NAVIGATING UNCHARTED WATERS: A ONE-YEAR GERMAN-FINNISH FACULTY EXCHANGE

This paper describes the decision of two higher education teachers from Finland and Germany not to leave internationalization solely to their students and the exchange that ensued, which took place over the full academic year 2020/2021 with the enthusiastic support of the participants’ institutions, universities of applied sciences located in Turku, in the south of Finland, and Hamburg, northern Germany. The paper will reflect on our personal experience of the exchange and our perceptions of teaching-related differences between the participating institutions, alongside conceptions of pedagogy and their influence on the competencies we expect of and test in our students. Though we intended to keep the exchange as simple as possible, we soon learned that the conditions associated with health insurance and employment contracts posed significant challenges to our project. It was impossible to simply extend a one-week exchange, of the type frequently undertaken and familiar to the higher education scene, to a full year. The project raised numerous administrative issues in both institutions, neither of which had blueprints setting out how to tackle them. All these challenges notwithstanding, this paper tells a success story. While some of our approaches in relation to the exchange will not translate entirely to other settings, the key message remains: the exchange added value both to the personal lives of the families that spent the academic year in another country and to the organizational development of the institutions involved. The exchange additionally represents a good example of faculty development in line with CDIO (Conceive, Design, Implement, Operate) principles and of implementation of the new optional CDIO standard regarding internationalization and mobility.