low enrollment relative to enrollment patterns in other programs on a given campus, have ushered in a number of US responses. National and international associations advocating for the humanities broadly, and modern language and culture studies specifically, have initiated and, in some instances, have instituted measures to remedy the damage made by the drawbacks of the financial crisis of 2008. The MLA, for instance, has instituted the MLA Action Network (2018). The network’s primary function is to disseminate information pertaining to current statistics about humanities education and its benefits. In addition, the network publishes information about policies in place and underway at the regional and national levels that might affect humanities education. Finally, the network curates information about ongoing successful and promising advocacy initiatives individual practitioners could draw on and seek to implement at their home institutions. The network’s information packages reflect how humanities scholars can advocate for their program and include sample language they can use to communicate to their constituents two major factors that comprise the initiative. The first factor relates to advocacy guidelines and information, which the network provides to humanities practitioners. The information is curated to help advocates emphasize how humanities help learners understand their personal lived experience in relation to others and thus form an important component of postsecondary education of citizenry. The second factor of the advocacy network provides humanities practitioners with sample language they can draw on to explain to their constituents how humanities education can prepare learners for the workforce. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), which is the national umbrella organization dedicated to the advancement of language study at all levels of instruction, offers field-defining guidelines for language instruction

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and program advocacy in the US. One of ACTFL’s most recent initiatives is its Lead with Languages (2018) campaign which provides information about and advocacy language for modern language studies. The motto for the campaign, “Language Learning Opens a World of Opportunities,” signals the association’s commitment to help articulate how language learning constitutes an essential skill that will guide learners to economic security. ACTFL operates with the assumption that learners are deterred from pursuing language and culture studies because they and their parents are not sure how a course of study in languages will lead to employment. The association asserts that language learning and culture studies have garnered a bad reputation as courses of study that provide a superfluous skill set. It believes that changing this negative perception of the usefulness of language study would offset some of the decline in overall enrollment in language and culture studies programs across the US. Unlike the MLA, ACTFL foregrounds language competence in the context of job preparedness and functionality. The “German” tab on the site for the Lead with Languages campaign features information adapted from the Goethe-Institut, which has devised its own initiative: “Just Add German.” The Goethe-Institut’s initiative presents German as an add-on, which would supplement learners’ courses of study in another discipline by purportedly making the students more marketable in an increasingly global marketplace. German language and culture studies are, in this model, relegated to a secondary (in some cases a tertiary) place in the hierarchy of disciplinary importance. Despite the Goethe-Institute’s mandate to promote German language and culture studies internationally, its advocacy campaign to keep German relevant merely articulates it as an add-on. The instrumentalist vision for German language and culture studies, which sees the primary value of language and culture studies curricula in terms of their ability to guide students into the economic job force, has yielded a number of dual-track German programs as well. Noteworthy are the successful models of German programs, which have productively developed partnerships with, for instance, programs in business and engineering at their home institutions. The German and Engineering dual degree program at the University of Rhode Island (URI) is a remarkable example in this regard. URI’s curricular reform yielded one of the largest German programs in the country in terms of total enrollment in the degree program. Rarick (2009) notes that in 2009, a year after the financial crisis, URI’s international engineering program with a German specialization had an enrollment of 135 majors. Whereas other programs in the country were facing elimination, URI’s German program was flourishing, a trend that continues today. Programs such as the URI dual degree program in German and Engineering are unique for the context in which they are operating and are always already an exception and never the rule. Notwithstanding the success at individual institutions—Rarick (2009) notes that programs at the “University of Cincinnati, the University of Connecticut, Georgia Tech, Purdue University, Rice University, MIT, Texas A&M, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute” are other examples of successful dual-degree

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models akin to URI’s (114)—the model itself is difficult to replicate for German programs which operate under different types of administrations across different types of post-secondary institutions. For the most part, German programs at North American colleges and universities are small to mid-sized: the promotional materials of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG), the largest German language and culture studies association in North America, frequently note that small German programs are those with three or fewer faculty members on the staff. Small programs can serve up to 300 students enrolled in all courses and anywhere between 5–15 students enrolled in a program of study. In such small programs, students frequently do not have the opportunity to take courses beyond the third year. Such context offers a difficult setting in which students can develop substantial linguistic proficiency to function in professional contexts. Reagan and Osborn (2019) have demonstrated this in their work studying language enrollment and student proficiency broadly, determining an “overwhelming failure of foreign language education programs at all levels to produce meaningful fluency in all but a tiny percentage of students” (83). This has resulted in an overestimation of what students who complete said programs could accomplish linguistically in professional settings. According to their analysis, “less than 1 percent of American adults are proficient in the language that they studied in a U.S. classroom” (74). Moreover, Reagan & Osborn have critiqued the claims by scholarly associations and by academic departments and programs that claim there are ample job opportunities for students with a second or third language seeking employment after completion of their degree. They argue that jobs in the US which require a second language are sparse and, if they exist, they go to native speakers or the few who graduate from specialized programs (79–81). The economic context, no matter the national campaign slogans’ claims, is not one in which foreign language education is well-positioned to make persuasive claims about its impact on the economy on a large scale. Notwithstanding the applicability of such instrumentalist advocacy to German language and culture studies, the programs initiated and supported by ACTFL, AATG, and the Goethe-Institut have had wide appeal among German language and culture studies advocates and practitioners at the postsecondary level. Not infrequently does one encounter instrumentalist language advocacy in advertisement for individual programs, which also, if they have the resources, work toward articulating and shaping curricula first and foremost preoccupied with linguistic proficiency in tune with workforce preparation. Such promotion takes place even if a given program does not have an efficiently articulated instrumentalist program in place, such as a Germanfor-professional-purposes track. Given the climate at their home institutions, which increasingly place pressure on German Programs to increase enrollment, preferably in programs reformulated to prepare students for the work force, it is unsurprising that German programs are eager to adapt the instrumentalist rhetoric to serve their purposes, even if these measures have been proven to be futile.

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Calls for Diversity in German Studies in Light of Diversifying Student Bodies In 2016, Regine Criser and I co-founded the scholarly collective Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum (DDGC). We sought to create a venue in which scholars can discuss, debate, and create inclusive and critical pedagogical models attentive to diversity and decolonization. A major driving force for the creation of the collective was the lack of emphasis on diversity or decolonization in the curricular advocacy campaigns of the major North American scholarly associations promoting German language and culture study. As the postsecondary student body in the US was increasingly diversifying—Conrad (2015) noted that postsecondary minority enrollment increased by 300% over the last three decades, the major scholarly associations focused on instrumentalist models for language and culture studies instead of centering diversity and decolonization as guiding paradigms for language and culture study pedagogy and program advocacy. A persistent disconnect between the type of curricular and advocacy work required to diversify and adequately serve a diversified student body in German and the type of initiatives scholarly associations advocate became explicitly legible. Some of DDGC’s calls to center diversity resembled earlier work in German Studies which revealed a history of failed attempts to generate field-wide commitment to a vital venture. In what follows, I would like to provide a brief overview of some of this early diversity advocacy work in German Studies. In 1994, George F. Peters, who served as chair of the first minority student task force of the AATG, proclaimed that “minority participation (or non-participation) in German is unsettling” (6). Peters refers to a survey prompted by the task force and carried out by the AATG, which hoped to capture student and instructor demographics in German across all levels of instruction (ranging from elementary to postsecondary). With the help of the survey, he determined that “about 90% of the German teachers in America face classes with few or no blacks or Hispanics” (6). That is, even as college campuses generally were becoming more diverse in terms of race and ethnic background (Levine 1993), German language and culture studies courses were serving an overwhelming majority of white students. Peters’ conclusions about the report in 1994 were both sobering and instructive for the work of DDGC: The demographics suggest that if German does not do a better job of recruiting and retaining minority students, particularly at the secondary level, it will lose its audience. This prospect was certainly not the impetus for the charge to the AATG task force, but in a real sense, the survival of the profession is at stake. (6)

In Peters’ view, the future of German Studies hinges on the field’s ability and commitment to attend to the diversification of higher education. There is some indication that broad trends in enrollment—i.e., the persistent diversification of higher education—would have improved the statistics somewhat since the early 1990s. That is, broad increases in non-white postsecondary student enrollment could have improved the enrollment numbers of non-white students in German as well. One of many driving forces of diversification is the internationalization of the

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student body. The overall influx of international student enrollment particularly from Asian countries could contribute to an overall diversification of the student enrollment in German today. For instance, the University of Toronto is slated to receive “its greatest source of revenue” from international students from Asia in 2019, a fact that attests to the certain increase in diversification of the university’s overall student body (Takagi 2019). The Canadian Bureau for International Education issued a report on international student enrollment in Canada (2018) and noted that 40% of all international students in Canada come from East Asian Countries and 27% from South Asian countries. Moreover, the US National Center for Education Statistics (2016) has demonstrated a substantial increase in overall enrollments by minoritized students: “From fall 1976 to fall 2015, the percentage of Hispanic students rose from 4 to 17% of all U.S. residents enrolled in degree-granting postsecondary institutions” (para. 9). This diversification of the general student body could also mean an increase of diversity in the student enrollments in German. It is important to note that no comprehensive data about student demographics with regard to race and ethnicity in German exists in Canada or in the US which could help corroborate the prediction that the situation has improved since the 1990s. Peters’ report, and the survey it presents, was the last such initiative. The only evidence right now is anecdotal. In my work with DDGC, I have been in contact with dozens of instructors from across North America. In conversations at professional gatherings as well as in online forums, the consensus is that, if left to their own devices and without special recruitment strategies and curricula in place, German programs will continue to attract an overwhelmingly white student body. Peters’ warning that the field will experience a devastating shrinkage unless it attends to diversification resonates with a special type of urgency, because the initiatives that he helped call into life with the AATG task force have receded into the background and have no meaningful impact on the advocacy of the largest association dedicated to the teaching and learning of German in North America. In short, there is little to no effort being made by scholarly associations to enact a meaningful shift toward attending to the increasingly more diverse student bodies at North American institutions of higher learning. Centering diversity in German language and culture studies advocacy is vital if German as a field hopes to serve minoritized students. Henderson (1991), writing about the experience of students of color, states that “students of color perceive a degree of relevancy and immediacy in the social sciences that seems to be absent in the study of German” (6). In her research, Henderson, who is another early advocate for diversity initiatives in German Studies, has demonstrated that relevance of the subject matter for the lived experience of students of color can be the driving force for their enrollment in German. By attending to the subject matter, how it is taught, whose experiences it centered and whose it ignores, Henderson argued, German Studies would resonate with more students from diverse backgrounds in significant ways. One need only to look at the representations of German culture in introductory textbooks, course listings, or reading lists for M.A. or Ph.D. exams to notice the overwhelming whiteness of the course content in German. Attending to this whiteness, critically evaluating it, and reformulating material and course expectations in ways that favor

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diversity would speak to the personal interests and needs of diverse learners. This was the perspective of Henderson in 1991 and it forms a central component of the advocacy work for curricular reformulation as envisioned by DDGC. The inability of North American German Studies to diversify its professoriate is immediately connected to the low number of non-white students in German studies broadly. Benitez et al. (2017) have shown that there is a direct correlation between diverse student enrollment, program success, and the diversity of faculty who teach and mentor diverse students. In this regard, Peters (1994) remarked on the diversification issues of the German language and culture academic profession. 98% of the instructors surveyed in the 1994 report he conducted for the AATG were white. As with the student demographics, the instructor demographics may have improved with the overall shifts in demographics in higher education; however, as with the student demographics, there are no current numbers about race and ethnic background of the instructors of German. The 2018 ACTFL/AATG annual convention in New Orleans provided a venue at which collective observation and conversations with colleagues helped me realize that one could count only a handful of non-white German Studies professionals at the major conference advocating for German language and culture studies (Malakaj 2018). The association’s predominantly white professional body persists across its history and would, possibly, yield similar statistics as those produced by Peters if it were surveyed. Next to a small number of programs with individual faculty advocating for diversity in their programs, the default constellation of German programs have no explicit strategy in place to attend to difference of the variety captured on their already diverse campuses. DDGC seeks to bring professionals dedicated to diversity advocacy together and amplify their work and their call for more efficient, field-wide efforts to center diversity in program development, curriculum design, and language advocacy. DDGC tends to questions of diversification more broadly: student diversity is as important as faculty diversity. While it advocates for curricula that would attract and better serve diverse student learners, it also sees an urgent need to diversify the professoriate as a central measure to carry out the calls for a diversity-centered German Studies.

Decolonization and German Studies Scholarship on decolonial pedagogy is deeply indebted to the work of Tuck and Yang (2012) which is a canonical text in the study of decolonization. They problematize the casual, if not token, use of the term “decolonization” in its mainstream standing in contemporary social justice endeavors in postsecondary higher education discourse. When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym. (Tuck and Yang 2012, 3)

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Tuck & Yang caution that the use of decolonization as a metaphor weakens the term, which is used to describe dispossession, “the repatriation of indigenous land and the seizing of imperial wealth” (Bhambra et al. 2018, 4). Decolonization is, however, not incompatible with scholarship on teaching and learning. As a framework, decolonization, as Jansen and Osterhammel (2017) have shown, describes the slow and uneven political and cultural process of undoing the damage done by European colonial violence and its legacies. Furthermore, Bhambra et al. (2018) have demonstrated that one can acknowledge that “decolonization is not a metaphor,” as Tuck & Yang advocate, while being aware that “the foundations of universities remain unshakably colonial” (6). Bhambra et al. (2018) further remark: It was in the university that colonial intellectuals developed theories of racism, popularized discourses that bolstered support for colonial endeavours and provided ethical and intellectual grounds for the dispossession, oppression and domination of colonised subjects. In the colonial metropolis, universities provided would-be colonial administrators with knowledge of the peoples they would rule over, as well as lessons in techniques of domination and exploitation. The foundation of European higher education institutions in colonized territories itself became an infrastructure of empire, an institution and actor through which the totalising logic of domination could be extended; European forms of knowledge were spread, local indigenous knowledge suppressed, and native informants trained. (5)

Decolonization in the context of higher education means recognizing the role of the university in the shaping and strengthening of the colonial project. It means acknowledging that Eurocentric curricula were historically the tool of colonial power and their persistence an extension of coloniality into the present. Decolonial pedagogy thus seeks to dismantle Eurocentrism in curricula through protest, policy, and education by way of reaching reparative land relations. In their work on the role of curriculum and instruction in the shaping and maintenance of violent settler-colonial myths in the US, Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) have shown how the “early curriculum scholar conceived of educational projects through logics of replacement in which the settler ultimately comes to replace the Native” (76). The cultural canon of the West, grounded in Eurocentric conquest narratives in which the white settler emerges as superior because “civilized” by othering Indigenous life, was an effective pedagogical tool that aided the settler-colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in North America. Decolonizing the curriculum, then, means upsetting the very logic of the replacement narratives as well as their long legacies in the service of settler colonialism in North America. Diversity and decolonizing discourses offer a productive, multidirectional framework for German Studies, which focuses on the social and historical factors that shape exclusion of and violence enacted upon marginalized peoples. On the one hand, the diversity framework is grounded in antiracist (Brandt 1986), antihomophobic (Cramer 2011), antitransphobic (Nicolazzo 2016), antisexist (Cramer 2011), antiableist (Dolmage 2017), and antixenophobic (Roy 2018) ideals, which help German studies scholars and practitioners attend to the various lived experiences of diverse and historically underrepresented and underprivileged learners. On the other hand, the decolonization framework is grounded in the calls for reparative land relations and repatriation discussed by Tuck and Yang (2012). Both frameworks promote

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and benefit from one aspect of humanities education, which such frameworks hope to articulate from the vantage point of diversity and decolonization: criticality. The frameworks seek to facilitate a hyper-awareness among learners and practitioners about the systems of power which benefit some at the expense of others. They seek to instill in learners a stronger sense of how difference registers among and across populations, and in which ways privilege is unevenly distributed and maintained in inequitable fashion. In what follows, I want to outline a couple of major lines of thought that inform diversity and decolonization pedagogy in the field of German Studies. My goal is not to be comprehensive. As with most work in diversity and decolonization in German Studies, the present chapter seeks to be generative and inspire other inquiries in a burgeoning line of thinking about and practising German Studies. The first broad idea in the framework relates to how educators conceive of language and culture before they even enter the classroom. That is, even before designing a lesson, the diversity- and decolonization-minded German Studies professional considers how language and culture operate, how and to what end they can be instrumentalized, and what the politics of such instrumentalization are. For instance, a language classroom pedagogy that embraces a diversity and decolonization framework in German Studies refuses to follow proficiency or fluency models of language acquisition. Proficiency models in modern language and culture studies take a near-native or native speaker as model and seek to position learners on a path to reach near-native speaker proficiency. The proficiency model of language acquisition renders as secondary any aspect about language learning which is not immediately tied to building communicative competence. As Komska et al. (2018) have shown, such “deficit models” of language—those aspects that lie outside the parameters of learning that lead to linguistic proficiency—“quietly intimate to young adults that their language is somehow too inarticulate, too compliant, too fashionable, too unfashionable, too regional, too ethnic, or not ‘appropriate’ for the global workplace” (107). Creativity, experimentation, and other examples feed what Komska, Moyd, & Gramling have called “linguaphobia,” a fear of the types of language used in a given context that collectively fall outside the purview of instrumentalist language classrooms (107). A diversity and decolonization-driven German language classroom, undermines the proficiency standards by seeking to facilitate among students strong relationships to the different types of language registers and the politics of power that govern them. In a classroom structured around a diversity and decolonization model for German Studies, students can experiment with language and knowledge systems. In the diversity and decolonial model of German language and culture studies, the essentialist ideals of a pure German language and culture are critiqued. Instead of advocating for and policing a pure form of speaking German as well as an authoritative way of conceiving how culture and cultural production work, instructors in the diversity and decolonization-minded German classroom convey to students essential skills to help them critique complex cultural processes of belonging restricted by qualifiers such as “German.” Part of the repertoire of critical thinking skills in the diversity and decolonization-minded German classroom are also lessons and modules that help students develop and practise what Komska, Moyd and Gramling

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(2018) call “linguistic disobedience.” Linguistic disobedience is a process of coming to understand, critique, correct, and care for the language that is used, misused, and abused in our daily lives. Linguistic disobedience is a praxis of social justice that can be cultivated in the classroom but that can have long-lasting effects outside the classroom and is an essential component of the ideological repertoire of the diversity and decolonization-minded German studies professional. An example of linguistic disobedience in praxis can be traced in two recent German textbook initiatives: Impuls Deutsch: Intercultural, Interdisciplinary, Interactive by Niko Tracksdorf, Nicole Coleman, Damon Rarick, and Friedmann Weidauer, which will be published by Klett in July 2019, and, Grenzenlos Deutsch: An OpenAccess Curriculum for Beginning German, written and produced by a scholarly collective under the leadership of Brigetta M. Abel and Amy Young. Both textbooks are responses to decades of problematic materials published by traditional textbook publishing companies which have issued first-year textbooks unaccommodating of non-normative families, peoples, and bodies. As a corrective and critical tool, both textbooks perform linguistic disobedience because they orient themselves not according to normative understandings of language and culture but by the needs of diverse learners, and in the service of social justice. Both textbooks are produced by teams which feature scholars who are also members of the Coalition of Women in German, a feminist organization which has for decades advocated for more just and equitable working and learning conditions in German Studies. I must note that both projects are underway and have not been tested yet, but they are certainly highly anticipated to leave a lasting mark and to contribute to diversity and decolonization in German Studies. Next to textbook initiatives, there are a number of online resources, which offer ideas for texts and other materials conducive to diversity and decolonization of the German curriculum. One is the “Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum Blog,” which features an ongoing series of programmatic statements by German Studies scholars about the urgency to include queer, black, gender, migrant, and GDR studies more actively in German Studies curricula across North America (Criser and Malakaj 2019). The other one is the “Expanding German Studies: An Interactive Bibliography for Teachers and Lecturers” blog edited by Rey Conquer, Rich McClelland, Tom Smith, and Nicola Thomas in the United Kingdom. This blog provides an extensive bibliography of material throughout German cultural history, which speaks to diversity and decolonization (Conquer et al. 2019).

Conclusion Resources such as those cited above, coupled with the ongoing commitment by scholarly collectives working internationally to produce materials and advocate for a more diverse and decolonized German Studies, have been a driving force of a new wave of commitment to diversity and decolonization in the field. One indication of the growing interest and commitment is the size of the biennial DDGC conference.

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The first conference took place in March 2017 and brought together 35 international German Studies scholars and practitioners. The second conference, which took place in March 2019, brought together 65 international German Studies scholars and practitioners. The third conference is scheduled for 2021 and promises to attract the same number of scholars. Collectively, the individuals affiliated with DDGC and those working beyond its confines are shifting the dialogue in North American German Studies by calling for a centering of diversity and decolonization when it comes to German program development and advocacy.

Appendix: Commentaries and Position Statements Regine Criser (University of North Carolina, Asheville) From my perspective, diversity describes the result of a process focused on expansion and inclusion. Decolonization in contrast describes a process of an intentional unsettling of hierarchies, a forceful decentering of whiteness and hegemonic discourses, a constant questioning of the status-quo, and as a white, cis, female it also means a lot of deep listening to spoken or written texts by scholars, activists, and authors, who have continuously been pushed to the margins. As an educator at an institution which has diversity and inclusion as one of its four strategic goals, I have to pause and reflect on how I am contributing to this goal. Am I doing it while upholding institutionalized frameworks of oppression, or am I doing my work in ways that actually provide more access to more students to all areas of the university? As a result of my work as the co-founder of the scholarly collective Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum, I have implemented diversity and decolonization initiatives in my home institution. Through continuous reviews and revisions of the curriculum, I strive to move towards inclusive pedagogy, towards course readings that truly represent the diversity of the German-speaking world, towards a classroom that does not uphold ethno-nationalist, heteronormative, ableist beliefs about what it means “to be German.” Organizing these curricular initiatives always means to acknowledge that they will fall short, until German classes in the US reflect their status as settlercolonialist tools, outlining the ways in which we continue to benefit from and uphold setter-colonialism as discussed in the work of Tuck and Yang (2012). For a white, immigrant-settler like me, diversity and decolonization initiatives mean to choose discomfort intentionally over easy solutions, and it means decentering white and male mainstream voices to create space—in the curriculum and the classroom—for the multitude of voices and stories of marginalized and oppressed people.

