2019 Inclusive Teaching Awards
Winners of the 2019 Inclusive Teaching Awards
TU Dresden presented an award for inclusive teaching for the first time in 2019. The aim of the award for inclusive teaching is to honor teaching staff and courses that proactively engage with the topic of non-discriminatory and inclusive teaching and apply this knowledge in their classes. This includes accessibility and the incorporation of topics relating to the inclusion of persons with disabilities, for example.
Dr. Cornelia Hähne and prizewinner Gesine Wegner
All TU Dresden students and employees were invited to submit nominations. Eight entries were received, from which TU Dresden’s Advisory Council on Inclusion, under the leadership of Professor Hurtado, Vice-Rector for University Development, subsequently selected two winning projects. The awards ceremony took place on October 11, 2019, during the general meeting of the Association of Friends and Sponsors of TU Dresden.
The prize money amounted to EUR 8,000, financed by the Saxon State Ministry for Science, Culture and Tourism’s special funds for inclusion. The prizewinners:
Gesine Wegner won an award. She is a lecturer at the Chair of North American Literature at the Institute of English and American Studies within the Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies. In her course on Disability Studies, she actively promotes and encourages critical discourse on disability and explains related terminology in the context of schools and other areas. Wegner won the award for breaking down barriers in teaching and for two lecture series: “Rethinking Disability” and “Disability From the Inside Out – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Disability,” which she integrated into her seminars in the 2015 and 2018 summer semesters. Disabled authors and researchers from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States featured in the course’s lectures and workshops and spoke about inclusion from their various personal and cultural perspectives. Gesine Wegner will use the EUR 6,000 in prize money to hold and research a blended learning seminar, which she is conducting this semester. The course, which blends elements of e-learning with on-site teaching, aims to facilitate more flexible learning conditions and thus provide targeted support for students – especially working students, students with children, and students with chronic illnesses or disabilities. She will also use the prize money to finance a short research stay at the University of Toronto. During her stay in Canada, Gesine Wegner will shadow Professor Anne McGuire’s courses and discuss potential teaching collaborations with her. Professor Anne McGuire, whose research interests include disability studies, is an award-winning expert in inclusive higher education teaching.
Dr. Cornelia Hähne and the members of the SING team (from left to right): David Jugel, Daniel Martin, Katrin Wesemeyer and Clemens Milker
The second prize was awarded to the SING project (Schule inklusiv gestalten – Shaping Schools Inclusively). The project is part of the Center for Integration Studies and aims to foster the development of inclusive teaching in schools. During the courses, teachers from subject didactics and special education specifically work to establish a link between their own perspectives. Students also examine, develop and evaluate teaching-and-learning settings during the courses that establish and develop universities and schools as places for inclusive learning. They are supervised by professional teams of lecturers from the fields of didactics and special education. The skills of the students will be collected and analyzed during the process/project in order to ascertain the effectiveness of the measure with regard to the development of teaching skills for inclusive specialist teaching and in order to be able to quickly implement adaptations into the teaching plan. The prize money will be used in the project to provide the staff with additional qualifications for inclusive teaching.
The award is scheduled to be continued in 2020.
Staff Unit Diversity Management extend their congratulations to the winners and would like to thank everyone who submitted nominations.
Contact:
© Crispin Iven Mokry
Head of Diversity Management
NameDr. Sylvi Bianchin
Send encrypted email via the SecureMail portal (for TUD external users only).