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David Gramling (University of Arizona) In their 2012 essay, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” the Unangax Indigenous methodologist Eve Tuck and the urban education researcher and community organizer K. Wayne Yang foresaw a patent likelihood: that well-meaning scholars and teachers, in search of powerful and motivating heuristics to frame our social justice critiques, would at one moment or another set our sights on ‘the decolonial.’ But, they inveighed, “Decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice” (21). Though Mignolo (2011), Quijano (2007), and Lugones (2010), among others, take a variously more capacious tack on this question of the use and abuse of the term decolonization, Tuck and Yang’s directive is unequivocal. It is all but designed to defuse the conceptual poaching of ‘decolonization’ in fields that have no business handling it, unless they are backed by a credible commitment to repatriate Indigenous lands. As a non-Indigenous German Studies researcher and a settler in Indigenous lands at nearly all stages of my life thus far, I am grateful for this disinclusive methodological admonishment. Not only does it require me to forego and reject the prospect of conceptual sloganization (Schmenk et al. 2018) as an opportunistic habit of scholarly uptake, it also pushes me to deepen my search and sensibility for aspects of German Studies-based inquiry that specifically fulfill the criteria Tuck and Yang set forth for decolonial work, rather than those suited for a broad and flexible social justice ethos. What Tuck and Yang’s directive has led me to, then—as just one German Studies researcher among thousands—is a set of writings from the 1930s in which German, Austrian, and Swiss scholars, involved in the nascence of neoliberalism (economists, policy-makers, social theorists), were seeking to manage the post-imperial refashioning of Africa and South Asia according to a dual-government model inspired by the Austro-Hungarian empire. While decolonized nations would be permitted the semblance of cultural autonomy, scholars like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Lionel Robbins wished to ensure that this penumbra of autonomy—i.e. the “repatriation of Indigenous land and life,” as Tuck and Yang put it—remains tightly constrained by a Europe-defined normative global order, where free-market commerce always outflanks nationalist movements’ experiments with protectionism (Slobodian 2018). While these men are usually associated with a discrete thought tradition within economics, I’ve begun to understand how their work is also key both to an understanding of, and a practical genealogy for, the ways Indigenous lands tend to remain perpetually in settler colonial hands today, despite being officially decolonized. Such is one of the ways German Studies research has indeed been host to a ground zero for continued colonization and potential decolonization in our time—rather than just looking on as a less implicated, “metaphorical” neighbor to the classic territorial empires’ impact and legacies.

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Beverly Weber (University of Colorado, Boulder) I am thinking here about anticolonial and “diversity” work from the perspective of the classroom. At this historical juncture, it seems most urgent to me to implement pedagogies that work against North American German studies as a colonial project from two perspectives: (1) enabling students to create (geo)politics of knowledge that decenter Europe as a sort of originary location of knowledge, modernity, and progress. This includes challenging the ways in which German intellectual traditions have participated in racist thought and ideas; (2) working to construct a politics of place that can challenge the violence of settler colonialism. Both of these imperatives require centering work by scholars of color; putting German studies into careful conversation with ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and Indigenous studies (among other disciplines); acquiring the skills and competencies for multilingual research (beyond European languages); thinking through the ongoing settler colonial violence that informs the very project of German studies in North America; insisting on transnational approaches to whatever “German cultural products” we construct as objects of study. Although such work might be promoted as fitting neoliberal demands for “innovation” and “flexibility,” the requisite scholarship in conversation with such curricular and classroom initiatives may also require a kind of “slowing down” that is in tension with the imperatives of the neoliberal university—taking the time to do the widespread reading and have the widespread conversations that anticolonial, interdisciplinary, transnational work requires; unlearning many norms of our disciplines and careers and resisting the impulses to discipline our students into those same norms. I make no claim to be doing this well.

References Benitez, M., M. James, K. Joshua, L. Perfetti, and S.B. Vick. 2017. ‘Someone Who Looks Like Me’: Promoting the Success of Students of Color by Promoting the Success of Faculty of Color. Liberal Education 103(2). Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/ 2017/spring/benitez. Bérubé, M. 2002. The Utility of the Humanities. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 2 (1): 23–40. Bhambra, G.K., D. Gebrial, and K. Ni¸sancıo˘glu (eds.). 2018. Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press. Bowles, B. 2015. Lessons from the State University of New York, Albany: Program Elimination, Shared Governance, and Administrative Power. In Profession. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://profession.mla.org/lessons-from-the-state-university-of-new-york-albany-programelimination-administrative-power-and-shared-governance/. Brandt, G.L. 1986. The Realization of Anti-racist Teaching. New York, NY: The Falmer Press. Canadian Bureau for International Education. 2018. International Students in Canada. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://cbie.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/International-Students-inCanada-ENG.pdf.

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Cohen, P. 2009, Feb 24. In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. In The New York Times. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/books/25human. html. Conquer, R., R. McClelland, T. Smith, and N. Thomas 2019. eds. Expanding German Studies Blog. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://germanstudiesbibliography.wordpress.com. Conrad, C. 2015. Educating a Diverse Nation: Lessons from Minority-Serving Institutions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cramer, E.P. (ed.). 2011. Addressing Homophobia and Heterosexism on College Campuses. New York, NY: Routledge. Criser, R., and E. Malakaj (eds.). 2019. Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum Blog. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://diversityingermancurriculum.weebly.com/ddgc-blog. Di Leo, J.R. 2013. Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy. New York, NY: Palgrave. Dolmage, J.T. 2017. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hayot, E. 2018. The Sky is Falling. In Profession. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://profession. mla.org/the-sky-is-falling/. Henderson, I. 1991. Addressing Diversity: A Call for Action. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German 24 (1): 4–9. Hutner, G., and F.G. Mohamed. 2013, September 6. The Real Humanities Crisis is Happening at Public Universities. In The New Republic Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://newrepublic.com/ article/114616/public-universities-hurt-humanities-crisis. Hutner, G., and F.G. Mohamed (eds.). 2016. A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education. New Jersey, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Jansen, J.C., and J. Osterhammel. 2017. Decolonization: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Johnson, S. 2019, January 22. Colleges Lose a ‘Stunning’ 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3 Years. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://www.chronicle. com/article/Colleges-Lose-a-Stunning-/245526. Komska, Y., M. Moyd, and D. Gramling 2018. Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language. New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan. Lead with Languages. 2018. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://www.leadwithlanguages.org. Levine, A. 1993. Diversity on Campus. In Higher Learning in America, 1980–2000, ed. A. Levine, 333–344. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lewis, P.E. 2015. Beyond Program Closures, the Menace of Slow Defunding. In Profession. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://profession.mla.org/beyond-program-closures-the-menaceof-slow-defunding/. Looseley, D. 2013. Speaking of Impact: Languages and Utility of the Humanities. In Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Utility and Markets, ed. E. Belfiore and A. Upchurch, 91–108. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Lugones, M. 2010. Toward a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759. Malakaj, E. 2018, November 11. On Whiteness, Exclusion, and the 2018 AATG Annual Conference. In Blog. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://ervinmalakaj.weebly.com/blog/on-whitenessexclusion-and-the-2018-aatg-annual-conference. Mignolo, W.D. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. MLA Action Network. 2018. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://action.mla.org/about/. Nicolazzo, Z. 2016. Trans* in College: Transgender Students’ Strategies for Navigating Campus Life and the Institutional Politics of Inclusion. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Peters, G.F. 1994. Dilemmas of Diversity: Observations on Efforts to Increase Minority Participation in German. ADFL Bulletin 25 (2): 5–11. Pratt, L.R. 2009. Financial Landscape of Higher Education: Mapping a Rough Road Ahead. ADFL Bulletin 41 (1): 9–15.

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Quijano, A. 2007. Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. Cultural Studies 21 (2/3): 168–178. Rarick, D.O. 2009. Resuscitating University Language Programs in the Global Age: The International Engineering Program (IEP) at the University of Rhode Island. ADFL Bulletin 40 (3): 78–87. Reagan, T. and T.A. Osborn 2019. Time for a Paradigm Shift in U.S. Foreign Language Education? Revisiting Rationales, Evidence, and Outcomes. In Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages, ed. D. Macedo, 73–111. New York, NY: Routledge. Roy, L.A. 2018. Teaching While White: Addressing the Intersections of Race and Immigration in the Classroom. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield. Schmenk, B., S. Breidbach, and L. Küster. 2018. Sloganization in Language Education Discourse: Conceptual Thinking in the Age of Academic Marketization. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Slobodian, Q. 2018. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Takagi, A. 2019, February 24. U of T Received More Money from International Students than from Ontario Government. The Varsity. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://thevarsity.ca/2019/02/ 24/u-of-t-receives-more-money-from-international-students-than-from-ontario-government/. Tuck, E., and R.A. Gaztambide-Fernández. 2013. Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 29 (1): 72–89. Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. 2012. Decolonization is not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Universities Canada. 2016. The Future of the Liberal Arts: A Global Conversation. Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://www.univcan.ca/the-future-of-the-liberal-arts-report/. US National Center for Education Statistics. 2016. Fast Facts: Do You Have Information on Postsecondary Enrollment Rates? Retrieved June 13, 2019 from https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display. asp?id=98.

Ervin Malakaj is Assistant Professor of German Studies and Affiliate Faculty in the Institute for European Studies at the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining the faculty at UBC, he was an Assistant Professor of German at Sam Houston State University in Texas. Ervin specializes in late 18th to 21st-century German cultural history and media. His research focuses on 19th century literary cultures, queer film history, critical pedagogy, and language advocacy.

The Language-Culture Nexus: German Teaching in a Culturally Rich Environment as Part of the German Model of Cultural Diplomacy Irina Herrschner

Abstract The Goethe-Institut is the official representation of German culture and language abroad. In over 160 institutes around the globe, German expatriates and qualified German teachers teach German language courses within the framework of German Auswärtiger Kultur-und Bildungspolitik, that is, foreign cultural and educational politics. This combination of language and culture as a conduit for international engagement is the focus of this chapter. Accordingly, I question the different approaches that German teachers utilize when teaching language within this framework. Conversations with German teachers in Australia, Germany, Asia and South-America provide insights into the techniques used to engage adult language learners in a culturally relevant discourse as part of their language learning. Considering the specific teacher education required for teachers at the Goethe-Institut, the chapter critically examines the cultural topics and teacher-student engagement in German language classes, as well as the changing status of German against the global languages backdrop.

The German Model of Diplomacy The German model of cultural diplomacy emerged under five state forms (the Weimar Republic, Third Reich, GDR, FRG and the reunited Germany) over the twentieth century. Unlike other European countries, Germany uses federally funded nongovernmental organisations to implement foreign cultural policies independently (Krischok 2007, 124; Michels 2005, 2). It ensures that German culture represented abroad is not driven and controlled by the government but instead employs a mixture of state and privately controlled Mittlerorganisationen, or third-party organisations (Haigh 1974, 112). The rationale behind this division of power is a consequence of Germany’s traumatic past and rooted in its responsibility to prevent disproportionate power from ever being concentrated in one person or party. The German Model of I. Herrschner (B) The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Nickl et al. (eds.), Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2_6

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Cultural Diplomacy aligns with Germany’s federal system and inherent diversity of culture and governance. It delegates the mandate of an entire branch of foreign policy to independent NGOs—mainly the Goethe-Institut. As a result of this division of power, cultural foreign policy in Germany must negotiate a complex system of private, semi-private and church institutions (Schneider, “Cultural Diplomacy”, 2010, 86); however, the Foreign Ministry funds most of these organisations and therefore presides over the general direction of German cultural foreign policy. Based on Germany’s history and its location in Europe, German cultural foreign politics is based around dialogue, European integration, cultural diversity and the representations of Germany as a contemporary, creative and diverse nation. German cultural diplomacy is enacted by several non-governmental organisations that hold a mandate to represent Germany in its respective fields of responsibility, such as language, culture and research. The main Mittlerorganisationen, or third-party organisations, are the many entities of the Goethe-Institut. It is responsible for the representation of German culture and language outside any academic framework. The DAAD is facilitating language teaching for tertiary education. The Humboldt Association and DFG facilitate research collaborations. The German term describing its approach to cultural Auswärtige Kultur-und Bildungspolitik (AKPB), or foreign cultural and educational politics, infers the close connection between culture and the education that both the DAAD and GI have at their core. For the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on the Goethe-Institut and the DAAD, which have the specific remit for the cultural content embedded in teaching German as a Foreign Language (herein referred to as GI, DAAD and DAF).

The Trajectory of the Goethe-Institut The core mandate of the Goethe-Institut (GI) is illustrated in its contemporary marketing slogan: Sprache. Kultur. Deutschland (Language. Culture. Germany). Always in German, the motto highlights the close connection between language teaching and cultural representation that the GI stands for. The Goethe-Institut evolved from the Deutsche Akademie (DA), which was originally established in 1925 as a scientific organization. During the 1930s, the DA followed the model of the French Alliance Française and started to operate German language schools abroad. 1932, the GI was officially established and became part of the Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment during Nazi Germany. Having been dis-established as a Nazi organization in 1945, the contemporary GI was re-established in 1951 as part of efforts to rebuild German identity by strengthening its representations abroad. Supported by Friedrich Meinecke’s notion of Germany as a Kulturnation, or nation based on culture, its founders envisioned the re-established GI as a ‘spiritual rebirth’ for the country (Kathe 2005, 83). Early institutes were opened in rural Germany in areas that remained intact after WWII, allowing Germany to invite international students to learn German and to witness an aspect of the country often absent from the representations and memories of the

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time. In parallel with the rebuilding of Germany’s cities, GIs opened firstly in Munich, Düsseldorf and Berlin. The first GI outside Germany was opened in 1952 in Athens and this heralded the start of a new era of German teaching and German cultural diplomacy. In 1953, the first GI programs were opened in small, picturesque towns in Germany, allowing foreigners to learn German and experience the best aspects of postwar Germany. In the following years, from 1955 to 1963, numerous language schools abroad were established (Oergel 2006, 281). In the same year, the aforementioned ‘German Model’ of foreign policy was created following the official integration of the GI into German foreign policy (Michels 2005, 229). Since then, the GI has had the task of representing German language and culture abroad, and increased funding has allowed for the establishment of an expanded international network. In 1966, Willy Brandt, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1964–1987, described cultural diplomacy as the ‘third column of foreign policy’, thereby giving it equal importance alongside economic and political foreign politics (Maaß 2011, 589). Brandt also identified it as a tool for re-establishing a positive image of Germany distanced from persistent images linked to the Third Reich and WWII (Schneider and Kaitinnis 2016a, b, 165). In 1969, the base contract between the GI and the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MFA) formalised the ‘German Model’ of independent cultural foreign policy (Katzenstein 2000, 159). In the 1980s, numerous GI centers opened in large university towns, attracting international students to the ‘New Germany’, such as Düsseldorf, Bonn and Frankfurt. After reunification in 1989, the former president of the GI, Hilmar Hoffmann, formulated the underpinning agenda of the GI as examiner of the ‘German and European question’; that is, the image of Germany and of Germans abroad was to be negotiated anew under changed political and social conditions (David-Fox 2012, 3). By 2016, the GI comprised 159 institutes and 12 liaison offices in 119 countries, with its main responsibility being the dissemination of German language and culture abroad (Fuchs 2011, 51). In 2015, the budget the German government allocated to the GI increased by 16.6 million euros (from 213.6 million euros in 2014), underlining the continuing importance attributed to cultural diplomacy (Goethe-Institut, Annual Report 2015/16 2017, 6). In a recent review entitled ‘Außenpolitik – weiterdenken’ (‘foreign policy – continuing reflections’ Bendiek 2014, 2–5), the contribution of the GI was not only described as ‘an extension of diplomacy and economic politics’ (Andreas Görgen, Head of the Department of Culture and Communication at the Foreign Office), but also as the ‘basic condition for achieving peace’ (Michelle Müntefering, member of the Bundestag—the German Parliament). Considering the direct and numerous connections between the GI and the MFA, linking the GI’s historical development to the situation and direction of the government of the day is a critical association, particularly as the GI is the main recipient of foreign policy funds of the MFA and therefore takes a hegemonic role in German cultural diplomacy. As part of the wider European Project, the GI became part of the EU National Institute of Culture (EUNIC) in 2006. EUNIC was founded to combine expertise and resources for designing and carrying out cultural projects representing European unity (Cross et al. 2013, 137). EUNIC’s formation was a groundbreaking approach

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towards collaboration, and an attempt to overcome the historic problems of intraEuropean antagonism (Báatora 2016, 166). With the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the EU went beyond its original economic objective and added a completely new dimension to European politics (ibid.). The development of a community social dimension and the establishment of a common foreign policy framework directly impacted the national cultural institutions of Europe. The establishment of EU initiatives such as the ‘Erasmus+’ exchange program significantly increased intra-European mobility and brought into question the ongoing relevance of national cultural institutions (Mol 2012, 209–222). The Erasmus program is a European Union exchange program that was founded in 1987. It allows University students to spend one semester at a University in a different European country. The connection between language and culture is at the heart of the GI as an institution; illustrated in its organizational structure being divided into the cultural and the language department. This division, however, also highlights the separation between the two parts of the organization, as funding models and target audiences for the two departments are also very different from each other. Whilst language teaching focuses on local students with an interest in learning German, the cultural events are often attended by the German diaspora in the respective country, or special interest groups which have an explicit connection with the content presented, and not specifically for the German angle as such. The cultural content, however, forms part of language teaching and thus needs to be understood also as a form of cultural representation. Individual teachers focus on cultural topics that they see as relevant as well as responding to interests in the classroom. These different interests, and the overarching understanding of culturally relevant topics, are analyzed here to provide insights into the transnational cultural topics transferred through language teaching that arguably form an important role in German cultural diplomacy.

The DAAD in the German Model of Cultural Diplomacy The history of the DAAD parallels that of the GI. A student in Heidelberg asked for 13 scholarships for German students from the Institute of International Education (IIE), laying the foundation for the emerging transatlantic initiative that developed into the DAAD. Becoming part of the Nazi administration, the DAAD’s global reach suffered in the 1930s and the office in the USA closed in 1938. With support from the US, however, the DAAD was reestablished in 1950. In 2018, 241 universities and 103 representative student bodies were members of the DAAD. The leitmotif of the DAAD Wandel durch Austausch, change through exchange, informs the organisation’s role as part of German foreign policies. In contrast to the GI that represents German research bodies, the pronounced aim of the DAAD is to inspire change. Identifying students and scientists as actors for change, the DAAD describes its task as ‘provided the impetus for internationalization and towards global responsibility’. Situating its part within the UN Agenda 2030 for sustainable development and collaborating with the GIZ, the German Development Agency,

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the DAAD, and its DAF teaching form part of a wider infrastructure of German diplomacy. In a similar emphasis on the cultural components of language teaching, the DAAD refers to its programs as Bildungsexport, the export of Bildung, a particularly German term describing a form of self-cultivation through a broad form of education, resulting in personal and cultural maturation. In a positioning paper, the DAAD highlights the transnational potential of DAF and the opportunity to open German Studies thematically in this context.

Cultural Policy in DAF Teaching As illustrated by the activities of the GI and the DAAD, language teaching is an integral part of Germany’s representations abroad. Politician and linguist Hans Joachim Meyer asserts that there are inextricable relations between learning another language and understanding the related culture and that ‘for being able to navigate more complex discourses in another language, one has to be able to think in the linguistically coded words, images and imaginings, which respectively form part of a traditional, cultural context’ (my translation, for German original see footnote).1 Moreover, Meyer outlines that the basis for language teaching at the GI is its connection to German cultural diplomacy, where learning the language is tied to representations of Germany, and its contemporary culture. The link between language and culture in combination with the German model of diplomacy, which strictly divides foreign representations of the country’s culture from its politics, runs the risk of oversimplifying the culture of the country in a language learning context through the transmission of hackneyed images employed by expatriate and/or diaspora teachers. The term Landeskunde, or study of country, is emblematic of this context and includes specific vocabulary as well as contextual language skills. Bildungsexport and Landeskunde make up the lens through which I examine the responses of DAF teachers, the cultural content of their teaching and the interests of their students. As well as including perspectives from DAF teachers who work either for the GI or the DAAD in Asia, Australia, South America and Germany, I highlight the specific interests, predominant motivations to learn German and the overarching elements of cultural teaching emphasized by the GI language teacher course and textbooks, and contextualise the potential risks of integrating cultural content into DAF teaching. I outline the details of three DAF teachers responding to a short questionnaire for this chapter. Due to the small number of respondents, comments serve only as examples, rather than comprehensive data informing this chapter. With its in-house training courses for German teachers, the GI provides a framework that reinforces the cultural and pedagogical intricacies of teaching German in a contemporary framework. The Grüne Diplom, Green Diploma—referring to the 1 “Wer sich in den höheren Diskurswelten seiner Gesprächspartner bewegen möchte, muss in deren

sprachlich kodierten Begriffen, Bildern und Vorstellungen denken können, die ihrerseits Teil eines tradierten kulturellen Zusammenhangs sind” (Meyer 2008, 47).

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colour of the GI logo—is the global qualification necessary for teachers at GIs. Established in 2004, the qualification is a didactic basis for language teaching at all GIs around the world. A new course, also available for German teachers not teaching at GIs, the GI has devised a new program titled ‘Deutsch lehren lernen’ (learn teaching German). It is an eight-part series for all teachers of German as a foreign language that was published by the GI in collaboration with DAF (German as a foreign language) experts. In publishing this course for all DAF teachers, the GI assume a leadership role in German language teaching, making its cultural elements even more relevant. The DAAD has a different approach to training its DAF staff, always combining a more experienced DAF teacher with a less-experienced teacher. Both teachers have usually completed a teaching degree in Germany, have lived in Germany for at least two years before their employment, and have to attend a training course provided by the DAAD. Particularly interesting for the purposes of this chapter is the condition of having lived in Germany before commencing work for the DAAD in one of its overseas partner Universities, as this ensures an ongoing connection to contemporary Germany, as well as a relatively young teaching cohort. Trying to uncover different teaching styles and approaches to integrating cultural context into DAF teaching, I draw on conversations and a short survey with DAF teachers. Due to the limited number of responses, this chapter merely teases out some of the possibilities of approaching the culture-language nexus and situates these within the policy frameworks provided by the GI, the DAAD and more general German foreign politics. By doing so, I highlight the individual agency of each teacher who is formally part of German cultural diplomacy but realistically more embedded in personal preferences and interests, as well as the interests and constraints of a particular teaching context.

German Language and Culture in the Transnational Classroom DAF teaching is always situated in a transnational context, where language learning and teaching negotiates different cultures and motivations to learn German. DAF teachers need to negotiate these differences and often use cultural context to provide more interesting course content, especially for grammar-focused beginner classes and also to motivate students. That culture forms an integral part of DAF teaching is highlighted by all respondents for this chapter, but illustrated well by this quotation as it unpacks the value attributed to cultural and historical content, for teaching per se, but also for the student: Ein Sprachunterricht, der die jeweils landestypische Kultur und Geschichte auslässt, ist meiner Meinung nach eindimensional. Ich denke auch, dass der Miteinbezug von kulturellen Themen einen wichtigen Punkt bei der Lernermotivierung spielt. T2 I think, language teaching that omits the respective culture and history of the country is one-dimensional. I also think that the inclusion of cultural topics forms an important point for student motivation. (translation by Herrschner)

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Whilst all respondents concur about the value of cultural context, the context included and the way it is framed vary between each teacher, the teaching context and the students, thus illustrating the personal agency of individual teachers in the context of the de-centralized German model of cultural diplomacy, but also revealing a disjuncture between language teaching and DAF education, where the former arguably includes significantly more cultural content than the latter (Eßer 2006, 3).

At Home and Abroad—Binaries in DAF Teaching Much of language learning is framed in the context of home culture and language. This makes it unsurprising that interest in cultural topics often emerges in this binary between familiar and foreign context. In her analysis of interculturality in DAF textbooks, Minna Maijala points out that German multiculturalism appears only rarely in DAF textbooks and often add the dimension of the foreign language learner in Germany rather than that of Germans with migratory backgrounds (2008). Here, multiculturalism offers the language learner an entry point to Germany and German culture by presenting Germany through the eyes of another language learner, thus facilitating identification with a person in the textbook. Rather than representing a contemporary multicultural Germany, textbooks thus also reinforce cultural differences between the cultural context of the learner and Germany. A learner-focused approach here takes the student and his/her cultural context as the starting point and ‘norm’ that serves as a contrast to the German cultural and linguistic materials taught. One comment from a DAF teacher (T1) about her experience teaching German in Morocco illustrates the integration of German language into a cultural context contrasting the home context. Thus, according to T1, students particularly are interested in ‘significant differences of German mentalities’ including traditions such as Christmas, but also gender roles within a German cultural context. This illustrates the impact of the home culture on German language learning. Meine marokkanischen Lernenden waren an der signifikanten Andersartigkeit der deutschen Mentalität, am Bildungssystem und auch an den deutschen Bräuchen, wie Weihnachten und Ostern feiern, am Umgang zwischen Männern und Frauen interessiert. My Moroccan students were interested in the significantly different German mentality, the educational system, German traditions, such as Christmas and Easter and the interactions between men and women (translation by Herrschner)

T1 went on to point more generally towards a more general appreciation of interest in cultural differences of German language learners. Ich nehme an, die meisten Lernenden - je nach kultureller Sozialisation - sind besonders an den Unterschieden, an dem Fremden - verglichen mit ihrer eigenen Kultur, in Deutschland interessiert. I think that most students - depending on their cultural socialization - are especially interested in the differences, the foreign in Germany - compared to their own culture (translation by Herrschner)

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A similar binary between the familiar and the foreign and the stereotypes often present particularly at beginner levels are pointed out by another respondent below. Especially at beginner levels, stereotypes and differences help the motivation of students and are an integral part of DAF textbooks. Selbst Anfänger […] stellen bereits Fragen zum Land und den Menschen. Dies geschieht entweder aus eigenem Antrieb heraus oder weil sie in den Übungsaufgaben über Stereotype stolpern. Oftmals greife ich diese selbst auch auf. Auch beim Lesen von Texten […] bspw zum Thema “Essen” werden schnell kulturelle Unterschiede wahrgenommen. Even beginners are already asking about the country and its people. This happens either out of their own motivation, or because they stumble across stereotypes in their textbook. Also when reading texts, e.g. on the topic ‘food’ students, quickly note the cultural differences. (translation by Herrschner)

Both quotations above illustrate an interest, as well as a teaching style, that contextualizes German language and culture as the Other, that is put against the familiar context of the student. Certainly, part of learning another language happens in comparison with a familiar language and grammatical structure, which makes cultural contrasting a part of the same logic; however, this also bears the risk of not only commodifying German culture to suit this logic, but also to act against the ideals of cultural diplomacy to engage dialogue based on commonalities rather than strengthening cultural differences. Especially in terms of Germany’s contemporary multiculturalism, this approach can reinforce ideas of a mono-cultural nation by drawing on stereotypical tropes of Germany that neither serve as contemporary representations of Germany, nor establish a diverse Deutschlandbild, or image of Germany, that can help students if they choose to live or work in Germany.

Exporting the Kulturnation Another teaching technique can be seen in responses from another DAF teacher who frames her DAF teaching more within the context of German Kulturnation, rather than its differences to the home culture. The idea of a German Kulturnation here refers to a concept of nationhood that is defined more by a common language and culture than by country borders, which allows DAF teachers to anchor their teaching on German cultural products that frame the discussion of German culture. Taking Bildung as the starting point for teaching, culture and language are closely intertwined and are taught simultaneously. Highlighting this idea is the close link made by one respondent (T2) between cultural products, such as art, music and dance, and the German language: Sowohl zeitgenössische als auch historische Themen, die einen Überblick über Deutschlands Vergangenheit und Geschichte geben. Kunst lässt sich sehr gut mit Literatur verbinden und auch Musik/Tanz/Theater miteinbeziehen, woraufhin die deutsche Gesellschaft zu einer Zeit kontextübergreifend diskutiert werden kann. T2 Contemporary as well as historic topics can provide a good overview over Germany’s past and history. Art can be connected very well with literature and also include music/dance/theatre,

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which allows for a comprehensive discussion of Germany at a particular time. (translation by Herrschner)

As well as highlighting a close connection between language and culture, reflecting the idea of a Kulturnation, this quotation also illustrates an understanding of valuable cultural content as part of DAF teaching that is closely aligned with an understanding of culture as proposed by the Frankfurt school. A focus on Hochkultur, or high culture, becomes apparent in the selection of cultural topics focused on music, dance, theatre and literature. A focus on these aspects of German culture facilitates an affirmation of the importance of Hochkultur for the German nation. A teaching method that hinges language teaching on cultural topics avoids the creation of dichotomies between familiar and foreign, but also limits contemporary discussions of everyday Germany. The term by the DAAD describing this approach to DAF is the Bildungsexport or export of education that unites culture and education as a product that can be exported together. Particularly, the term export highlights the one-directional nature of this focus on exporting the Kulturnation. Especially in an increasingly globalized world, this can limit the transnational potential of DAF teaching abroad, where language not only forms insights into another culture, but also allows for new perspectives of one’s own culture.

DAF Transcending National Contexts A focus that stands in contrast to the topic of everyday Germany, according to Majiala (2008) the most frequently demanded topic by learners of German (Adick 2014, 747), is on practical ‘survival skills’—as described below—which decontextualizes the language learning from its specific country context and focuses on contemporary Germany, rather than its history: Ich persönlich bevorzuge Themen, die den Studierenden beim “Überleben” in Deutschland hilfreich sein können sowie aktuelle Themen, die gerade in Deutschland in den Medien auftauchen. T3 Personally, I prefer topics that are helpful for students to ‘survive’ in Germany, as well as contemporary topics, that are currently in the news. (translation by Herrschner)

By focusing on skills rather than cultural topics, the DAF teacher becomes less a cultural interpreter and expert, and more a guide through a different linguistic and cultural landscape. Narrowing down the topics that students find most interesting, T3 summarized the highly individual and context-dependent nature of DAF teaching, stating that “[interest in cultural topics] completely depends on the individual interests of the students”. Cultural topics chosen to be included into DAF teaching, naturally, depend on the teacher and the student, especially the motivation for studying German. The context of teaching also influences students’ motivation, and cultural topics included into DAF teaching. These differences also become clear when comparing DAAD teachers who teach in the context of tertiary education, and GI teachers who teach adults outside any wider educational context. This can also

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be illustrated by a quotation from a respondent with experiences in both contexts, stating that the students at a university in Colombia were more interested in cultural topics, and GI students in Spain were more interested in practical knowledge: Das Interesse an jeweiligen Themen fand ich insgesamt unterschiedlich stark ausgeprägt. Zum Beispiel waren die kolumbianischen Studierenden eher an der Geschichte, Politik und an deutschen Filmen interessiert (Deutsche Filmevents waren sehr gefragt und gut besucht). Spanische Studierende interessierten sich mehr für den Spracherwerb und für praktische deutsche Themen (wie öffne ich ein Bankkonto usw). T2 I find the interest in particular topics strongly differentiated in different countries. For example, Colombian students were more interested in German history, politics and films (German film events were popular and well attended). Spanish students were more intersted in language aquisition and practical topics, such as opening a bank account and so on. (translation by Herrschner)

Similar differences are mentioned by all respondents in addition to a transnational aspect of DAF teaching, where cultural topics are only loosely related to Germany. They are instead part of a transnational Western cultural discourse, such as environmental protection, gender equality and democracy. As mentioned, the task of the GI is the dissemination of a contemporary Deutschlandbild, inclusive of contemporary challenges, historic catastrophes and the regional differences in Germany. Similarly, the DAAD states that DAF as Bildungsexport transcends disciplinary borders. The close collaboration between the DAAD and the GIZ (German Development Agency) further highlights the broad understanding of DAF teaching as a form of cultural diplomacy and international development. Topics that transcend language teaching, as well as a strictly German context, can here be seen from two aspects: first, the increasing integration of Germany into a transnational context beyond national borders as a result of globalization, or, second, as an agent of social change in developing countries, disseminating ideals and ideas of the West. An example of this form of teaching is the integration of global issues into DAF teaching, with the aim of influencing local behaviors. This also shows a link between DAF teaching by the DAAD and the GI and German cultural diplomacy, emphasizing contemporary Germany as a modern, democratic and multicultural country. Focusing on environmentalism is popular also in textbooks, where the German recycling system is often referenced. In Vietnam, the DAF teacher found a significant lack of understanding of environmental protection, also influenced by the discourse on Halong Bay and its endangered listing on the UNESCO World Heritage list, due to water pollution. She therefore included the discourse more prominently in her teaching, with the aim of introducing ideas as part of DAF teaching that might influence local behaviors. […] vor allem in Vietnam habe ich versucht, auch Themen anzusprechen, die in solchen Ländern kein grosses Thema sind wie bspw. Umweltschutz. T3 […] especially in Vietnam, I tried to include topics that aren’t a big topic in the respective country, e.g. environmentalism. (translation by Herrschner)

This quotation is also a clear enacting of the positioning of the DAAD, that sees learning German connected with a so-called Deutschlandkompetenz or ‘being

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knowledgeable about Germany’ and describes this as a potentially deciding factor for career and competitiveness. Illustrating the limits of this approach, the same teacher spoke about the topical limits in Kirgizia, where she encountered a dynamic in the classroom that she describes as a Heiratsmarkt or a marriage market, where women hope to find a husband, that could have engaged students in discussions on gender equality, but due to cultural and political limits were excluded from the classroom discourse. Themen zur Genderdebatte, Gleichberechtigung oder eine Ehe für alle Punkte, die in Krigistan nur unter vorgehaltener Hand besprochen werden und daher nicht im Klassenraum zur Sprache kommen. In Kirgizia, topics such as gender, equality or marriage equality are only talked about on the quiet and thus never come up in the classroom (translation by Herrschner).

This quotation also further emphasizes the responsibility of the DAF teacher to select appropriate cultural material for the teaching context, as well as the emphasis not only on language, but also on cultural teaching. This becomes particularly clear in the inverted commas used for describing the participation in discussions in Vietnam and by Chinese students in Germany: Kreative Aufgaben wurden nur angenommen, wenn es sich bspw. um Themen wie Weihnachten handelte, bei denen nicht die “Gefahr” bestand, seine Meinung zu äussern. T3 Creative tasks were only completed, if they consisted of topics such as Christmas, where there was no ‘danger’ in voicing your own opinion. (translation by Herrschner)

The desire to involve students in a more critical and individual debate, stating personal opinions, can be described as a more Western value, that in this case clashed with the more ‘Eastern’ value of saving face. This also illustrates a risk when focusing DAF teaching on contemporary issues, rather than the ‘safer’ topic of Hochkultur or high culture. These differences are illustrated in a contrast between European and Chinese students studying German in Germany, and thus as part of a multicultural classroom: Während Chinesen insbesondere bei politischen Themen eher zurückhaltend reagiert haben, war es bspw. für TN aus der EU kein Problem sich rege an Diskussionen zu beteiligen. T1 Whilst Chinese students reacted reluctantly to political topics e.g. European students had no issues in actively participating in discussions. (translation by Herrschner)

Whilst this attempt to export German ideals can be put in context with the DAAD’s positioning within German cultural diplomacy, it also illustrates a rather more colonial approach that forms part of cultural diplomacy and here also language teaching. Demokratieförderung or the strengthening of democracy forms the core of German foreign politics and demands open and egalitarian discussion (Schneider and Kaitinnis 2016a, b, 176). Teaching that aims at creating open discussion and establishing a safe space where a public sphere allows for the exchange of ideas between students is part of this Demokratieförderung.

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Discussion and Conclusions: Mittlerorganisationen and DAF Teachers Disconnecting representations of German culture from German politics allows for individual ideas and a multi-facetted image of Germany that can be independent of government politics of the time. This also means that each actor within this system, including German interns actively shaping cultural events at GIs around the world and DAF teachers teaching DAF in countries foreign to them, thus makes German cultural diplomacy highly dependent on individuals. Cultural context of DAF teaching and the different approaches to teaching depend on context, personal preferences and teaching experience, and thus illuminate risks with the decentralized structure of integrating DAF into German cultural diplomacy. Whilst the structure allows for shaping teaching to the individual circumstances and interests of teachers and students, it also makes each teacher an influential decision-maker in creating understandings of Germany abroad. Whilst the GI and its Grüne Diplom attempt to create global standards for DAF teaching, teachers of DAAD, who often teach in the context of tertiary education, are not embedded in a broader framework of the cultural components of their DAF courses. Situated in the rather vague ideals of inspiring change and exporting Bildung, each teacher makes decisions as to what aspects of German culture to include and to focus on. Romanticized ideas of a German Kulturnation can be the result of this, as well as the positioning of Germany in a leading role for democracy and global challenges, such as environmentalism. Textbooks highlighting cultural and outdated stereotypes of Germany often further confirm this rather positivistic representation of Germany. Stereotypes can form part of an Othering and commodity discourse around Germany and German culture that not only situates Germany as the opposite of home but can also reinforce the imperial roots of cultural diplomacy. Terms such as Bildungsexport affirm these notions, especially when enacted as part of broader projects of developmental aid. Here, Germany is not only the Other, but also the provider of money and knowledge. As exemplified above, a focus on Hochkultur can strengthen these power-imbalances further. Topics of global importance, such as climate change, can, on the other hand, form the basis for the DAAD’s imperative of ‘Wandel durch Austausch’, where change is seen because of intercultural exchange and communication. Despite the limited scope of this chapter, the particularly tight connection between culture and education, as exemplified by the term Bildung, has been demonstrated and supported by respondents, as has the highly individual interpretation of this concept made individually by DAF teachers. German concepts of a Kulturnation subconsciously influence DAF teaching, where cultural elements are borrowed from an understanding of culture influenced by the Frankfurt School. Particularly in culturally different contexts, such as Asia, DAF teachers become the interpreters between a more generally ‘Western’ and more ‘Eastern’ ideas of education and critical discourse. Western democratic ideals are here juxtaposed with the national context within the DAF classroom, challenging DAF teachers, particularly as part of a hypermobile workforce of the DAAD that limits teachers’ immersion in

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cultural specificities. This, in particular, highlights a demand for more focus on the nexus of language and culture within the DAF classroom that critically engages with concepts of transnationalism, cultural diversity and the role of German teaching as part of Germany’s cultural diplomacy. The assertion that culture and language are inseparable parts of DAF teaching has become clear, as has the individual responsibility of each teacher. The responsibility of being part of a decentralized system of cultural diplomacy as the first point of contact between students and German culture arguably diverges from the separation between culture and language at the GI. Whilst culture is consciously framed as a form of German soft-power (Herrschner 2015), the language department acts seemingly separately from this cultural mandate. Closer integration, focus on cultural aspects of DAF teaching and more focus on cultural topics in the teacher training for DAF teachers of the GI and especially the DAAD could add complexity and depth to DAF teaching as part of German cultural diplomacy and as a form of Demokratieförderung and contemporary Bildungsexport detached from colonial ideas and power disparities. An example of this is the approach the GI takes for DAF teaching of children, where culture and film form an integral part of language teaching and thus, at the same time, add cultural content and different perspectives to that of the teacher and the DAF context. This decentralizing of cultural content from the teacher to film and song texts allows for diverse, culturally complex and contemporary cultural content to be integrated as learning tools into DAF teaching.

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Kathe, Steffen R. 2005. Kulturpolitik um jeden Preis: die Geschichte des Goethe-Instituts von 1951 bis 1990. Bern: Peter Lang. Katzenstein, Peter J. 2000. A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Krischok, Klaus. 2007. “The Goethe Institut—A model for Australia?” Australian Arts: Where the Bloody Hell Are You?: Australian Arts in an International Context. Eds. Clark, John, Peter Maccallum, and Ian Maxwell, 124–128. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Maaß K. J. 2011. Aktuelle Herausforderungen der auswärtigen Kulturpolitik. In Deutsche Außenpolitik. ed. Jäger Thomas, Alexandrr Höse, and Kai Oppermann, 584–603. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Maijala, Minna. 2008. Zwischen den Welten–Reflexionen zu interkulturellen Aspekten im DaFUnterricht und in DaF-Lehrwerken. Zeitschrift für interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 13 (1). Meyer, Hans Joachim. 2008. Kommunikation und Dominanz. In Die Macht der Sprache, ed. Jutta Limbach, and Katharina von Ruckteschell, S47–S53, Berlin. Michels, Eckard. 2005. Von der Deutschen Akademie zum Goethe-Institut: Sprach-und auswärtige Kulturpolitik 1923–1960. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag. Mol, Christof van. 2012. Intra-European Student Mobility and European Identity: Successful Marriage? Population, Space and Place 19 (1): 209–222. Oergel, Maike. 2006. Culture and Identity: Historicity in German Literature and Thought 1770– 1815. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schneider, Wolfgang, and Anna Kaitinnis (eds.). 2016a. Kulturarbeit in Transformationsprozessen: Innenansichten zur ‘Aussenpolitik’ des Goethe-Instituts. Berlin: Springer. Schneider, Wolfgang, and Anna Kaitinnis. 2016b. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik Beiträge zu Theorie und Praxis binationaler Beziehungen. In Kulturarbeit in Transformationsprozessen, 9–17. Wiesbaden: Springer. Schneider, Wolfgang. 2010. Cultural diplomacy: Einbahnstraße, Sackgasse, Kreisverkehr, oder? Risiken und Nebenwirkungen einer Kulturentwicklungspolitik. In Kultur und globale Entwicklung: die Bedeutung von Kultur für die politische, wirtschaftliche und soziale Entwicklung, ed. Wilhelm, Jürgen, et al., 86–93. Berlin: Berlin University Press.

Irina Herrschner holds a Ph.D. in German Studies from the University of Melbourne. In her doctoral thesis, she scrutinized the risks and benefits of using film festivals as cultural diplomacy, with particular focus on the German Film Festival held in Melbourne and Sydney. Irina is coeditor of the book series ‘Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues’ which brings together different voices and topics surrounding Germany in the 21st century. Irina publishes on cultural and cinematic diplomacy, transnational relations, film festivals and tourism.

Comparative Perspectives on Education Policy and Strategies

Bilingual German Childhood Education and School Transition: Literature Review and Policy Suggestions for Australia Ivy Zhou

Abstract Facilitating migrant children’s transition to school is the goal of many Western countries. Meta-analyses show that effective bilingual childhood programs have the potential to help migrant children to succeed in school by assisting them with their linguistic and sociocultural development. Drawing on evidence from wellestablished German bilingual programs and bilingual research literature, this chapter takes the form of a literature review that examines the merits and debates surrounding bilingual childhood education. In order to lift migrant children’s language proficiency, early childhood settings need to acknowledge and embrace these children’s transnational migratory experience, which includes children’s native languages and home literacy practices. The chapter puts forth a set of suggestions for Australian policymakers and early childhood educators for establishing, maintaining and evaluating a fruitful, national, early childhood education bilingual program.

Introduction Proficiency in the language of instruction predicts migrant children’s academic, socio-emotional and physical wellbeing (Dawson and Sheara 2008, 87; Goldfeld et al. 2014, 146). Migrant children entering school with limited proficiency in the language of instruction will likely encounter difficulties in academic learning and social activities (Goldfeld et al. 2014, 146; Lam et al. 2012, 45). Mounting research has shown that providing early childhood bilingual education can assist migrant children with school transition (Collier and Thomas 2004; Bialystok and Craik 2010; Han 2010; Kenner 2004; Meier 2010; Moin et al. 2011; Reyes et al. 2012; Steinlen 2018). Recent large-scale reviews of German early childhood bilingual programs demonstrate the literacy and sociocultural benefits these programs have for all children (Meier 2010; Moin et al. 2011; Reich and Roth 2002), yet, very little empirical research has been done in Australia to evaluate the effect early childhood bilingual I. Zhou (B) The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Nickl et al. (eds.), Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2_7

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education has on migrant children’s transition to school. In his paper on institutional, material and economic constraints in languages education in Australia, Jones Diaz (2014, 280) argues that shortages of resources, availability of languages and infrastructural support, combined with a lack of explicit policy initiatives for children from birth up to five years of age, leads to the unequal distribution of linguistic resources and support in preschool and primary education. Without enough resources, learning activities and professional support, many bilingual migrant children who attend monolingual preschool do not develop adequate proficiency in the language of instruction before school entry (Müller-Benedict 2008, 31). According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Starting Strong 2017 report (OECD Starting Strong 2017), a child’s language background is a key predictor of their performance on reading comprehension and writing tasks in mainstream schools. The Australian Early Development Census (2015, 137) reveals that between 2009 and 2015, the reading literacy performance in Australia declined significantly across all students with immigrant backgrounds even after social factors were removed. These disappointing results demonstrate a need for more evidence-based language intervention programs such as bilingual childhood education to be introduced before school entry to assist migrant children with school transition. This chapter presents a critical literature review that highlights the merits of early childhood bilingual education. It focuses specifically on sequential childhood bilingualism, which refers to the introduction of a second language (L2) within the child’s first five years in life (Baker 2006, 2; Hemsley et al. 2010, 363). It will focus only on recent peer-reviewed psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research related to early bilingual research in Germany, the United States (US) and Australia. The bulk of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research on bilingual education is predominantly based in the US and therefore justifies its inclusion. This review will, first, examine factors that influence the L2 acquisition and early language development in early childhood within the context of transnational migratory experience because, for migrant children, early language development is always intertwined with transnational activities to maintain social ties with the native country (Hsin 2017; Fürstenau 2005; Lam et al. 2012; Ohi et al. 2018; Sánchez 2007). This review will next collate and synthesise evidence on the linguistic improvements that may be produced by effective bilingual early childhood education. It will then examine the linguistic and sociocultural outcomes from German early childhood bilingual programs with a particular focus on important work by Meier (2010), Reich and Roth (2002), Doyé (1998), and Gogolin and Neumann (2009) to identify the lessons derived from German early childhood bilingual programs. Finally, the review will conclude with a set of suggestions for Australian policymakers and early childhood educators for establishing, maintaining and evaluating a fruitful national early childhood education bilingual program.

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The Effects of Child-Internal, Environmental and Contextual Factors on Migrant Children’s L2 Acquisition This section explores various child-internal and external factors that influence migrant children’s L2 acquisition in early childhood. It also examines migrant children’s early language development within the context of their transnational migratory experience and mobility because, as qualitative research demonstrates, these aspects invariably influence the trajectory of their early literacy development. Children are always learning, and what they learn and how they learn is shaped by their environment (Siraj-Blatchford 2008, 26). Existing psycholinguistic research shows the rate at which bilingual children acquire the L2 can be influenced by childinternal factors such as the age L2 learning begins (Lenneberg 1967; Cummins 1980; Mägiste 1992; Milne and Clarke 1993; Johnson and Newport 1989), the proficiency of the native language (Kan and Kohnert 2005; Hemsley et al. 2010; Bialystok and Craik 2010; Reyes et al. 2012), and the child’s working memory (Hackman and Farah 2009). Furthermore, Duncan and Magnuson (2013, 109) argue early language development is also extremely malleable, in response to the complex environmental inputs within children’s immediate surroundings. These external factors range from the consistency of the children’s immediate language environment such as home and school (Brebner et al. 2016; Kenner 2004; Paradis and Jia 2017) to the similarities between the children’s native language and the L2. The dominant view on bilingual language development is that the age at which L2 commences is a critical factor for early sequential bilinguals reaching fluency in the L2 (Johnson and Newport 1989; Limbird et al. 2014; Mägiste 1992; Milne and Clarke 1993; Moin et al. 2011; Pascale et al. 2012; Reich and Roth 2002). In his ‘optimal age hypothesis,’ Lenneberg (1967, 11) argues that due to multiple psychological and neurological factors and constraints, the best period for language learning is between four to eight years of age. Evidence from cross-disciplinary studies supports the idea of ‘optimal age’ by demonstrating that the age of L2 introduction reliably predicts bilingual children’s L2 proficiency in formal classroom learning (Cummins 2016; Johnson and Newport 1989; Mägiste 1992; Milne and Clarke 1993). Mägiste’s (1992) study of two groups of German children in Sweden found that the preschool age German children who started learning Swedish at the age of 4 had a greater advantage in learning concrete nouns compared to older German children who began learning Swedish at the age of 10, evidenced by younger children’s faster response time in naming picture card tasks. These findings indicate a clear advantage for introducing L2 learning early on in childhood. For early sequential bilinguals, their native language and the L2 tend to co-exist on a continuum and develop through life according to context, medium, and content. The consensus in psycholinguistic research is that a high level of proficiency in native languages supports bilingual children’s oral and functional competency of the L2 (Bialystok and Craik 2010, 20; Reyes et al. 2012, 307). Well-developed

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skills in native language enable children to transfer knowledge such as phonological awareness and syntactic information between the two linguistic systems (Reyes et al. 2012, 307). External factors such as language variations in the child’s immediate language environment, and the amount and the quality of language input, can also profoundly influence children’s rate of language acquisition. Arguably, the abilities to communicate in two languages and to navigate between two cultures is also a double-edged sword for bilingual children. Research shows that bilingual children experience more variation in their immediate linguistic environment compared to monolingual children, because each language has its inherent phonological and morphological characteristics (Paradis and Jia 2017, 2). Sociolinguistics research shows by maintaining the consistency in the child’s immediate linguistic environment, it also expands opportunities for children to practise their emergent literacy skills across different linguistic environments (Kenner 2004, 43). In the context of transitional migration and mobility, the early language development of children who became bilingual as the result of their migratory background is inseparable from the literacy activities they engage in to maintain and sustain social relationships with families across the border. Lam et al. (2012) argue that migrant children’s language development needs to be understood as an expanding repertoire developed from their affiliations across two countries. Lam et al. (2012) believe, in the context of transnational migration and mobility, language and literacy practices are instrumental for migrant families to construct and maintain social relations across borders. In return, the child’s native language, the literacy practices for sustaining transnational ties, and the effects of a ‘dual-national perspective’ can shape the trajectory of migrant children’s early language development. In a longitudinal observation study on immigrant families based in the U.S, Sánchez (2007, 258) observes that from a young age, migrant children began to learn their native cultural values as they acquired simple vocabularies in their native languages. In addition to learning culturally specific verbal expressions, children in immigrant households also experience a distinct form of socialization due to the exposure to the sustained cross-border relationship with their native country (Sánchez 2007, 260). The above demonstrates that migrant children’s literacy development is a trajectory that entails a pragmatic purpose for maintaining and sustaining transnational ties with families cross the border, and a symbol of their social and material affiliations with their native countries. The transnational affiliations and linguistic resources provided by the educational institutions in the hosting nation impact the way migrant children negotiate their lives and attitudes towards education. For early sequential bilinguals, contingency learning is another crucial factor that influences children’s motivation to engage in second language learning. Attitude towards bilingualism and feedback from the people within the child’s immediate surroundings, e.g., peers and teachers, can influence children’s motivation and willingness to engage in second language learning (Milne and Clarke 1993, 14). Wan et al. (2012) investigated the role institutional attitude to children’s migratory experience plays in migrant children’s perceptions of schools and education. Wan et al. (2012) found when institutions devalue children’s migratory experience through the lack of representation of children’s native culture and native

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languages, it prompts children to evaluate their experiences in the hosting country negatively and affects their disposition toward schools and education. In contrast, school structures that recognize and support children’s migratory experience, such as bilingual schools and those that give children’s native language a high status in classes and use them in the curriculum, tend to foster a positive attitude towards the school and education (Meier 2010; Rabkin 2018). The findings demonstrate that the linguistic resources and support provided by education institutions have a profound influence on migrant children’s learning experience within these settings, their motivations to engage in second language learning and their perceptions of schools and education.

The Linguistic and Sociocultural Merits of the Bilingual Educational Model This section examines the evidence from meta-analysis on the linguistic improvements that may be produced by effective bilingual early childhood education. It also draws on evidence from state-run German two-way immersion programs1 with a focus on works by Meier (2010), Doyé (1998), and Sandfuchs and Zumhasch (2005) to discuss linguistic and sociocultural merits of German childhood bilingual programs. Children’s proficiency in the language of instruction is crucial for a successful transition to school and later academic success, and promoting bilingual education does not contradict this fact. The common consensus now in bilingual research is that the bilingual educational model assists all children to reach the same language attainment as the children in monolingual programs, with the added benefit of learning another language without negatively affecting other academic or personal achievements (Meier 2010; Reich and Roth 2002; Gogolin and Neumann 2009). While balanced bilingualism may not be a realistic goal for all children enrolled in bilingual educational programs, research nevertheless shows that all children still achieve age-appropriate proficiency in the language of instruction at school at school entry (Meier 2010; Reich and Roth 2002; Söhn 2005). Personal multilingualism has been linked to enhanced executive function (Bialystok and Craik 2010, 20; IluzCohen and Armon-Lotem 2013, 884), cognitive flexibility (Goldfeld et al. 2014, 42), increased metasemiotic and metalinguistic awareness (Bialystok 2011, 229; Kroll et al. 2014, 159) and when combined with professional qualifications, bilingualism also constitutes a valuable asset in an increasingly globalising economy (Heckman and Heckman 2006, 18; Fürstenau 2005, 32). Reich and Roth’s (2002) meta-analysis on the two-way immersion model in Germany, Denmark, and Austria found that native language tuition has a positive effect on the development of children’s native languages and the L2. Similarly, the Grevé et al. 1 Two-way

immersion model (TWI) also known as the bilingual model or dual-language model.

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(2004, 143) study on the Italian–German, Portuguese–German, and Spanish–German bilingual programs in Hamburg, Germany, also demonstrates the development of native language skills supporting migrant children’s acquisition of oral and written skills in German, and there are no significant differences in terms of children’s language achievements between these three bilingual streams. Albeit, Reich and Roth’s (2002) meta-analysis reveals a lack of agreement between the different studies with regards to the extent of the material increase in migrant children’s L2, which is further complicated by the varying types of control groups used when comparing the language achievements between bilingual and monolingual groups. A critical factor for interpreting children’s linguistic outcomes in various bilingual education programs is the duration of the program. According to Cummins (2000, 941), new immigrants, on average, need two years to acquire Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS)2 in a second language, but five to eight years to achieve Cognitive/Academic Language Proficiency (CALP)3 in that second language.’ Systematic reviews should consider important methodological issues such as when the language achievements were measured and whether the control group used as a comparison is appropriately matched on age and language backgrounds. In essence, linguistic outcomes obtained before the recommended five to eight years may not reflect the full potential of bilingual programs and thus should be interpreted with caution. As with all social science research, the progress of bilingual education research is not immune to political influences and the deep-rooted ideological burden. According to Meier (2010, 442), political aims for those who commissioned the study also plays an implicit influence on the research direction and the differential results. For pragmatic reasons, studies that produce either positive or negative findings tend to be more readily adopted than those that yield inclusive findings (Wright 2004). In the European context, contradictory evidence for bilingual education’s function in supporting the development of the majority language fuelled political debates (Söhn 2005). Söhn’s (2005) comparative study focuses specifically on the bilingual education programs in Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. According to this report, the 2004 Dutch Parliamentary Enquiry Commission declared that instruction in the native language, as used in bilingual programs, ‘failed to prove the supporting function’ in the development of the Dutch language,’ which led the Dutch government to abolish native language tuition. It is worth noting that the Dutch-based studies included in Söhn’s (2005) report often share problematic methodology such as a heavy reliance on descriptive data, a lack of adequate statistical analysis, small sample sizes, and high participant drop-out rates (Söhn 2005, 58). In contrast, the Swedish ministerial report concluded that ‘all research points to the fact that mother tongue instruction increases the chances of reaching targets at school,’ which contributed to an increase in the introduction of bilingual programs in Sweden (Söhn 2005, 49). Besides political influence, bilingual programs 2 BICS

describes the development of conversational fluency (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) in the second language (Cummins 1979). 3 Cognitive/Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) describes the use of language in decontextualized academic situations (Cummins 1979).

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are challenged by the deep-seated ideological burden and some educators’ tendency to adhere to the ‘monolingual habitus.’4 For example, a Turkish–German bilingual program in Cologne faced several problems before it could start in 2008 (Heinemann 2008). The first school trial was resisted by school staff on the ground that the school would be labeled a ‘Turkish School,’ which would contradict the aim of enabling migrant assimilation to the dominant culture, and potentially alienate some parents and teachers (Heinemann 2008). Nevertheless, the program was successful when it relocated to a different part of Cologne where 80% of the population had a Turkish background, evidenced by the positive feedback from German parents whose children were enrolled in the program, because, according to the parents, the children were able to utilize their second language skill in the local community (Heinemann 2008). This case study highlighted the ideological burden language can carry and the positive effect the bilingual language model can have on community cohesion. In Germany, bilingual programs can currently be found at 2% of all private or public primary schools (Steinlen 2018, 43). Two-way immersion model (TWI), also known as bilingual, dual-language, partner-language models, is a more intensive type of bilingual model that divides the language of instruction equally between the native language and the majority language with the aim of developing both languages to a high standard (Meier 2010, p. 419; Moin et al. 2011, 1008). The Center for Applied Linguistics (2005) defines TWI as programs that integrate native speakers and speakers of another language, providing instruction in both languages for all students. TWI strives to promote bilingualism and biliteracy, grade-level academic achievement, and positive cross-cultural attitudes and behaviors in all students. The Staatliche Europa-Schule Berlin (SESB) is the largest state-run TWI program in Europe (Doyé 1998, 54). In 2008, SESB catered for approximately 8000 native and migrant students (Meier 2010, 421). SESB programs offer TWI education in German in combination with nine migrant languages that includes English, French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish and Polish (Meier 2010, 421). SESB programs are integrated into the mainstream classes in Berlin’s primary and secondary schools along with other mainstream classes, and are one of the most wellresearched bilingual programs in Germany (Meier 2010, 421; Doyé 1998, 56). Doyé’s (1998) study on the SESB’s German-English, German-French, German-Russian, German-Italian and German-Spanish bilingual streams using a large cohort of native German children and migrant children (n = 317) reveals that all children exhibited a high level of listening comprehension skills and their German was comparable to the age-matched monolingual control groups. The longitudinal study by Kielhöfer (2004) reveals that by Year Six, all children enrolled in SESB’s German and French bilingual stream achieved the Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills and 95% obtained Cognitive/Academic Language Proficiency.

4 The

term ‘monolingual habitus’ was coined by Gogolin (1994), which refers to mainstream schools’ tendency to ignore the evidence that many children in multilingual urban centres speak diverse languages at school entry and yet non-German language backgrounds are effectively seen as a problem.

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Besides these linguistic merits, research show TWI education is positively associated with classroom cohesion and higher student satisfaction with the class community. Using a peace-linguistic framework,5 Meier’s (2010) qualitative study on SESB Berlin program found that the bilingual education approach contributes to greater cohesion in the class community and reduced group fragmentation. According to Meier (2010), students’ self-reports also reveal that the changes elicited by bilingual education differ between the native German group and migrant groups. Compared to the monolingual control group in mainstream schools, German native children enrolled in TWI programs demonstrated increased critical thinking skills and openness towards migrants’ right and duties, whereas migrant children reported a lower level of perceived violence in their class community. Positive intercultural competency and good conflict resolution skills were also observed in the study by Sundfuchs and Zumhasch (2005) on the German-Italian bilingual stream in Wolfsburg. These findings demonstrate that a bilingual education model has the potential to enable all children to achieve the proficiency in the language of instruction at school entry, with the added benefit of acquiring a second language skill and cultivating positive sociocultural development.

Conclusion In Australia, increased dissatisfaction with the existing education systems can also generate a favorable climate for alternative educational programs to formal educational settings (Jones Diaz 2014). Based on the literature reviewed, this section presents several suggestions for Australian policymakers and early childhood educators to establish, maintain and evaluate a national early childhood education bilingual program arising from this literature review. Decades of sustained international research demonstrate that attending early childhood bilingual education programs can assist migrant children with the transition to school by fostering their language, cognitive and sociocultural development (Bialystok 2001; Kenner 2004; Meier 2010; Milne and Clarke 1993; Reich and Roth 2002; Steinlen 2018). Three valuable lessons can be derived from the German bilingual education programs. First, there is no single solution to meet all children’s learning needs; however, in general, educators who work in multilingual preschools should not neglect the importance of teaching, especially in the context of migrant children’s acquisition of the language of instruction. Educators might be required to adjust the curriculum if the child exhibits difficulties in acquiring the language of instruction. For example, educators in the Russian–German bilingual preschool in Frankfurt tailored their pedagogical approaches based on Russian children’s linguistic competency by providing extra German language lessons as a form of early language intervention to assist children who struggled with the German language (Moin et al. 5 Meier’s

(2010) peace-linguistic framework comprises three dimensions: peace education, social capital and critical applied linguistics.

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2011, 101). Second, early bilingual educators need to reflect critically on their pedagogical approaches, professional experience, and insights, because implicit personal attitude and conceptual framework can influence their pedagogical practice. As Moin et al. (2011, 1013) point out, bilingual education is not just about combining two languages in the same institution, but also bringing two pedagogical traditions together. Finally, parental support is crucial to the success of bilingual programs and it can significantly impact children’s progress in school (Orellana et al. 2001; Söhn 2005). Thus, early bilingual programs should collect and incorporate feedback from parents, the local community and local mainstream schools to position themselves as the facilitator for promoting children’s linguistic and sociocultural skills, and preparing them for the transition to school. In order to facilitate migrant children’s language and cultural integration, each State government needs to establish a comprehensive process that defines, promotes, implements and evaluates existing bilingual education programs. It is the primary responsibility of the government to regard bilingual early childhood programs as part of the mainstream education model of early childhood education. That is, every Australian early childhood education institution should incorporate multilingual and multicultural perspectives. Moreover, early childhood education institutions should integrate significant bilingual or multilingual aspects into their programs with the aim of enhancing bilingual children’s community language and their second language. These aspects may include considerations with regards to children’s language background, home language/s, and the type of literacy learning materials or activities that are currently being used by children at home. Kenner (2004) argues that the language environment in which the child lives resembles an ‘eco-system’ where parents, educators, and peers function as an interconnected system that maintains and sustains all aspect of the child’s early literacy learning. Second, early childhood educators need to appreciate that the children’s community language is the foundation of all subsequent language development and therefore, should not be neglected in favor of second language learning. As research demonstrates, the development of children’s native languages and the second language are always intertwined, and bilingual children’s second language ability is supported by the development of native languages. More importantly, however, the native language is more than just an instrument to accelerate L2 learning, it also symbolizes the social and material affiliations with the native country. In this sense, bilingual education programs preserve the minority culture. Currently, most bilingual programs are established solely as the result of the advocacy of immigrant parents who are keen to maintain their heritage language (Meier 2010, 428). Therefore, bilingual early education programs and administrative structures should include parents and members of the local community in the review process to foster a collaborative relationship between educators and parents, and create an avenue for open discussion. As the Turkish–German bilingual program in Cologne, Germany demonstrates, feedback from German parents whose children were enrolled in the bilingual program provided much-needed validation from the majority group for the linguistic and socio-cultural benefits of bilingual programs.

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Finally, bilingual early education institutions should be encouraged to employ bilingual or multilingual staff to enhance the multicultural and bilingual environment in which children learn and socialize. In Ohi O’Mara’s (2018, 3) review of obstacles in intercultural learning in Australian schools, she points out that, too often, educators themselves struggle to achieve a balance between cramped mandatory curriculum, assessment priorities and intercultural learning, which may contribute to some teachers’ limited capacity to relate to migrant children. Thus, initial training regarding working in a multicultural background should be provided to all employees working directly with bilingual children in early childhood education settings upon employment. Furthermore, employees should also undergo further professional development training to enhance knowledge of various acculturation stressors such as children’s language status, so that they can relate to migrant children. Regular review and assessment of all bilingual early childhood programs should incorporate objective measures to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the bilingual early childhood education program, and include subjective evaluation, e.g. parental surveys, regarding children’s experience in the early childhood education programs. Longitudinal follow-ups should be carried out on children who have completed six to eight years of bilingual education to assess the full potential of bilingual education programs. Acknowledgements I would like to express my very great appreciation to Dr Tristan Lay for his guidance and encouragement during the planning phase of the research. I would also like to thank Dr John Hughes for his valuable and constructive suggestions regarding clear and concise writing. His willingness to give his time so generously is very much appreciated. I would also like to extend my thanks to the editors: Dr Benjamin Nickl, Dr Deane Blackler and Dr Stefan Popenici for their encouragement and constructive feedback.

References Australian Early Development Census. 2015. Findings from the AEDC. Accessed December 1, 2018. http://www.aedc.gov.au/early-childhood/findings-from-the-aedc. Baker, C. 2006. Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 4th ed. Clevedon [England]: Multilingual Matters. Bialystok, E. 2001. Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and cognition. Cambridge University Press. Bialystok, E. 2011. Reshaping the mind: the benefits of bilingualism. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale 65 (4): 229. Bialystok, E., and F. Craik. 2010. Cognitive and Linguistic Processing in the Bilingual Mind. Current Directions in Psychological Science 19 (1): 19–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721409358571. Brebner, C., P. McCormack, and S. Rickard Liow. 2016. Marking of Verb Tense in the English of Preschool English-Mandarin Bilingual Children: Evidence from Language Development Profiles within Subgroups on the Singapore English Action Picture Test: Tense Marking in English– Mandarin bilinguals. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 51 (1): 31–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12181. Center for Applied Linguistics. 2005. What Is Two-Way Immersion? Accessed November 10, 2018. http://www.cal.org/topics/ell/immersion/html.

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Ivy Zhou is a Psychology Honours student at the University of Sydney. She holds a Bachelor of Arts with a double major in Germanic Studies and Psychology from the University of Sydney.

Juggling Selves: Navigating Pre-service Teaching Experiences in Overseas Contexts Michiko Weinmann, Rod Neilsen and Isabel Martin

Abstract Global mobility programs for pre-service teachers are an increasingly integral component of many teacher education courses. Research into international teaching programs has shown that student teachers develop intercultural awareness, inclusive teaching practices and flexibility, but global mobility programs can also reinforce cultural stereotypes, neocolonial attitudes and a sense of superiority and entitlement. This chapter presents a comparative analysis of pre-service teachers’ experiences in two mobility programs—a German program undertaken in Laos, and an Australian program in Chile. Such a comparison has two aims: first, to explore and add to current understandings of transnationalism; second, to examine how binary categories of self and other, which are historically constructed and discursively produced, continue to shape intercultural encounters. From this arises the need to support pre-service teachers in finding new ways to engage with the complexity of their experiences, which may lead to a deeper questioning of their identities and the normative conditions that shape their understanding.

Transnational Mobility in Teacher Education As a result of the culturally and linguistically diverse nature of contemporary schooling, the need to prepare teachers as global educators represents a challenging task for teacher educators to engage with (Villegas 2008). The need for the development of intercultural skills for global citizenship is articulated into the requirement for teachers to bring ‘the world into the classroom’ or send ‘students into the world’ M. Weinmann (B) · R. Neilsen Deakin University, Victoria, Australia e-mail: [email protected] R. Neilsen e-mail: [email protected] I. Martin Karlsruhe University of Education, Karlsruhe, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Nickl et al. (eds.), Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2_8

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(Andreotti and de Souza 2012, 1). Global citizenship is defined as a core graduate learning outcome by many Australian and increasingly by German universities. This requirement is commonly translated into partnerships across institutions, study or volunteer abroad programs or the explicit, deliberate promotion and treatment of global issues in the curriculum, which aim to facilitate a deeper understanding of interactions with different linguistic and cultural contexts. If teachers and teacher educators are required to be prepared to teach global citizens for diversity, equity, multiculturalism and social justice, transnational experiences alone cannot make someone a more multicultural, global educator, but this can be achieved with a range of interconnections ‘across identity, power, and experience that lead to consciousness of other perspectives, and a recognition of multiple realities’ (Merryfield 2000, 440). Much research has shown the effects of mobility programs on transnational competencies and has investigated the impact of international field experiences on (pre-service) teachers’ identities (Block 2007; Ellwood 2011; Kinginger 2013; Porsch and Lüling 2017); however, research in this area has failed to engage more deeply with neo-colonial perspectives underpinning international education (Chen 2010; Motha 2014; Zemach-Bersin 2007). It is argued that the reported benefits of global mobility programs have failed to recognise the ways in which ‘the discourse of study abroad surreptitiously reproduces the logic of colonialism, and perpetuates notions of supremacy, entitlement and global expansion’. In this paper, we examine how established discourses of study abroad, defined as a ‘temporary sojourn of pre-defined duration, undertaken for educational purposes’ (Kinginger 2009, 11), are being drawn on in the reflections of participating students. By analysing the ways in which students articulate intercultural professional encounters, the studies described here aim to gain a better understanding of how renegotiation of self and other may or may not take place, and of the underpinning ideologies that shape such encounters. We specifically ask how participating students speak about the ways that international practicum experiences support the development of pedagogy responsive to linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms. In asking this question, we aim to explore how such international experiences promote the interrogation of submerged discourses of neo-colonialism and contribute to the deeper questioning of binaries—expressed not only by the participants, but inherent in the design and delivery of such programs. This comparative study draws on two mobility programs for pre-service teachers: an Australian program in Santiago, Chile, and a German program in Laos. The Republic of Chile is today South America’s most economically and socially stable and prosperous nation. It is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and a founding member of the United Nations. Chile has a literacy rate above 96 per cent, and the common language is Spanish, with Mapuche the most widely spoken indigenous language (Stalker 2010). The Chilean education system is a leader in South America and is divided into public and private; less than 10 per cent of students are enrolled in private schools which tend to offer bilingual education (Mineduc 2018). The Lao People’s Democratic Republic is one of the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDC). The socialist government followed isolationist policies until the

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1990s, following two decades of civil war, and the ‘American’ or ‘Secret War’ (‘Vietnam War’). The only state university was closed between 1975 and 1996. Laos is home to 49 ethnic groups, and only half of the population speak Lao as their first language. In 2016, English was made the official working language of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which Laos joined in 1997 (Stalker 2010).

Program Backgrounds The Australian program was the inaugural 2017 Chile Global Education Program (GEP), coordinated by teacher educators from Deakin University in Melbourne. Deakin offers teaching placements in several destinations in Asia, Europe and the Americas to teacher education students (pre-service teachers, or PSTs) who elect to undertake one of their mandatory teaching practica overseas. Around half the Australian group was also enrolled in an elective course unit designed with GEPs in mind: ‘Teaching in a Global World’. The unit explores issues such as internationalisation, social justice and human rights, identity and cultural diversity, peacebuilding and conflict resolution, and sustainable futures. Students are encouraged to research and develop resources and teaching approaches that respond to diverse learning needs, which may develop their skills as reflective practitioners. Weekly reflection sessions and focus group interviews in the last week are organised to provide a space for sharing and guided reflection for the participants throughout the program. The Australian students who went to Chile were mostly primary education PSTs, along with four secondary PSTs whose specialisations included Mathematics, Health and Physical Education, and Science. As none had a language pedagogy specialisation, pre-departure workshops were provided in basic TESOL principles and also in some basic Spanish. In most Deakin GEP destinations, visiting students tend to be placed in English language classes, reflecting the schools’ preference for making use of native speakers. The program in Chile was facilitated in-country by professional and academic staff from La Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez (Silva Henriquez Catholic University, or UCSH) in Santiago. Three-week placements were arranged at a mix of public and private schools, so that the Australian PSTs could experience teaching and learning environments in different cultural and socio-economic contexts. Ten local Chilean English-language PSTs were recruited as ‘buddies’ for the program. With the aim of enhancing both groups’ level of engagement, pre-program interaction began through structured and independent activities via social media. These activities included paired interviewing on topics relating to study and social life, and then introducing their peer to the rest of the group. During the program, the Australian students also attended basic Spanish language classes provided by the local university. Reflection sessions and talks on the Chilean education system were also included in the program. The Chilean buddies initially accompanied the Australian students to some of the placement schools in order to mediate any language difficulties, and both groups participated in excursions

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and social activities organised by the host university. The Australian students were expected to teach up to 10 hours per week, observe other lessons, and generally contribute to the daily life of the school—including extra-curricular activities. They were assigned mentor teachers who guided their lesson activities according to the local curriculum and who were requested to write reports about them at the end of the program. The two accompanying coordinators from Deakin were language specialists, and were proficient in Spanish. They visited the schools and informally observed at least one lesson for each PST.

Laos Program Background The program, ‘The Laos Experience: Bi-directional learning and teaching’ was initiated in 2015 by Karlsruhe University of Education (Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe, or ‘PH’) and the German foundation Angels for Children. The PH program is run twice yearly, for two months in spring and three to five months in winter. Participating students prepare extensively before the program for their various teaching assignments at one pre-school, two primary schools, one secondary school, and one technical college. In each program, 10 German students and graduates work in tandem with Lao teacher-partners, with the aim of supporting and improving teacher education in Laos, especially in English, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics. The aim is for the German students to develop transcultural competencies in the process, by engaging in pedagogical dialogue with the local partners and navigating life, work and education situations that are very distinct from the German context. There is no common language at the outset. Although the German students have high competence in English (C1) (as defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), proficiency is generally low (A1–A2), or non-existent, among the Lao teachers. Communication initially takes place through gesture, lesson modelling—even via Google Translate. One English lesson is taught to the local teachers every day, so communicative proficiency in English develops to support communication between the partner organisations. The learning process is bi-directional, as the Lao teachers guide their German tandem-partners through similar learning stages regarding their own confrontation with an overwhelmingly unknown setting and culture. This process paves the way to cooperation in tandems, and it challenges the German team in ways that can be translated back into a German education context, with heightened reflectiveness about their hitherto unchallenged ‘Western’ values. This process is intended to create a safe learning environment in which mutual trust can grow and challenges can be met. Gradually, modern teaching approaches, materials and strategies are tried out to develop more effective ways of teaching and communicative learning in the Lao classrooms; however, this requires that the volunteers recognise and transform their own Eurocentric ideas about education through exchange with their tandem-partners, and in their reflections and weekly reports, with feedback from the educator.

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The bi-directional approach is structured as a system of multipliers on four different levels of teaching and learning, which are continually interlinked. It is continuously being developed and improved, and governed by the principle that ‘teaching’ means studying and providing the conditions in which a particular group of learners can learn. The ‘tandems’ build a working relationship together through the four interrelated domains of pre-project work, daily teaching, special workshops and tasks, and post-project work. These domains include, for example, the development of language skills through daily one-hour English lessons; development of teaching skills through job-shadowing, team-teaching, feedback loops, and joint lesson preparation; customised workshops on relevant topics and practical help with new material; introduction of new teaching equipment and digital media; modernisation of libraries and book donations; modelled teaching in ‘Activity time’ and in various new ‘English clubs’, focusing on oral communication (one hour each day). These are also attended by the Lao tandem-teachers, who are encouraged to join and then take over. Special responsibilities are allocated within the program—such as media manager, blog manager and librarian—and classrooms are dedicated to the didactic development of various school subjects. Teacher educators supported the German teams via Skype and email, and visited the site at least once. The participants were encouraged to reflect critically on their experiences through seminars and academic assessments, thus achieving vital and diverse insights into their own Eurocentric preconceptions when engaging with the Lao people, their education and political systems, Buddhist culture, and extreme poverty. Research projects linked to the program are also emerging at graduate and postgraduate levels in Germany, and reports about the project work are continuously published on the project blog (see Martin and Zeck 2015) to guarantee transparency to stakeholders and make visible the goals and experiences of both the German and Lao participants (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Transnational teacher mobility training program overview. Source Martin

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The Role and Significance of Overseas Teaching Mobility Programs Overseas teaching programs have been viewed as opportunities for PSTs to reflect on their own pedagogies and gain practical teaching experience that enhances their professional learning. They may take the form of a teaching practicum, where the emphasis is on students applying their developing pedagogical expertise in a different context, under the guidance of academic mentors, as in the Chile program, or they can be seen as ‘internships’, of longer duration, where the emphasis is on the questioning and transforming of a student’s own learning as a mentor of others, as in the Lao program. Many studies have examined how overseas programs can enhance learners’ intercultural competence (Fuller 2007; Regan 1995; Regan, Howard and Lemée 2009). Other studies have looked at the impacts of such experiences on the construction of PSTs’ personal and professional identities (Block 2007; Ellwood 2011; Kinginger 2013). A systematic analysis of research conducted in this area found that although intercultural learning opportunities in study abroad programs can shift participants’ perspectives of the destination country, it also identified limitations in the scope of such programs to engage with the complexity of multicultural encounters more comprehensively (Castro 2010). Smolcic and Katunich (2017) discuss three central elements that can significantly impact PSTs’ readiness to face intercultural spaces. The first element relates to pedagogical instances and, more specifically, to courses that promote equity and diversitywith clear, direct linkages to school-based fieldwork. The second element deals with the actual development of conceptual foundations and skills of culturally responsive pedagogy which are supported and promoted by different school stakeholders whose vision about diversity is unanimously shared in the school community. The third element concerns practical knowledge, skills and capabilities vested in culture, which can support successful interactions in intercultural contexts. Previous studies have emphasised the importance of engagement with the language, culture and context of the host country or organisation in order to develop intercultural knowledge and capabilities that go beyond the superficial. We suggest that a fourth element is a vital component to PSTs’ readiness to face intercultural spaces: support from remote and accompanying mentors and coordinators, both during the program and on ‘re-entry’ to the home context. Research has also acknowledged the complexity of identity shifts occurring within such overseas programs. The concept of imagined identity, as those ideal selves we wish to become in the future or those we avoid becoming (Benson et al. 2013), provides a space for the exploration of how learners position themselves and are positioned by peers, mentors and their practicum students. A study by Tangen et al. (2017) of a group of PSTs’ perceptions of their imagined identities in a short-term study abroad program revealed that they displayed enhanced cultural awareness. The program included 10 Australian PSTs from an Australian university and 12 Malaysian students who were studying to become teachers of English. A central

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focus of the study was the pairing (or ‘buddy system’) of students from both participating institutions, which the authors considered a cornerstone of the mobility program. Some of the benefits of the buddy system, as reported by the participants, included: (i) friendship formation; (ii) depth of intercultural skills; (iii) opportunities to resolve possible incidents of cultural clashes. In general, both Australian and Malaysian participants recognised the personal, cultural and professional value of the pairing system. This is an illustration of the positive impact on developing attitudes and dispositions towards cultural sensitivity, cultural identity and global citizenship (Campbell and Walta 2015) and how the experience may shape participants’ personal and professional beliefs and pedagogical practices (Maynes et al. 2012).

Re-examining the Discourses of Transnational Education in the Globalised World Global mobility programs are embedded within discourses of postcolonialism, ‘a highly contested political and theoretical rethinking of knowledge and social identities authored and authorised by colonialism and western domination’ (Prakash 1994, 1475). Postcolonialism has also been criticised for its complicity with the structures of globalisation (Appadurai 2002, 2013). Chen (2010) points to the necessity of interrogating and shifting the binaries still present in postcolonial perspectives, arguing that such re-theorisation is key in resuming the tasks of the intellectual and subjective task of decolonisation. This approach has been taken up by Lavia and Mahlomaholo (2012) who have pointed to the need to push the boundaries of postcolonial thought by seeking wider and more varied interpretations of how historical circumstance intersects with contemporary conditions of globalisation and neoliberalism. Such attempts, they argue, will expand the discourse and possibly define the next steps towards actioning theories of decolonisation. The enterprise of teaching and learning as a cornerstone of social transformation is central to these discussions. The processes involved in ‘[l]earning, unlearning and relearning, therefore, take place within a culture of difference, imagined as a collective sense of ourselves, and providing coherence between ideas and action’ (Lavia and Mahlomaholo 2012, 256), which ‘provide a basis for the content of social relationships and the creation of categories within which to understand the world around us’ (Rizvi 2000, 223, cited in Lavia and Mahlomaholo 2012). Transnational, transcultural pedagogical programs create a powerful space for neo-colonial preconceptions to be set against moments of discovery that unveil the limitations of established parameters that define our sense of self within ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991; Weinmann 2015), yet the host communities are a key part of the transformation process, and no dissolution of binaries can take place unless we engage with the complexities that continue to shape and position perspectives of self and other. A more complex understanding of identity and difference can reshape teacher practice and contribute to becoming more cognisant of the raced,

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classed and gendered binaries inherent in society and education. Our identities as teachers—and the experiences that form them—are realised in our teaching and have profound effects on it, yet they often remain unexamined. For example, being aware of our sense of privilege or cultural biases can be a useful if superficial initial stage. When interrogating how our experiences shape our practices on a deeper level, any discomfort experienced in such self-questioning is a dynamic pedagogical tool to facilitate a transition from reflection to action (Bohler and Zembylas 2003; Zembylas and Papamichael 2017). As Motha (2014, 133) argues, when teachers ‘are adequately prepared to examine their worlds critically, they are in a better position to advocate for their students and to teach their students to advocate for themselves’. While studies so far suggest that the development of critical self-reflection is seen as an outcome of mobility programs, we would argue there is significant scope in the structure of such programs to encourage PSTs to engage more critically in the implications of these experiences for their future practice. Examples presented and analysed in this study attempt to do this through the vehicle of sense-making. The vignettes aim to tease out the disconnect between the program participants’ descriptive observations of a society, culture and education system that is new to them, and the limitations in using these insights as a catalyst for introspection, if not further prompted. Making sense of such a disjunct may lead to a deeper questioning of their identities and the normative conditions that shape their understanding of the needs of their students and of what constitutes ‘good’ educational practice.

Making Sense of the Experience: Methodological Perspectives The methodological framework used in the studies discussed here is sense-making, a process that ‘emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs’ (Weick 1993, 635). Understood as an interpretive framework of experience, sense-making has been widely used in education (e.g. Bradford and Braaten 2018; Gallant and Riley 2017; Kelchtermans 2009) as a mechanism to explore and better understand how (pre-service) teachers make sense of their profession, social and political school contexts, and of the various factors that contribute to their becoming teachers. A community of practice approach was used, for example, in Bradford and Braaten’s (2018) study, as a framework to explore how teachers interpret school contexts and understand their positioning within these and the profession as a whole. In the cases analysed here, the development of professional identity through encounters with intercultural complexity is mediated through language and communication (Weick 1995). Environments in which research participants are also social participants are enacted through their narrative accounts which are retrospective and ongoing. In the interpretive process, cues are extracted to determine the relevance of information and the acceptability of explanations, for which both plausibility and

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accuracy of the reported accounts are drawn on (Abolafia 2010; Brown 2005; Currie and Brown 2003). The ‘embedded truths’ (Gallant and Riley 2017) in the PSTs’ accounts of their experiences were therefore revealed through their narratives, using Kelchtermans’ (2009) personal interpretive framework (PIF) analysis tool. PIF is a tool used to capture how teachers interpret the complexity of their role, and how they position themselves. The process of engaging in reflection in narrative accounts of sense-making involves risk (as deeply held beliefs are questioned) and vulnerability (Kelchtermans 2005) as fundamental characteristics of teaching, made up of three elements: lack of control over working conditions; the realisation of the unequal relationship between teaching and educational outcomes; lacking power and a firm base for decision-making. The elements of risk and vulnerability inherent in overseas experiences—and which have the potential for transformation—are reflected in the following themes, which emerged from some of our data. • Making sense of the unfamiliar: environmental, cultural and language-related aspects, school and classroom contexts, interactions with local students and teachers. • Making sense of the overall experience: end-of-program reflections on ‘take home’ elements of the program, which include professional and (inter)cultural and personal aspects; reflections from a returning-home perspective. • Making sense of self: reflections on how and in what ways the program was able to transform PSTs’ sense of identity.

Method: Participants, Methods and Data Analysis Both projects discussed in this chapter are qualitative, small-scale case studies. The participants in the Chile experience were five third-year Australian PSTs in their early twenties from Deakin University, participating in the Santiago GEP. Three focus groups of approximately one hour were held in the final week of the program with the two accompanying academic coordinators. Discussions were held around their experiences of difference in the schools and local curriculum, and around what they had gained from the experience overall. The focus group discussions with the students included eight open-ended questions that broadly tapped into students’ pedagogical, social and cultural experiences, their views on the benefits and challenges of the buddy system, and the implications for their pedagogy and practice. For the Laos program, data were collected through individual interviews across two groups: returnees (7) and outgoing participants (10). Data from 43 written final reports since 2015 and previous weekly reports describing program and tandem experiences were also selected for analysis. The participants were of different ages and at different stages of study, and had different special tasks during the program. They also differed in their previous experiences abroad: some had never been abroad,

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while others had lived in another country (typically English-speaking) for up to three years. The volunteers were between 20 and 28 years old. The youngest was a student in the second semester, while the oldest had just finished university level studies. Excerpts from the narratives here are limited to the stated foci on the experience of difference, and pseudonyms are used for the selected participants. Making Sense of the Unfamiliar Both initial reactions and later reflections from both groups reveal the nature of PSTs’ encounters with cultural complexity, although the two contexts are markedly different. Laos seemed altogether alien and exotic to the PSTs. Germany and Laos were: so opposite, very culturally distant, the food, the people, the coffee … nobody could imagine a family sitting outside of the house cooking on an open fire. (Verena) Laos is so different, they [people in Germany] don’t even know it exists. (Silvia)

Many German volunteers commented on the tangibility of cultural difference in Laos, such as food, clothing, the urban landscape, difference in social values and ways of communication, differences in the private sphere of friends and family, and views on the world. Some participants tried to access the discourse community, which was perceived as ‘difficult’, by copying gestures from Lao women, and trying to learn a little Lao (Verena). This experience is accompanied by the unsettling realisation of illiteracy: road signs are in a different alphabet and not always translated; some streets—and even people—have no names. Many participants reported that they experienced ‘foreignness’ for the first time when local people stared at them, and, at times, scared children ran away from them. Such palpable contrasts were commented on as creating a ‘simulated experience’, which PSTs felt helped them to empathise with students in multi-ethnic German classrooms, because one knows now how the children must feel (Verena). By contrast, in the Santiago experience, the initial impression for many was of a Western city with many points of comparison with the PSTs’ home city of Melbourne, such as climate, size and a sophisticated transport system. One point of difference noted was the vibrancy of the city and the people, which was reported as simultaneously exhilarating and discomforting: Yeah, everyone’s really nice, and sometimes it’s maybe a little bit too over the top nice, compared to what we’re used to. (Leah)

The Australian students are drawn to ‘comparing’ when cultural distance seems initially close, and the focus is on ways of behaving. A phrase such as over the top nice lacks an appreciative connotation, as it implies that it is somewhat exhausting to engage with local people; it is unsettling because it contrasts with what the PSTs are ‘used to’. For the visitors, the known and normalised remain the default. They are in the minority in the host country and are as yet unfamiliar with its own defaults, so comparison appears to be the most common way of making sense of the experiences. Reflecting on their practica, they also tended to talk about school environments and practices as comparisons with ‘home’:

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Safety was one [thing] that I found is huge in Australia and not so much here … They [the students in the school] were dancing on the tables. They were jumping on the tables and I’m—what is going on? This has OH&S [Occupational Health and Safety] written all over it. (Maddy)

Such comparisons imply how fortunate ‘we’ are. The apparent ‘lack of control’ in a Chilean public school—although the coordinators observed good levels of behaviour compared to some Australian schools—is linked by Maddy to comments about the inefficacy of learning spaces: They don’t have any floor space, and there’s a lot of them packed into one small room. So we’re very fortunate in Australia to have such flexible learning spaces, whereas here—they’ve got their little desk and that’s kind of it. (Maddy)

In Laos, by contrast, the usual total control by the ‘elder’ (teacher) and collective submissive behaviour on part of the 40–60 students in one classroom rendered more open and communicative forms of teaching difficult at first. This was the case until the advantages of teacher–student exchanges modelled by the volunteers gradually became attractive to both parties. Permission for this had to be first obtained from the school authorities, who then visited lessons and interviewed teachers to check whether students’ ‘new ways’ were still in alignment with party politics. Several PSTs reflected on links between classroom layout and communication and learning styles, although their level of Spanish was limited, with the majority of participants not having any Spanish language skills. The perceived excess of classroom talk led Leah to assume that the talk was uncontrolled, and she links flexible learning spaces with ‘good classroom talk’ whereas rigid desk arrangements were seen as not facilitating collaborative communication, as: the classrooms are quite noisy here, and they [the students] talk so much, I feel they could benefit so much from incorporating maybe some collaborative learning in with that talk. (Leah)

Certain assumptions seemed to cloud or exclude what they could not comment on, as their Spanish was not at a level to ascertain whether Chilean schoolchildren were sharing their learning experiences or not. Developing awareness of language issues was discussed by several; the need for making sense literally, through language, was an obvious yet significant realisation during the program. Some Chilean buddies (whose English was proficient) gently pointed out to the visitors that English was not understood all around the world. Most of the Australian students had travelled to countries in Asia or Europe as tourists, where they perceived communication in English (in a tourism context) generally as less of a problem, but participants in both the Chile and the Laos programs felt that their lack of proficiency in the local language significantly limited the possibilities of ‘linguistically mediated membership into a discourse community that is both real and imagined’ (Kramsch 1995). This limitation, we would argue, appeared to offset initial presumptions of knowledge and understanding of classroom dynamics and teacher–student relations. While earlier comments appear to express how ‘we’ bring more advanced pedagogical approaches to ‘them’, the acknowledgement of linguistic limitations by the participants appeared

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to prompt critical reflection in the later stages of the program. In some instances, this shifted the PSTs’ stances towards a decentring of their localised assumptions, and an emerging acknowledgement of the connection between proficiency in the local language and a deeper intercultural understanding. Both Maddy’s and Leah’s comments centre on comparing different systems, pedagogies and teaching styles in the two different contexts. The way they make sense of their observations is by pitching the familiar (Australian classrooms, teaching, ‘us’) versus the unknown (Chile, ‘them’). There is an unarticulated conviction that the Australian system is superior, and that ‘they’ would benefit from what is considered a more sophisticated approach. There is little reflection about what the implications of these observations are for their own learning and professional practice. In the case of Laos, the exoticism is upfront and, although bewildering, the ‘easygoing’ local environment becomes something they miss on their return home—the familiar actually becomes stressful back in Germany, as several PSTs commented. The experiences in the two programs foreground the differences in the respective contexts, yet they also reflect the stated aims and designs of the programs. In the Australian GEPs, the PSTs are expected to engage with difference in unstructured ways; in the absence of experience of other contexts, they have little choice but to apply pedagogical knowledge learned in their study contexts almost as unquestioned best practice. In the internship in Laos, structured engagement with cultural difference is better integrated through a stated focus on co-learning with the ‘other’, which is intended to foster deeper questioning of and reflection on Eurocentric ways of being and behaving. Once again, the analysis we are presenting raises questions regarding the gaps or disjuncts inherent in the formulated objectives of such programs such as the development of intercultural awareness and context-sensitive pedagogies. There persists an absence of deeper questioning of the ‘portability’ of pedagogical knowledge and practice, and engagement with the complexities around discourses of ‘first-world’ views of latent patriarchy and supremacy, through which a more nuanced professional identity can be forged. Such observations must challenge the assumptions and expectations that universities involved in such programs have about the mutual benefits of mobility programs for local and visiting teachers. We argue that there continue to be blind spots in both the PSTs’ emerging identities as ‘global’ teachers, as well as in the ways in which universities frame, position and run their international programs, in particular in the local perspectives from which program goals and outcomes are formulated. Making Sense of the Overall Experience The research literature on teacher mobility programs and intercultural exchanges, and on teacher professional development in general, reveals many reports of ‘moments of disruption’ that refer to ‘incidents which have altered participants’ worldviews, and modified their attitudes towards the culture–language nexus they assumed they were representing and embodying’ at the commencement of programs (Neilsen 2011, 18). Institutional learning outcomes often refer specifically to the role of professional and personal transformation or growth. Such disruptions may result in bewilderment and

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inconsistencies in articulations of the experience on the part of the participants—yet they are often an expected part of the process. At the end of the Chile experience, Chris summed up his insights: I guess the one thing that I’m going to take away from this is try and teach [to] the best of your ability, even when it’s [a] culture that isn’t your own. You can always find a way, I suppose, to reach out and teach them a bit about the world, a bit about themselves, and they can put the pieces together. (Chris)

Chris’s comment on his developing professional stance suggests that in the end ‘we’re all the same’ despite our ‘differences’. While such a conclusion suggests an appreciation of a ‘shared humanity’, it ‘equalises’ diverse students and classrooms to an unspecified, generic context and student body. In the end, such a conclusion almost appears like an ‘escape’ from deeper reflection and discussion, which would require more far-reaching questioning of his identity and practice. In a sense, the emphasis on inclusivity in Australian teacher education may still silence the voices of the ‘other’ and lead to a form of whitewashing. There is a need to interrogate such recurring assumptions of implicit power inequalities more deeply, for PSTs through better support in critical questioning and reflection by their mentors and teachereducators, and also by program coordinators who play a central role in implementing the universities’ international program objectives (Dotson 2011; Spivak 1998; Reitman 2006). Participants in both groups acknowledged the potentially life-changing value of the programs, and several commented that they would repeat it, if they had the opportunity (which is a possibility for the German program); however, from the PSTs’ perspective, the programs were validated principally through their own sense of achievement. In an echo of Chris’s earlier comments, Verena—who had been on two programs—expressed her satisfaction in this way: ... now I see the learners’ progress and it makes me happy, to see that you can really do something by your own teaching. I could not believe to have been part of such a meaningful project that makes a profound difference to the tandem partners and their students’ lives and learning, also expressed [for me] a sense of self-worth as doing something in the world. (Verena)

Verena’s use of the trope of doing something in the world reiterates recurring themes that emerged in our analysis. It raises deeper questions about the positioning of the person who is afforded the material and intellectual means to pursue their desire to effect change elsewhere, and about the unidirectionality of many mobility programs which often involve only one party as the geographically mobile one. The intention of doing something in the world is strongly connected to the emancipatory departure of the Bildungsbürger (or middle-class intellectual) from their home, in order ‘to go out into the world’, and to return as a ‘better’ person who has gained a new sense of understanding of the world they live in. This brings to the fore an implicit conceptualisation of mobility primarily as movement across geographical and cultural spaces, both real and imagined (Massey 2005). The described feeling of accomplishment of doing something in the world may be frustrated on the return home. For some of the Laos participants, slipping back

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into the ‘normal’ after experiencing the ‘different’ caused conflicting emotions with the realisation that such experiences are hard to share, as Silvia found: I made this movie for my family and friends. After two or three times I got bored by people’s reactions; they were always the same. ‘Nice pictures’, like watching TV. Shock is a big word. But it shocked me that some people didn’t ask any questions. And it also shocked me how easily [I slipped back into my German life] as if I had never left. (Silvia)

Silvia expressed initial unhappiness at leaving Laos’s minimalism and living and working spontaneously but this phase was apparently of short duration, as the pressures of courses to catch up on and exams to prepare for hindered a more reflective post-phase, and the feeling of having a full agenda again appeared to give her security. Silvia rationalises the problematic nature of developing reflective understanding of the experience, and of exactly what kind of transformations may have taken place, when the familiar home context comes crowding in: It’s not gone—you just can’t share it. The experiences are powerful but increasingly distant. For many PSTs, an identification with the location is a way of maintaining connections and understandings: The second time, I went ‘There was my village’. I started crying—it was like coming home. (Verena; emphasis added)

Verena’s notion of ‘doing something in the world’ and Silvia’s slipping back into both imply the possibility that the reflection and discoveries that were made as part of the program were bound to the space and place where her experience took place. While the experience of an initial displacement can be transformative in exactly the ways they describe—if transformation is predominantly seen as connected to geographical shifts—this understanding presents questions about the availability, sustainability and fleetingness of the transformative insights outside the ‘foreign’ context. This is illustrated in many of the Laos program participants’ need to hang on to the experience, by volunteering their time for project work at the PH, or organising regular post-program ‘meet-ups’ to continue to make sense of the experience and to ‘keep it alive’. This highlights the need to rethink the geographical, intercultural and professional imaginaries (Massey 2005) that are brought to such overseas experiences, and how such a rethinking might shift our sense of contribution and responsibility as members of a shared internationalisation experience. For many participants in the Laos program, the realisation that the experience has advanced them considerably personally and professionally can lead to a new sense of the impact of their work more globally. Teachers in Germany teach in an education context that is regulated by set systems and prescribed curricula, providing little freedom to effect change. In Laos, the participants observe the immediate impact of their collaborative work. From this experience of unexpected ‘power’ to be transformed, a new understanding of global justice emerges, and a sense of personal responsibility for it. The common reportings from both groups on the perceived gains in intercultural understanding from mobility programs are well documented in the research (e.g. Kinginger 2013). Common findings have confirmed the benefits of negotiated

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communication for intercultural understanding and awareness of difference: you understand things afterwards (Verena). What is less documented is how the overall experience may prompt continual questioning of assumptions based on visible and invisible power structures: to manage situations that don’t work—[and not] give up that fast—question yourself (Silvia). We commented earlier that a common thread among the participants’ reflections was that transformations had taken place—but the corresponding gains in understanding may be initially expressed in vague or superficial terms. Students across both programs referred to the little everyday things, or how many small things are necessary to reach one goal (Silvia). At the end of the Chile program, Lachlan referred to the little things on both social and professional levels: So like just little things like that … [and] I live out of home [in Australia] but living with people around my age you just kind of grow as a person and, like, learn more about yourself, especially being in a Third World country—not Third World but, like, in a different country. (Lachlan)

The ‘home cocoon’ of a community of emerging professional peers living together in the group provides an initial coping strategy in ‘a Third World but not Third World country’. Lachlan’s ‘little things’ also referred to his growing awareness of different ways of communicating with different people. He commented that he had to use gestures, pictures or other means in class, reflecting that this negotiation of communication in the face of language limitations—both his own and his students’— can have more direct results than spoken language, and he compares this with his teaching placements in Australia where this realisation did not take place because of speaking the same language. It is, then, maybe the ‘little things’ that combine to create new self-identifications, which is the subject of the next section. Making Sense of Self As outlined earlier, exploring the immediate experiences of being in different contexts, whether the more ‘exotic’ and culturally distant Laos or the closer cultural context of Santiago, represented a key stage for the participants in both programs. The comments by both the Australian and German PSTs suggest that the realisation of one’s limitations in language and communication was experienced as challenging and, at times, unsettling. As illustrated in some of the selected quotes earlier, this caused the Australian PSTs in particular to make inconsistent observations regarding language use, especially regarding teacher and student interactions in the classroom; however, the PSTs saw immediately the value of using even a limited range of expression in the other language that they acquired through the beginner Spanish language classes provided by UCSH. Reactions to this use, ‘shot through with intentions and accents’ (Bakhtin 1981, p. 324), were well received by their Chilean peers and mentors, and reactions from children in primary classes were enthusiastic: I went into school the first day and I said: ‘I don’t speak any Spanish’. Then I went back a week later, and I said ‘Hello’ in Spanish, and I asked them how they were, and they looked at me and starting speaking full Spanish. And I was like, ‘No, that’s all I know.’ They thought magically in a week I’d picked up Spanish. (Maddy)

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Yeah, it’s so nice. (Leah)

Maddy’s quotation suggests an emerging insight about something that seems obvious: the centrality of language and culture in ‘communicating’ with people who speak another language and whose first language is not English; however, there is an underlying assumption of the Anglophone world as the default position. The students’ excitement about the Australian PSTs’ ability to speak a few words of Spanish is seen as a validation of themselves—they have ‘made an effort’ to respond to the new environment. Leah’s response to Maddy, Yeah, it’s so nice, seems to reaffirm this sense of accomplishment. There is no deeper engagement with the complexity of language, communication and language learning at this point in the conversation, and no acknowledgement or appreciation of the long-term commitment that their primary-aged students would have to bring to learning English. Overall, there is little sense of an ‘unsettling’ and shifting of Maddy and Leah’s stance as speakers of a ‘global’ language towards a more reflective understanding of their privilege, a deeper engagement of what the children’s response tells them about how their students see them, and how they might need to engage with these responses to develop a better sense of how these interactions might shape the learning experiences they create for their students. When asked about what they had learnt ‘about themselves’ through their experience in Laos, the German participants shared a broad range of insights: Not being stressed so quickly, to first think about people and then act, trying to be patient, you can manage things even without many resources. (Verena) I got to know some negative characteristics of my own. I judged [tandem-partner] in the beginning (quiet, poor English), in the end she was my friend, still texts me about her lessons sometimes. (Silvia) I am able to live with very little and that’s good. Everything I did was an enrichment to my personal life. Even the bad things are good in the end because you learn [other ways, to cope]. (Silvia)

While these responses consider different aspects of the experience, they do not provide highly individualised responses. In fact, the learning experiences that were identified by the three students quoted have been well documented in the literature as frequently reported outcomes of student mobility programs (Smolcic and Katunich 2017). Similar to Maddy and Leah’s conversation earlier, while these observations are important and valuable, a stronger progression towards deeper self-reflection, and a deeper questioning about what actions these insights could generate in the PSTs’ practice, and in their sense of understanding and being in the world, are missing from these comments. An emerging sense of the discomfort that some of the experiences trigger—and how these impact on participants’ senses of self—is expressed in Verena’s summary of her experience of the Laos program: There was always a cultural distance but I tried to be open or sometimes adapt—it’s very difficult to talk about it; there are two of me. (Verena)

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The acknowledgement of how difficult it is, in hindsight, to make sense of the experience reflects a shift that relates the experience more closely to oneself and does not focus on observations and comparisons that allow oneself to stay in the position of an observer. The expression used to describe this dilemma—the notion of being two different people in one person—allows Verena to assign a powerful metaphor to make sense of an experience involving two contexts she perceives as separate and disconnected. A final comment from Lachlan brings together many of the experiences discussed earlier. He describes the environment in Santiago, the challenges and creative opportunities for communicating in limited English and Spanish, and the uniqueness of an encounter with street circus performers in a local park: I love adventure and walking around the streets. Like learning different flavours, like talking to different people. I walked to the park and the circus is there, and we joined them tightroping. Little experiences like that that you just wouldn’t get anywhere—not in the suburbs in Melbourne. They don’t know English and you don’t know Spanish, but you somehow conjure up a conversation; they were teaching us juggling and we didn’t know [Spanish]—you just learn [in] different ways. (Lachlan)

There is an element of ‘tourist talk’ at the beginning (adventure; different flavours) that leaves Lachlan in the experience as the comfortable, outsider observer; however, the personal encounter with Chilean street artists brings about a realisation that communication beyond language barriers is possible, and that through flexibility and the sense of a shared humanity—a notion expressed earlier by Chris—communication and ‘learning’ can happen in different ways. For primary education PSTs who teach a highly integrated curriculum, this may seem an obvious insight, but it also reflects their acknowledgment that they are in fact honorary visitors to a language and discourse community (Kramsch 1995) of which they had hitherto hardly been aware. The circus experience and the transformative shifts it seems to have brought about for Lachlan—allowing him to realise what such ‘little’ (out-of-classroom) encounters can do to shift perspectives and enfranchise other dimensions of his professional identity—serve as a powerful metaphor for international mobility programs, and the ways in which the participants navigate their experiences. It conjures up the image of a series of ‘carnivalesque’ moments and encounters (Bakhtin 1981), when the ‘normal’ is substituted by the unusual and novel, when a situation is created: ... in which diverse voices are heard and interact, breaking down conventions and enabling genuine dialogue. It creates the chance for a new perspective and a new order of things, by showing the relative nature of all that exists. (Robinson 2011)

Traditional forms of carnival, paralleled here in Lachlan’s actual experience of street entertainers in Santiago, may actuate the destabilisation or reversal of power structures, albeit temporarily. Ways of coping with disruptions to ‘normal’ experiences of working and being, as we have illustrated in these sections, led program participants to compare difference, often unequally, with a tacit assumption that ‘our’ ways ought to be ‘better’.

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These assumptions are also inherent in the designs of the programs themselves and the study units connected to them. In many cases, the framing of overseas PST programs through the terminology used in program descriptions, as well as in program and university graduate learning outcomes, are shaped by binaries of a ‘dominant’ norm versus a faraway and foreign ‘other’. As our discussions have tried to illustrate, there are moments and encounters in which the intellectual dissolution of such binaries starts to emerge by a noticing and an engagement with a developing sense of hybrid identities, of the program participants themselves and the teachers, students, colleagues and peers they interact with in their programs; however, these ‘alternative’ insights can sometimes lead to lapses back into making sense of the experience through ‘hegemonic’ parameters that offer more comfortable familiarity, unless further scaffolding allows deeper reflection and articulation of the complexities encountered in-country and upon re-entry. While new perspectives are being created, a further embracing of ambiguity and subversion is needed to attain ‘equal dialogic status’ (Bakhtin 1981).

Conclusion If significant transformations are to result from PST mobility programs, we argue that it is the transition space or the ‘in betweenness’ (Urry 2007, 39) that is of interest. Mobile educators negotiate their globalised lives within the expanding markets of international education, and the assumption is that new expert forms of knowledge will emerge as a result of mobility (Urry 2007, 53). We have attempted to show that the objective of developing teacher expertise that is well placed to respond to the diversity of globalised classrooms involves a complex engagement and reconfiguration of identity, pedagogy and practice in contexts shaped by different economic, social, and political relations. We have argued that the deconstruction of binaries is key, and that such a process requires mutual in-depth engagement with the program partners, and with self and identity. This has implications for the design of global mobility programs and the role of supporting courses, units, seminars and academic coordinators, whose role implies bridging the gap between ‘the familiar’ and ‘the unfamiliar’ that participants are expected to experience, and ‘manage’, during their program. Academic coordinator participation, engagement and leadership have been found to be central to students’ welfare, familiarity with logistical aspects of the program, and formal and informal matters relating to the academic side of the program (Goode 2008); however, the expectation that program leaders are better equipped to navigate the complexities of the program experience downplays the fact that faculty members and universities themselves are part of globalised institutional structures that continue to (re)produce binaries and hierarchies. At the same time, the discovery by PSTs that educational processes, teaching materials and goals used in the home context may be unsuited to the local partners for linguistic and cultural reasons necessitates a more selfcritical examination of our own practice and neo-colonial assumptions underpinning

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our programs. Further refinement of the programs would entail the customisation of teaching approaches, methods and materials, in collaboration with the program partners on site. Our comparison of mobility program implementation in different contexts, as described here, aimed to add to current understandings of transnationalism as ‘the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space’ (Ong 1999), and how historically constructed and discursively (re)produced binary categories of cultural self and other continue to shape intercultural encounters (Hall 1996, 1997). Mobility program experiences may perpetuate surface-level interculturalism unless encounters and spaces can be created that facilitate a process of becoming more strongly aware of and proactive in deconstructing them. If global student mobility programs in universities are to comprehensively address their goals of developing intercultural capabilities and global mindsets, they need to bring those biases that continue to shape such experiences to the fore, so they can contribute to learning and teaching that ‘critically intervene in a way that challenges and changes’ (Hooks 2009, 12). An intervention for change that appears to be key in making international teaching practica the transformative mobility experiences they aspire to be is a more overt and proactive challenging of the inherent discourses of superiority and inequality that shape understandings of geography, culture, pedagogy and professionalisation. This is a challenge for universities, partner organisations in host countries, and teacher educators, as much as it is for the pre-service teachers themselves. In this paper, we have aimed to show that, in line with Massey’s (2005) call for reimaginations of geographical and cultural conceptions, a useful direction for global mobility programs might be to question our responsibilities as members of new ‘places’. Such questions have been asked before, but as these programs are situated within continually re-forming discourses of globalisation, they may therefore require new answers.

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Michiko Weinmann Michiko Weinmann is Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning Languages in the School of Education, Deakin University. Her work as a teacher educator in Languages and multilingual education is centred on the nexus of contemporary theory, curriculum and practice in the discipline. Bringing together Education and Cultural Studies perspectives, Michiko’s research focuses on an interdisciplinary reconstitution of the ways

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that discourses and imaginations of nation, nationality, and geography continue to shape the representations of languages and cultures, and the identities of the people who speak, live and teach them. Michiko’s work seeks to inform a reframing of Languages education policy, curriculum, pedagogy and teacher practice beyond established boundaries and hierarchies of languages and culture towards multilingual and transnational approaches. Rod Neilsen Roderick Neilsen is Senior Lecturer in TESOL education and co-ordinates the TESOL/Languages discipline area at Deakin University. His research brings global perspectives to the links between intercultural awareness and effective language teaching and learning, with the aim of bringing more complex understandings of language and culture to the professional learning of language teachers. Recent projects have examined how teacher mobility and transcultural exchange programs enhance teacher professional learning, how multilinguals speak about their language learning journeys, and how parents and carers can encourage bilingual and bicultural reading development. He is chief editor of the Australian professional journal, TESOL in Context. Isabel Martin Isabel Martin is Professor of English at the University of Education Karlsruhe (Germany) with areas of specialization in TESOL, applied linguistics, literature, and culture. Current research and teaching interests include TESOL in Asia, Global Citizenship Education, and teacher professionalization in transcultural mobility projects. Her project, “Teaching English in Laos”, combines action research with a German-Lao teacher-tandem programme in several subjects (English, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics) at two Lao primary schools, one secondary school, the Lao-German Technical College, the Vocational Education Development Institute, and Savannakhet University. The different modules are funded by the AfC Foundation, Erasmus+, and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).

Transnational Institutions of Higher Education and Their Contribution to the National Innovation System: The Case of the German University of Technology in Oman Ann Vogel Abstract Participation in transnational-university founding, as discussed for the case of the Sultanate of Oman, is a relatively recent national policy-making strategy to encourage ‘permanent innovation’ through an institutional mechanism. In their efforts, institutional entrepreneurs benefit from the spread of global models for higher education and revised conceptions of the national innovation system. A transnational space for higher education, such as Oman’s newly built private sector of universities and colleges, allows actors from many countries to further their own respective goal of global competitiveness. Being anchored in the national innovation policy for country development, the university projects’ potential success factor is derived from a number of national, transnational, and regional conditions for emergence. This chapter argues that globalization scholars focus narrowly on the transnational phenomenon, neglecting the analysis of opportunities for national actors. The chapter analyzes the win-win strategy for the case of the German University of Technology in Oman and other sector members of the transnational field—a field in which the German-partnered university, providing a specific model for advanced technical education and research emulated under very different country conditions, must compete. It reflects on the ways the state is embedded in trans-border processes, offering ideas for more research on the worldwide circulation of institutional models and their engagement by national states and elites.

The Transnational as a Methodological Problem What is the benefit of transnationalism studies compared to the traditional approach by ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Schiller 2002) which has been with us for many decades despite ample criticisms from various social-science communities? Is the nation-state entity no longer an appropriate measurement unit for analysis? Is the phenomenon of globalization—its emergence, its forces, its scope, its effects, its A. Vogel (B) Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Nickl et al. (eds.), Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems, Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2_9

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magnitude—only intelligible through a transnational approach? The editors of the inaugural volume in this Springer Series emphasize the study of social phenomena by a radical turn towards a “juxtaposition of nations and of the national and the global and the local” with the aim to avoid entrapment in the transnational as a quality of prepostmodern thought” while also conceding that “critical engagement with the nation state cannot avoid a historical dimension.” At the same time, the editors warn of an “imagined utopianism of boundless mobility” neglecting the protectionist policies of Europe or immigration reforms walling in Australia and the United States, of a neglect of imperial and colonial (add: postcolonial) power relations” (Nickl et al. 2018). Do we know what a methodology of transnationalism entails? Research terms such as transnationalism and transnationality appear to have no general and working definition in cultural studies, apart from a rather intuitive assertion that the study of “sustained, cross-border relationships spanning nation-states” is entailed (Vertovec 2010). Frequently, studies under this banner are informed by the empirical problem. To illustrate, some authors like Basch and colleagues examine the mobility of people and the resulting “interconnected social experience” observable in remittance migration and diaspora society. The same authors define transnationalism as “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement—with the outcome of particular “social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders”. Transmigrants “develop subjectivities and identities embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more nation-states”, with transformational effects on the latter. Nation-states, the cited book tells, aim to capture these transnational migrations by confirming the social ties of transmigrants to their origin countries (Basch et al. 2006). While such definitional work centers on subjects, it also suggests an institutionalized space or a set of such institutionalized spaces which can be empirically explored (De Cesari et al. 2016). The study of socio-economic development in a nationally defined location, including the introduction of a private higher-education sector based on international partnerships—as reported on in the following paragraphs—is a suitable case for some observations about the property of transnationality and the organizational and institutional actors in a transnational space. While individuals and networks have significant roles, the following analysis seeks to draw attention to the global circulation of institutional models for higher education, which are strategically embedded in a transnational space within a nationally bounded area, the Sultanate of Oman. To make this still developing space observable, this chapter looks at the private higher-education development in relation to the building of a national innovation system, which the next section introduces as an important action frame for higher-education institutional projects.

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The National Innovation System and the Role of Knowledge in Development The idea of a national innovation system (NIS) encapsulates the interest in understanding industrial development and economic policy through country-comparisons, initially those similarities and differences pertaining to Western economies and Japan, as Japanese economic and industry models had become competitive and influential in the 1970s (Lundvall 2010; Nelson 1993). Broadly speaking, the term NIS captures the social phenomenon of an institutionalized space in which organizations and institutions, including prominently those of the state, collaborate toward the common goal of knowledge production and diffusion, especially in the area of technology which advances economic performances. An innovation system ought to generate and diffuse technology and its utilization; therefore research and development organizations (R&D) play a key role in the NIS (see also Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 1997). In more recent decades, NIS scholarship has turned toward the study of particular industrial sectors, aiming to understand their global interconnectedness and the way national economies work together in global value chains (Cattaneo et al. 2012). From this perspective, these policies work at all levels of the economy—industry (or sector), region, and the nation-state. For example, a recent comparative sector analysis on university knowledge transfer to market actors in South Africa (Kruss et al. 2015) shows how astronomy research links relevant actors into global innovation networks with high R&D value under the guidance of national policy for ‘big science’, whereas the automobile sector—and thus the research necessary for it—provides a different case scenario, as it produces for the regional consumer markets which are under heavy competition in the studied case. These studies show that research universities have different capabilities which, in turn, allow them to establish links to different actors of the economy and capitalize on their locations in innovation systems. Policy actors have turned this research frame into a now widely applied, nearly hegemonic tool of policy analysis: for the social construction and organization of highly interconnected social fields whose organizations and institutions provide the lever for economic development. The concept of NIS emerged in the 1980s; it is closely associated with evolutionary economics and more recently with a more articulated role of the state in relation to markets (Nelson 1993, 2005). Before the millennium, the research frame of NIS came to include the research organization as a pillar of knowledge-based economic development (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1997). The concept of NIS was adopted by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 1997) as a complexity-modeling approach to the economy. This adoption helped turning the NIS-concept into a globally used policy tool, thereby joining the canon of development theory (such as Rostov’s famous take-off model and others). The macro-sociological and ideological contexts, a topic that cannot be extensively approached by this analysis, are shaped by the concept of ‘organizational learning’ (Lundvall 2010), the neoliberal marketization ideology (see Turner 2008), and the emergence of a ‘creativity dispositif’, which in industry deploys the concept

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of innovation based on Schumpeterian entrepreneurial theory (for critical analysis see Reckwitz 2017). Especially within the path of the ‘triple helix’ model by management scholars (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1997), which urges the interconnectedness of the state, the market and research organizations, the role for transnational highereducation and research centers has been cast in new light.1 This argument underwrites a broader developmental participation by the university, intensification of university-industry relationships and the empowerment of universities as participants in regional-economic development and in global value chains (on Germany see Koschatzky 2014). These market and state-driven policy contexts have paved the way for new university models including demands that often threaten the university and its constituencies, while also opening up new possibilities of being a scholar and researcher (Vogel and Kaghan 2001). The following sections examine the private higher-education sector and one of its member institutions, the German University of Technology in Oman (known as GUtech), in their relation to Oman’s NIS. The chapter examines the import of institutional models pertaining to the function of a higher-education organization and some of the outcomes of the adoption, which are based on information from the first-time audit reporting on Oman’s higher-education institutions. This information became available in 2015 and is concentrating on the transnational relationship of Oman and Germany at the higher-education sector level.

The Transnationality of Higher Education Mobility of higher learning has a long history and has come in cycles, leaving its marks across the world’s regions. In the nineteenth century, Germany became the hub for higher-education development and its model of a university became successfully replicated and adapted (alongside the British and the French models) by US American university projects. Many more models developed in the course of modernization. The twentieth century is marked by the big pull-attraction of the US American higher-education institutions (Wildavsky 2010). This century, however, is already defined by a high interconnectedness between the circulation of researchers, scholars and students on one side, and the worldwide circulation of institutional models, together with emerging regulatory modes to turn research institutions toward a

1A

new model as offshoot of the Triple Helix model has been suggested as suitable to the study of Omani socio-economic development: “The Penta Helix model has its roots in Etzkowitz and Leyesdorff’s (2000) Triple Helix, where a tri-lateral network of academe, industries, and government combine to take advantage of the innovative research projects that are cultured within educational institutions and transform these projects to viable commercial products or services. NGOs, civil society, and the social entrepreneurs were added to the Penta Helix. They have significant roles to play in supporting shared innovation goals (Rampersad et al. 2010) and they contribute to socioeconomic progress of the region” (Halibas et al. 2017).

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global standard on the other side. This, in a nutshell, captures what is nowadays celebrated as the transnationalization of higher education and the making of new elite institutions around the world, the so-called world-class universities in traditionally sending countries of students (Altbach and Salmi 2011). Additionally, and as the case of Oman but also that of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and many more countries with emerging economies shows, it is entire sectors which are raised at once.2 The ‘transnational space’ emerging through such projects is both highly marketoriented and state-driven, with the eye of rulers on demographic and economic problems they have to solve within relatively short time because of macroeconomic and political conditions. It is, therefore, not surprising that university-model export concentrates mainly on the applied-research domains, and puts second basic social sciences and especially the humanities—the latter known in the West as ‘expensive and useless’ and defended as necessary since the 1960s, not least because of its possibility as politically vibrant and institutional space of rational and secular criticism. Two further significant trends of historically new competition are the provision of university education by governance through companies or business-government alliances, which quite often copy public and nonprofit models of universities they strive to emulate, and the immediate addition of universities to so-called knowledge cities, or creative clusters, such as seen with the recent Middle Eastern cases of Knowledge Village Dubai or Education City Qatar (Altbach and Salmi 2011; Arocena et al. 2013; Muborakshoeva 2013). This transnational space has long been dominated by the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as by English as the world’s lingua franca (compare De Swaan 2013). Similarly, the Commonwealth countries of Australia and Canada, and France in addition, have provided the majority of institutional models of higher learning. In the twenty-first century, the market comprises many more participantcountries, including those, such as the successful instance of Singapore, which have turned their own import of models originating from the West into a supply market for models that they pass on to emerging economies as well as economies that upgrade to more profitable positions in global value chains, thereby facing increased demands on the knowledge-based workforce (on Singapore see Olds 2007; Sung 2006). To achieve such aims, model-importing countries draw on market-competitive games such as competition for the best strategy of establishing a university which is promising to help solve immediate socio-economic challenges.3 2 This

policy has already seen a number of often reported challenges such as ‘quality’ and ‘brands’ which are being exported from one country to another but not ‘translated’ fully under destinationcountry development conditions. Further problems, such as export of excellent research and scholarship while free speech and faculty rights as known in the West often stay behind, have received critical commentary (Findlow 2005; Wildavsky 2010). There often is a ‘cultural reawakening’, in the sense that universities include as Islamic civilization what the model would suggest is the humanities canon (Muborakshoeva 2013). Transnational higher-education research has yet to investigate such trends (for seminal works see for example, Knight and Observatory on Borderless Higher 2005). 3 Some of the most significant transnational education projects today are in the Arab World. Still in the 1980s, “the general climate in most countries was unsympathetic or actively hostile to research

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Newcomers to such fields must provide an international ‘branding strategy’ to outperform competitors while bringing into the country their specific approach of education. As the field is diverse, it is more likely they merge toward a formalizing standard of international education, which puts them closer to the global template and away from their own traditions (for a theoretical approach compare Meyer and Rowan 1991). Still, such imports require particular societal-cultural knowledge and a conception of how an ‘education import’ can transfer and yet stay authentic to the source-country, which also means to negotiate institutional values. Crucially, these issues separate universities from internationally operating firms, the major makers of educational globalization.

The Vision of the Omani Government for Rapid Country and Educational Development Several Arab governments, especially those heading the oil-rich Gulf States, have come to recognize the university as a powerful tool in country development. Qatar’s Education City Initiative, which resulted in six leading US universities establishing satellite campuses in Doha, with the government of Qatar funding all institutional costs for at least ten years, is a case in point. Similar deal ‘packages’ were offered by Abu Dhabi to the Sorbonne and New York University. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, founded in 2009 as a postgraduate school, is perhaps the largest of these projects, with funding from the monarchy dwarfing what Western European governments spend on their respective higher-education sectors as a whole. This, and a number of other new projects, are cornerstones in the national strategy aimed at removing the primacy of oil extraction and first processing as the primary economic basis—in sum, development toward a broader manufacturing basis (Lidstone and Middle East Economic Digest 2009; Smith and Abu ‘Ammuh 2013). “Vision 2020” is the key policy document communicating the development path Oman has been committed to take since 1995. The “Vision 2020” states the goal of the development of human capabilities of the Omani people with the purpose of creating and managing technological change is an efficient way to prepare for the contingencies of local and global development, while protecting and furthering the Omani traditions and customs. Its main tactics to accomplish modernization are industrialsector diversification, private-sector development, and human-resource development, all of which follow approved global-governance models. The higher-education sector belongs mainly to the third strategic area and is aligned with protectionist labor

and scholarship that did not have evident practical application or that questioned conventional views and official doctrines” (Muborakshoeva 2013). According to World Bank data, Middle East and Northern Africa (the so-called MENA region) contributed one percent of worldwide research in 1999, and, according to the UNDP report of 2002, the entire Arab world was cited to have written 330 books annually (Muborakshoeva 2013).

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market policies (Al-Lamki 2000; Mellahi and Al-Hinai 2000). Known as localization policy, all the Gulf countries encourage the rapid entry of their local citizens into the workforce, aiming to curb their decades-old labor market policy shaped by cheap labor imports and well-paid, highly skilled expatriate workers. This traditional policy has left the lucrative public sector positions to national citizens. According to the neoliberal policy formula of marketization, however, the public sector must be shrunk to a minimum of public provision and a level of public regulation which won’t hinder assumed laissez-faire market dynamics (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development 2014). Following Mansouier’s analysis (which starts with 1996 and ends with 2010) of the strategic plan of Oman, the objectives have not yet been fully realized after fifteen years (Mansouier 2013). Importantly, instead of growing non-oil productivity, the reverse is suggested to have happened. Manufacturing increased, but it has to be attributed to downstream oil activities rather than adding to the goal of economic diversification. Similarly, the share of non-oil export increased only marginally, and there is weak expenditure by government on private sector development, for example in the form of infrastructure development. Government policy stipulates that at least half of all Omani nationals aged 18–24 should be enrolled in tertiary education by 2020. In 1995, the enrollment share was 15 percent. Going back further in the history of education in Oman, the gains on all levels of education have been substantial since the 1970s. Whereas in 1970 the country had only three primary schools educating 900 boys, by 2002 nearly 1500 schools with over half a million boys and girls being schooled existed. A founding wave of private higher education has paved the way for broader and more diverse tertiary/higher education and is a further sign of enormous social change in the country (cf. Al-Barwani and Albeely 2007; Al-Lamki 2002). The government sector in higher education includes a number of crucial institutions, such as the national university, Sultan Qaboos University, colleges for the applied sciences, specialized institutions, such as for the national armed forces, and vocational training institutes (cf. Al-Lamki 2002).4 There are around thirty private institutions: universities, university colleges (having a mandate for a research function), and colleges (which are free to encourage scholarship and research). Across this sub-sector, there are many international partners: Australia and Britain the most frequent ones, and the US, Austria, Jordan, Lebanon, and India. The size of these organizations varies from a few hundred to some thousands of students. The gains from the transnational education sector have particularly translated into higher-education access for young women, as young men are still sent abroad to top institutions.5

4 SQU was modeled on American and English ‘templates’, with the first colleges educating students

in medicine, engineering, science, Islamic studies and education, as well as in agriculture. In the 1990s, a Faculty of Commerce and Economics and a Faculty of Sharia and Law were added. In the late 1990s, government licensed several private colleges with emphasized business curricula, which are reformed teacher colleges, for which the head of state no longer saw a need. 5 In 2006, the number of students in the private sector is roughly 46,000, in the state sector over 51,000, with about 12,300 students being educated at Sultan Qaboos University, and a ‘considerable number of Omani students going abroad for higher education (partly on government scholarships

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In its promotion of transnational education arrangements through partnerships, the Sultanate has avoided imitating the GCC countries in which branch campuses of foreign universities have been established. The Sultanate thereby aims to diversify and improve education but also encourages an indigenous sector for higher education, by which it aims to preserve traditional culture and values in line with “Vision 2020” (Donn and Issan 2007; Issan 2010). Regarding the relationship between the national innovation system, the research institution, and the development policy of an emerging economy, we can summarize that universities have become an indispensable element for the purpose of generating relatively stable R&D environments and new knowledge of both basic and applied character. Additionally, they are significant components of strategic policy visions because of their key role in human capital formation and education in entrepreneurial creativity as well as the fostering of start-up companies of young ‘tech’ entrepreneurs. They also provide environments deemed important in social capital formation, which has been recognized as crucial for technology transfer and permanent innovation from the perspective of NIS policy (Halibas et al. 2017). In the following, I turn to the exporting-country strategy, limiting the discussion to Germany and the GUtech in Oman.

The Win-Win Strategy for Germany and Oman Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) has been the national university since 1986 and effectively belongs to the state and to powerful elites. By law, the private institutions under discussion in this chapter have to be locally owned, while they must operate also in affiliation with an international partner. This has resulted in a variety of governance structures, including actors such as mainly wealthy tribal families, investment companies, and various government departments involved in country development, but also relationships to various industrial sectors as well as to other countries. Most institutions have one major partner but some have added other foreign institutions for operating particular programs. The Sultan of Oman has been paying regular ceremonial visits to many of these institutions and his subjects. GUtech is a private university, established in 2007 under a collaborative agreement between the university-owning company in Oman and the RWTH Aachen, which is located in the German state of North Rhine Westphalia. In 2015, GUtech operated under an academic affiliation agreement with RWTH, which involves academic (curriculum) quality monitoring by the RWTH and, as to governance, a non-voting representation on the Board of Directors. The university profile has three pillars modeled on the RWTH: education, innovation, and research, common to the format of a Technical University. It thereby clearly symbolizes its role in socio-economic country development. The university is open to international students, but has attracted for the entire family) (for thorough discussion Donn and Issan 2007). For studies abroad within the Gulf region. see (Findlow and Hayes 2016).

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very few. Its student enrollment is, to a large extent, determined by allocation through the Omani government. Like all higher-education institutions in Oman, it has a socalled foundation programme to prepare most incoming high-school graduates for the challenging academic program studies. Of the 640 students enrolled in 2013, women made up seventy percent. The university is one of the roughly thirty many transnational projects which are supervised and regulated by the Ministry of Higher Education (Oman Academic Accreditation Agency (Report 036) 2013). Knowledge about the performance of these universities has been made accessible through publicly available results of a sector-wide audit under the supervision of the Oman Academic Accreditation Agency (OAAA) (Carroll et al. 2009). The purpose of the audit (2008–2013) was to start off a quality assurance system and accompany the private higher-education sector’s growth as regulatory control. The reports handed in by the colleges and universities each give information about governance and management, academic programs, graduate destination and employability, research indicators, consultancy for firms and public organizations, student demographics, support and administrative services, and other typical dimensions of a higher-education institution of policy interest. From this rich source of information, it is possible to infer the existing institutional links that the NIS research frame hypothesizes, and to discern the German-Omani ‘win-win’ strategy within the bigger picture of country development. The challenge to build a research university upon invitation—by policy and private individuals—corresponds with Germany’s own higher-education export initiative starting in the early 2000s (Fromm 2017). While Germany has a longstanding reputation regarding the circulation of researchers and students, and has upped the ante through science-system level internationalization policy in the context of the European ‘Bologna reform’ (Barrett 2017), it took a top-down policy approach spearheaded by two ministerial entities to introduce what Fromm has called “bilateral university” projects.6 According to Kammüller, managerial staff member at the agency German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the binational university has been communicated as Germany’s own transnational education path into the marketplace of international higher education.7 While the case of Oman shows that such binational partnerships can also belong to the host-country, the notion of the bilateral university, as studied by Fromm comprehensively, emphasizes the state-driven policies on the German side, which entails that the government is anchored in several ways as a key stakeholder and financier as well as resting on binational agreements (for a legal analysis see Fromm and Ramin 6 Such

universities have been built in Jordan, Turkey, Viet Nam and other countries, including Oman. Each bilateral project contains a unique combination of actors, as university and federalstate partners differ already on the German side. This holds, of course, also for the model-importing countries and for the governance structure, as Fromm eloquently shows. 7 Generally, the internationalization policy by German universities is funded long-term through the DAAD (which is an agency funded in turn by the German Bund, the federal state). In the case of the projects discussed, the major grants are the responsibility of the German state, or states involved in the projects. The DAAD position is that a sustainable engagement must be supported by its capacities, including regular deployment of German academics in the host-countries.

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2014). The primary target of these partnerships appears to be the educational export of STEM subjects, which is relatively costly compared to the export of business and humanities, as well as the social sciences and law. Germany and Oman have interests that seem compatible: first, Germany wants to remain globally competitive. Its foreign science policy directly brings together research might, development policy, and security policy (Fromm 2017); second, Oman wants to leap frog to a knowledge-based economy, providing excellent education to the national citizens (essentially from the tribal families) with the aim of better positioning these nationals vis-à-vis the remittance-migrant and native nonArab people of Oman, who form the larger majority of the current workforce. For both countries, the branding process is important as the name of the GUtech project already shows. The university is owned by a wealthy elite family, while its governance board (a second-level decision- making unit) includes representatives of the German state and science system, such as DAAD and the German ambassador. The state of North Rhine Westphalia participated in the first funding phase for the project. What constitutes the ‘reference to Germany’, as demanded by the German Federal Government is entirely up to the universities, apart from having DAAD-organized German language courses, even where English is the campus language.8 Principally, however, a German university must be involved in the operational teaching area (not just in curricular guidance and quality control), and there must be evidence of an intercultural exchange with Germany. Apart from bringing technological and methodological know-how to the country, thereby bolstering its NIS capacity, the partnership is grounded in the communication of institutional values, such as the promise of GUtech to import a certain technological culture, a specific outlook on the world. The German offer is the Technical University model in the case of GUtech and other university projects, e.g. in Viet Nam. A Technical University (TU) is a research institution up to doctoral level with the broadest offers of instruction and research in the engineering and natural-science fields, supplemented by complementary subjects from other areas. The German model of the TU is defended by the top-institutional members as a standard backed by the following defining criteria: a classical academic canon including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering and architecture, with the new disciplines computing science and mathematics being added; the dominance of the classical canon; demarcation from institutions with applied sciencesstatus (the polytechnics or universities of applied sciences); a doctorate program in engineering; large research funding from industry for applied sciences but also basic research as well as for major, capital-intensive equipment; the notion of a researcher 8 During

my fieldtrip to GUtech at the end of 2014, I observed the German higher-education policy on language instruction as the major mechanism for instilling the German sense of culture and preparing the mobility of the students, as academic course work includes a study term at RWTH Aachen. The demand on Arabic-speaking natives to learn German, when they are already struggling with English, was not a demand well received in Oman, as it takes away from academic instruction time. On the societal concern about English “as a language that opens doors for development, modernization, information, and even democracy” in Oman, see (Abdel-Jawad and Abu Radwan 2011).

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career that is grounded in a significant number of years of industry experience before receiving tenure as a full professor. In the last section of this chapter, I present the findings from audit-report analysis for the private higher-education institutions in Oman, including GUtech, to assess their current contribution to development and the NIS of the Sultanate.

The Technical University as Competitive Model: the GUtech as Its Carrier Based on the OAAA audit report and compared to the results from other highereducation institutions under audit, it is possible to establish what GUtech has so far accomplished in terms of exporting the TU model that RWTH Aachen epitomizes (Oman Academic Accreditation Agency (Report 036) 2013). Among these are: enrollment of students with high academic potential to match the demands of the STEM programs of which a few have already been implemented at Masters level; preparation for research and consultancy toward comprehensive policies; establishing the teaching-research nexus; providing learning environments with the latest technological standards and thereby reflecting the technological superiority represented by the TU model. Many of the recommendations and affirmations offered by the OAAA panel of auditors are aimed at implementing systems and moving toward comprehensive policy and implementation. Many of these directives are not specifically GUtech issues; they make sense in the context of the broader highereducation sector development as Oman enters the global economy at a time where knowledge-based economies are promised to secure national competitiveness. On the sector level, GUtech competes with institutions where staff qualifications seem to be relatively low across the board, with BA and MA holders appearing frequently among the teaching staff. Altogether, the audit report inspection shows that the sector is positioned to meet the labor market demands, with many commercial operators creating a market for relatively less costly degrees, which challenge the more demanding higher-learning projects. A good number of higher-education institutions formulated visions that communicate quite narrowly the function of education to provide labor market inputs and professional qualifications. A few stated a vision that includes the economy and national development, and less than a handful have an institutional vision which goes beyond industry and economy, drawing a reference to culture, society, or civilization, or more universal values. The Oman Tourism College, for example, references the hospitality industry and economy, but does not address the Omani heritage protection which aligns with the “Vision 2020” (Oman Academic Accreditation Agency (Report 022) 2011). How does the sector line up with NIS system requirements? Drawing on measures developed in Vogel 2014,9 the audit-report analysis finds that most college 9 My research findings pertain to 2015, due to the limit of the audit and the lack of robust secondary

research data. The findings are based on information given at the higher-education institutions

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and university activities—regardless of subsector membership and governance logic as well as age and academic subject-focus—have still highly informal activities regarding NIS-responsive areas of operation such as monitoring of labor markets, offering career guidance and services, placement/internship services, research funding, research activities, commercialization, and consultancy. Even at SQU, only four percent of the annual budget can be attributed to research activity and is noted as ‘significantly below international standards for a comprehensive research university’, as mentioned by the auditors (Oman Academic Accreditation Agency (Report 006) 2011). While some activities have been documented, their volume does not appear large enough to show developed functional linkages with the policy-conceived innovation system. The OAAA auditors repeatedly note that formal systems for administering and monitoring, to move such activities forward, are lacking. Perhaps the most developed dimension is the placement/internship service, but here again quality issues regarding services often turn out to be student services’ problems. While industry ties exist, they are of relatively low volume or pertain to single market actors and have to be developed into systematic and institutionalized patterns to be regarded as fully active linkages and inter-institutional patterns. Similarly, commercialization and consultations seem singular projects rather than institutional functions developed to match the expectations related in the various reports on “Vision 2020” and are already raised as issues for improvement in the audit reports. Another issue, if not dilemma, is presented in the area of recruitment and retention. First, the academic and administrative labor markets in higher education are volatile. As known from the German perspective, hiring an excellent academic workforce for a developing country’s university or college is generally a difficult problem due to skill shortages. This is also true for the private sector of higher education in Oman. While there are administrative staff skilled through education and job experience, this constitutes yet another challenge for higher-education institutions, because such staff have been observed as easily being lured away with offers of higher salaries from public and private companies, as my interviews with GUtech administrators revealed. This suggests great imbalances in the economy, which hinder the continuous development of the private university. Similarly, hiring temporary staff, including the academic faculty flying in from the international partner universities, who provide block seminars instead of shifting permanently from Western institutions, is an obstacle to student satisfaction as assessment has repeatedly shown. Second, Omanization policy, which mandates the priority of hiring locals (Al-Barwani et al. 2009), adds to the problem, as it blocks the development of a market for academic expertise. The audit reports show that most higher education institutions, at least formally, comply with this national localization, or Omanization policy, while they also argue that regional competitiveness through international hiring is a key factor in building strong institutions (see also Al-Barwani et al. 2009; Al Bandary 2005). Major challenges to the emulation of the TU model arise with the slow institutionalization of an innovation system, as well as continuity in policy and funding. between 2008 and 2013. A new round of audits is currently in process, and the results offer more robust research opportunities in the near future.

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Additionally, the volatility of the national economy creates an unpredictable business sector and risk-averse entrepreneurial behavior—the very issues the government’s development policies try to combat. Typically, export products of firms are in the same fields as higher-education projects of the kind GUtech represents, in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and information technology, yet, to create technology transfer dynamics in a national economy which aims to change its location in the global economy, needs ‘firms on the ground’, and to have that, economic diversification has to be accelerated according to the NIS policies in a neoliberal framework. Challenges also arise from the education model proliferated by the government, which aims at vocational training, while the most promising talents enroll in Western institutions of higher education with the support of generous state scholarships. This, perhaps, reflects on the side of the export of education underestimated need in developing countries, which could be accomplished by promoting another famous German model: that of dual occupational training, or the model of the German applied-science university, which the bilateral project has turned to in the case of the German-Jordanian University in Amman (see case study in Fromm 2017). In Oman, GUtech has had very similar start-up problems when compared with other sector peers and can tactically benefit from these newcomers when it comes to external demands, for example by the state, on the sector. Given the dearth of research activity as a developed function, it seems that GUtech should build on its partnership with RWTH Aachen more strongly to make gains in this regard. Overall, this OmaniGerman partnership is uniquely positioned as a university representing a great deal of backing from both high-level political as well as social elite sources, a partnership with one of the elite technical universities in Germany, a continuous personnel flow with RWTH Aachen at the top level, and a highly educated and powerful partner in the Al-Salmi family with strong aspirations for socio-economic development, and respect for local and enlightened religious traditions. 10

Conclusion: Transnationalism as Policy Paradigm and the Present Culture of ‘Development’ In what way can transnationalism scholarship profit from a wider or international discourse on such higher-education projects? Who can benefit and why? In a recent review of Fromm’s already mentioned study of ‘bilateral university projects’ similar to GUtech, I have been critical of the limitations the author has set on the study, specifically her focus on national politics at the neglect of examining the entire network, involving transnational ties and other national actors (Vogel 2019). Surely, Fromm decided to concentrate on the commonalities of such bilateral projects in terms of a political interdependence within Germany’s borders and the translation of 10 On

similar findings on research function development in other Gulf countries’ sectors of private higher education, see (Findlow and Hayes 2016).

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political will into the political reality of higher education, such as governance and its ways, and the power relations undergirding and moving them. The exploration of transnational education spaces, however limited, where one must rely on policy audit reports as the best available source of information shows that the transnational matters. First, there are substantial national contexts which provide the obstacles bilateral universities must overcome to fulfill their missions. Second, institutional models have been in circulation in addition to individual and organizational actors, which are mostly captured as transnational phenomena with little regard by transnationalism scholars for these sociologically well-studied and welltheorized phenomena. Third, I have mentioned here and there global-governance institutions and policies which should be elaborated and taken up by scholarship on transnational spaces, as development paradigms such as those represented by IMF, World Bank and OECD, as well as national development aid strategies pertaining to industrialization. These are crucial to understanding the constraints and possibilities of binational projects and the institutional entrepreneurialism which such projects need aside from elite circulation and elite networks. Especially for scholarly interest in post-colonialism, these observations suggest that earlier social science theories such as world-systems theory and dependency theory deserve renewed engagement to challenge existing neoliberal policy frames for development, including the role assigned to transnational education (Dirlik 2016; Hout 1993). Finally, the higher-education policy studies accompanying audit-report analysis also provide evidence of a directive state, observable in generous government support for the private sector coming in the form of land grant, certain customs exemptions and a matching grant for capital contribution. Private education is regulated through Royal Decrees and Ministerial Decisions. Sultan Qaboos also endowed land-grants for all Omani-owned private universities to construct facilities and purchase educational equipment. These tactics of support are neither unique to Oman nor to the Gulf countries, but have been observed in previously emerging economies, thereby allowing an argument for a ‘strong state’ in the higher-education sector, where it is positioned to catalyze national socio-economic development within a global economic context. ‘Bilateral university projects’ of the kind studied here, and as a group by Fromm, are boundary-broker phenomena similar to activism through diaspora politics, transnational public-private partnerships, global governance institutions, transnational companies, and remittance economic niches around an occupational group working abroad. They are transnational in character through active organizational steering, however, often involving powerful actors including government and business. Following earlier political-science scholarship on transnational actors (compare Erman and Uhlin 2010), another fruitful research extension on the theme is the study of the legitimacy of such actors (individual and collective respectively) and the potential ‘democratic deficit’ of transnational universities, potentially as a starting point for more generalizable hypotheses about transnationalism phenomena. In the social sciences, it has often been suggested that transnational spaces are evidence of the outcome of de-territorialization processes within the broader globalization context. The current study suggests that this cannot just be assumed. Rather,

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it has to be tested by more and effective empirical investigation which can contribute to the exploration of social structures in addition to subjectivities and identities by which transnational spaces have been explored. This chapter contributes to the study of transnationalism by showing that the nation-state is not just a historical component providing infrastructures and policies in which transnational circulation can altogether take place. The nation-state is far from having relinquished its role in the public goods provision. It has an active role in the incentivizing, steering, regulating and symbolically filling the transnational space that global circulation of institutional models and their symbolic capital leaves as an intelligible unit of observation. This active role is not accidental but actively recast by governments in cooperation with business, policy and social elites, pursuing deep engagement in education as a tradable service and being strategically a driver in privatization of higher education. The ‘bilateral university project’ becomes transnational in its emergence, yet remains firmly anchored in the rational-legal frameworks of two nation states and their higher-education sectors. In this sense, transnational space-making must be investigated further as a state strategy or a cooperative strategy of states and elites in order to provide the foundations for national wealth and global competitiveness and, simultaneously, secure their own social-structural positions at all levels of the global economy. Acknowledgements The author acknowledges a travel stipend issued by the University of Speyer’s DAAD-PROMOS fund and family-side financial support by Prof. Dr. Jörg Vogel (Würzburg) for life in the field. The author is thankful for insights shared by Prof. Dr. Michael Jansen (founding member of GUtech) and Prof. Dr. Michael Modigell (current Rector of GUtech), as well as several members of the Al-Salmi family, the owners and co-directors of GUtech.

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Ann Vogel is an economic sociologist who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington at Seattle as well as three Masters degrees from the Technical University Berlin, the University of Amsterdam and the German University of Administrative Science at Speyer. She is currently seeking Habilitation from the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her former positions include over half a decade of teaching at University of Washington and sociology assistant professorships/university lecturer positions at the University of Cambridge, the University of Exeter, and the Singapore Management University. Her research has concentrated on institutional boundary-brokering in diverse fields (philanthropy, languages, and cultural economy of cinema). Her current writing has returned to sociological methodology (process sociology and sequence analysis).

Author Index

B Bachmann, Wiebke, 3

Nickl, Benjamin, 65

F Fromm, Nadin, 43

O Otte, Susanne, 3

H Herrschner, Irina, 103

R Raev, Alexander, 43

K Kammüller, Susanne, 3

V Vogel, Ann, 155

M Malakaj, Ervin, 85 Martin, Isabel, 133 Mayer-Lantermann, Katrin, 29

W Weinmann, Michiko, 133

N Neilsen, Rod, 133

Z Zhou, Ivy, 119

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Subject Index

A Abroad, xv, xvii, xviii, 3, 5–8, 15, 19, 20, 23, 29–32, 34–37, 40, 43–45, 49–51, 56, 57, 59, 65, 66, 68–77, 103–105, 107, 109, 111, 114, 134, 138, 141, 161, 168 Academic exchange, 54, 68 Accreditation, 12, 31, 33–41, 163, 165, 166 Accreditation Council, 31, 33–41 Activities, 3–9, 11, 13, 17, 19, 30, 31, 43– 45, 47, 49, 50, 57–59, 65, 66, 107, 119, 120, 122, 127, 135–137, 161, 166, 167 Actors, 33, 34, 43–51, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 73, 94, 106, 114, 155–157, 162, 163, 166–168 Advocacy, 85, 86, 88–93, 97, 127 America, 9, 65, 72, 74–77, 85, 86, 90–92, 94, 96, 99, 103, 107, 134 Australia, xvii, 6, 8, 16, 29, 31, 44, 46, 53, 55, 56, 74, 75, 79, 80, 103, 107, 119, 120, 126, 143, 147, 156, 159, 161

B Beijing humboldt forum, xiii–xvi Bilingual education, 119, 120, 123, 124, 126–128, 134 Borders, 4, 5, 13, 29–31, 43, 46, 53, 69, 73, 77, 78, 110, 112, 122, 155, 156, 167

C Century, 14, 15, 19, 22, 29, 43, 45, 65, 68–70, 73, 75, 77, 78, 86, 103, 158, 159

Challenges, 13, 25, 29, 36, 38–40, 47, 54, 57, 66, 70, 75, 76, 99, 112, 114, 136, 141, 144, 149, 151, 159, 163, 165–168 Childhood, xix, 119–121, 123, 126–128 Children, xvii, xix, 15, 115, 119, 121–123, 125–128, 136, 142, 147, 148 China, xiii–xv, xvii–xx, 3, 7, 11, 14–19, 33, 37, 45, 50, 52, 59 Classroom, 75, 76, 85, 90, 95, 97, 99, 106, 108, 113, 114, 121, 126, 133, 134, 136, 137, 141–145, 147, 149, 150 Colonial, 70, 72–74, 86, 94, 98, 99, 113, 115, 134, 139, 150, 156 Communication, 48, 105, 114, 136, 137, 140, 142, 143, 147–149, 164 Community, 45, 70, 73, 74, 76, 78, 98, 106, 125–127, 138–140, 142, 143, 147, 149, 155 Comparative, 59, 124, 133, 134, 157 Context, 4–6, 11–13, 19, 31, 38, 43–45, 48, 66, 68, 69, 71–75, 77, 79, 80, 86, 89, 90, 94, 95, 107–115, 120–122, 124, 126, 134–136, 138, 140–147, 149–151, 157, 158, 163, 165, 168 Cooperation, xvi, xx, 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16–19, 21, 22, 25, 32–34, 38–40, 49–51, 53, 55, 57, 58, 65, 68, 120, 136, 169 Countries, xiv, xviii, 3–9, 11–17, 19–22, 29– 32, 35–40, 44–46, 49, 51, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 68–76, 79, 80, 89, 92, 103– 108, 110–112, 114, 119, 120, 122, 123, 127, 134, 135, 138, 142, 143, 147, 150, 151, 155–157, 159–164, 166–168 Courses, xvi, xviii, xx, 4, 5, 8, 11, 17, 24, 29– 32, 34, 36, 38–40, 48, 56, 71–73, 87,

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176 89–92, 97, 103, 107, 108, 114, 133, 135, 138, 146, 150, 158, 163, 164 Cultural, xv–xvii, 4, 7, 14, 23, 33, 38, 40, 50, 51, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72–75, 78–80, 94– 96, 98, 99, 103–115, 122, 125, 127, 133–135, 138, 140–142, 144, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 156, 159, 160 Cultural diplomacy, 7, 103–110, 112–115 Culture studies, 85–93, 95 Curriculum, 13, 18, 23, 24, 32, 39, 40, 71, 72, 74, 77, 86, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 123, 126, 128, 134, 136, 141, 149, 162 D Decolonization, 74, 85, 86, 91, 93–98 Degree, xiv, xvi, xvii, 5–9, 11–17, 19–25, 30, 32–37, 40, 45, 50, 56, 71, 88–90, 92, 108, 165 Department, 19, 49, 69–72, 77, 78, 80, 87, 90, 105, 106, 115, 162 Development, 3, 4, 6, 7, 13–15, 18, 20–23, 25, 30, 32, 40, 44, 49, 50, 53, 55, 58, 59, 68, 73, 74, 77, 79, 85, 93, 97, 105, 106, 112, 119–124, 126–128, 133, 134, 137, 138, 140, 144, 155–168 Diversity, 8, 15, 65, 79, 85, 86, 91–97, 104, 115, 138, 150 E Early childhood, 119–121, 123, 126–128 Economic, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, 6, 7, 9, 13, 17, 20, 21, 23, 43, 49, 50, 53, 57, 66, 68, 70, 74, 77, 86, 89, 90, 98, 105, 106, 120, 134, 135, 150, 156–162, 167, 168 Education, xiii, xiv, xvi–xx, 3–8, 11–23, 29– 39, 43–47, 49–51, 53–59, 65, 68–72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 85–88, 90, 92, 94, 95, 98, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109, 111, 114, 119, 120, 122–128, 133–137, 139, 140, 145, 146, 149, 150, 155, 156, 158–169 Educational, 4, 14, 15, 30, 38, 46, 51, 68, 94, 103, 104, 109, 111, 122, 123, 126, 134, 140, 141, 150, 158, 160, 164, 168 Education institutions, xvi–xviii, 3, 21, 29, 30–40, 46, 54, 68–71, 75, 94, 123, 127, 128, 156, 158, 163, 165, 166 Education sector, xviii, 3, 16, 21, 43, 44, 47, 51, 53, 54, 57–59, 65, 156, 158, 160, 161, 163, 165, 168, 169

Subject Index Educators, 13, 95, 97, 119, 120, 125–128, 133, 137, 145, 150, 151 Engagement, 3–5, 8, 11–13, 17, 19, 30, 31, 39, 44, 53, 70, 72, 79, 103, 135, 138, 144, 148, 150, 155, 156, 163, 168, 169 Engineering, 7, 9, 12, 16, 17, 22, 23, 32, 40, 49, 51, 58, 89, 161, 164, 167 Enrollment, 85–93, 161, 163, 165 European, xv, 9, 22, 29, 31, 33–35, 37, 50, 73, 75, 94, 99, 103–105, 113, 124, 136, 160, 163 Experience, xiv, xviii, 6, 8, 13, 18, 23, 25, 30, 34, 39, 65, 85, 88, 92–94, 105, 109, 112, 114, 119–122, 127, 128, 133–151, 156, 165, 166

F Field, 9, 11–13, 15, 22, 29, 30, 43–45, 47, 49–53, 55–59, 65, 66, 70, 77, 80, 86–88, 91–93, 95, 96, 98, 104, 134, 155–157, 160, 164, 167, 169 Foreign, xiii, xvi, xvii, 5, 7, 9, 16–21, 23, 30, 32, 34–37, 46, 49–54, 56–58, 60, 68, 71, 88, 90, 103–111, 113, 114, 146, 150, 162, 164 Foreign Office, 7, 49–54, 56–58, 105 Foreign policy, 50, 60, 104–106 Framework, 5, 11, 18, 29, 38, 47, 50, 57, 71, 77, 85, 94, 95, 97, 103, 104, 106– 108, 114, 126, 127, 136, 140, 141, 167, 169

G German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), 4–9, 13, 15–17, 22–24, 29–33, 37–39, 44, 46, 49, 50, 52–56, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 77, 104, 106–108, 111–115, 163, 164, 169 German culture, 68, 70, 71, 79, 80, 92, 103, 109–111, 114, 115 German language, xiv, xvii, 12, 17, 22–24, 40, 49, 50, 52, 59, 69, 70, 72, 79, 85, 89–93, 95, 103–105, 108–110, 125, 126, 164 German studies, xiii–xvii, 32, 34, 65, 68–70, 72–78, 93, 94, 96, 99 German university, xvii, xviii, 3, 5–9, 11, 12, 16–19, 21–23, 30, 32, 39, 40, 43, 49, 51, 52, 57, 134, 155, 158, 163, 164

Subject Index Germany, xiv, xv, xvii–xx, 3, 6–8, 11–13, 16–18, 20–25, 29–35, 37, 39, 40, 44– 47, 50–53, 55–59, 65, 66, 68–71, 73– 77, 79, 103–105, 107–115, 120, 123– 125, 127, 137, 142, 144, 146, 158, 162–164, 167 Global, xix, 6, 7, 43, 44, 50, 53, 57, 59, 65, 68, 71, 74, 75, 77, 89, 95, 98, 103, 106, 108, 112, 114, 133–135, 139, 144, 146, 148, 150, 151, 155–160, 165, 167–169 Governance, 5, 16, 47, 58, 59, 77, 104, 159, 160, 162–164, 166, 168

H Higher education, xiv, xvi–xx, 3–8, 11–15, 17–22, 24, 25, 29–40, 43–47, 49–51, 53–59, 65, 68, 70, 71, 73–75, 77, 78, 86, 88, 91, 93, 94, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161–163, 166–169 Home, 8, 13, 19, 30, 46, 69, 88–90, 97, 109, 110, 114, 119, 121, 127, 135, 138, 141, 142, 144–147, 150 Humanities, 8, 79, 85–88, 95, 145, 149, 159, 164

I Identity, 40, 48, 65, 68, 70, 74–77, 104, 133– 135, 138–141, 144, 145, 149, 150, 156, 169 Indigenous, 74, 75, 78, 80, 94, 98, 99, 134, 162 Influence, 3, 19, 48, 52, 57, 60, 78, 111, 112, 114, 120–122, 124, 127 International, xiii–xix, 3–8, 13–15, 17, 19– 25, 30, 33, 35–37, 40, 44, 45, 47, 50, 52, 53, 55, 59, 65, 66, 68, 71, 73, 74, 78, 88, 89, 92, 97, 103–106, 112, 126, 133, 134, 144, 145, 149–151, 156, 160–163, 166, 167 Internationalisation, 6–8, 13, 16, 17, 19–22, 29, 44, 57, 66, 135, 146 International Programme and Provider Mobility (IPPM), 3–9, 11–14, 16–19, 22, 23, 25 International students, xiv, xvii, xviii, 6, 15, 21, 22, 45, 71, 92, 104, 105, 162

K Knowledge, 7, 13, 30, 43, 47, 54, 59, 70, 74, 77, 86, 94, 95, 99, 112, 114, 122,

177 128, 138, 139, 143, 144, 150, 157, 159, 160, 162–165

L Languages, xiii, xiv, xvii, xviii, 12, 17, 19, 23, 40, 44, 49, 50, 52, 59, 68–70, 72, 74, 76, 78–80, 85–93, 95, 96, 99, 104–113, 115, 119–128, 134– 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147–149, 164 Language teaching, 23, 78, 104, 106–109, 111–113, 115 Laos, 133–136, 141–148 London, 81

M Migrant, 80, 96, 119–122, 124–128, 164 Migrant children, 119–128 Model, xiv, xix, 3, 5, 8, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 25, 32, 39, 40, 44, 45, 47, 51–53, 55, 56, 68, 69, 72–74, 85, 86, 89–91, 95, 98, 103–107, 109, 123, 125–127, 155–160, 163–169

N National, xiii, 3–6, 8, 12–15, 20–22, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 38–40, 43, 44, 46, 49, 57– 59, 65, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76–78, 88, 90, 92, 105, 111, 112, 114, 119, 120, 122, 126, 155–157, 160–162, 164–169

O Oman, 11, 38, 155, 156, 158–168

P Participants, 124, 134, 135, 137, 150, 158, 159 Partner, xviii, xx, 5, 7, 9, 12, 13, 16–21, 23– 25, 31, 32, 35, 39, 40, 46, 51, 52, 54– 59, 108, 125, 136, 145, 148, 150, 151, 161–163, 166, 167 Pedagogical, 85, 91, 94, 107, 126, 127, 136, 138–141, 143, 144 Politics, 18, 50, 53, 75, 80, 95, 99, 103–108, 112–114, 143, 167, 168 Potential, 8, 13, 16, 21, 24, 25, 73, 98, 107, 111, 119, 124, 126, 128, 141, 155, 165, 168 Professor, xiii–xx, 13, 18, 22, 33, 79, 165

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Subject Index Projects, xiv, xix, 5, 7, 8, 14, 16, 17, 22, 23, 25, 31–33, 37–40, 43–59, 71, 72, 74, 77, 79, 80, 94, 96, 99, 105, 114, 137, 141, 145, 146, 155, 156, 158–160, 163–169 Public sectors, 161 Q Quality, 4, 5, 8, 12, 14, 15, 20, 23, 24, 29–40, 46, 52, 59, 122, 156, 159, 162–164, 166 Quality assurance, 5, 8, 12, 29–40, 46, 163 S Scholars, xiii, xv, xvi, 44, 66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76–79, 87, 88, 91, 94, 96–99, 155, 158, 168 School, xix, 12, 15, 16, 20, 22, 24, 50, 76, 78, 80, 93, 104, 105, 111, 114, 119–123, 125, 126, 128, 134–138, 140–143, 147, 160, 161, 163 Science, xiv, 3, 6–9, 12, 14, 17–19, 22, 23, 25, 29, 32, 39, 40, 47, 50–52, 57, 71, 92, 124, 135, 155, 157, 159–161, 163, 164, 167, 168 Second language, 90, 120, 122, 124–127 Staff, 7, 8, 12, 13, 19–21, 23, 24, 32, 40, 66, 70–72, 77, 78, 90, 108, 125, 128, 135, 163, 165, 166 State, xv, 6, 12, 14, 15, 19, 21, 24, 29–34, 37– 39, 43–51, 53, 54, 56, 59, 66, 68, 70– 74, 76, 77, 87, 92, 103, 112, 120, 123, 125, 127, 135, 155–164, 167–169 Student learning, 13, 31, 106, 110, 135, 143, 145 Students, xiv–xix, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11–25, 29–33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 44, 46, 54, 66, 68, 70– 75, 78, 79, 85–87, 89–93, 95, 97, 99,

103, 106–115, 120, 125, 126, 133– 136, 138, 140–143, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 158, 161, 163–166 Studies abroad, 77, 162 Study programmes, 4–6, 11, 13, 17–20, 23, 30, 32–39 System, xiv, xix, 6, 7, 11–15, 19, 20, 24, 25, 32, 33, 35–38, 40, 44, 47, 55, 71, 75, 76, 87, 95, 104, 109, 112, 114, 115, 122, 126, 127, 134, 135, 137, 139– 142, 144, 146, 155–157, 162–166, 168

T Teachers, xix, 29, 32, 38–40, 72, 90, 91, 96, 98, 103, 106–115, 122, 125, 128, 133, 141, 143–147, 150, 151, 161 Transnational, xiii, xviii, 3–5, 29–31, 35, 36, 38, 43–45, 51, 56, 65, 66, 68–75, 77, 78, 99, 106–108, 111, 112, 119–122, 133, 134, 139, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161–163, 167–169 Transnational education, 4, 29–31, 36, 38, 43, 45, 51, 56, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 73–75, 139, 159, 161–163, 168 Turkey, 3, 11, 19–22, 24, 25, 51, 163 Turkish German, 12, 19, 22

U University, xiii–xix, 3, 5–9, 11–25, 30–32, 37, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 49–55, 57–59, 65, 68, 71, 72, 74, 76–80, 86–90, 92, 94, 97–99, 105, 106, 108, 112, 134– 136, 138, 141, 142, 144, 145, 150, 151, 155, 157–169