Sweden, Bulgaria, Germany: HSBI Students Experience Intercultural Exchange from Home

Bielefeld (hsbi). 877 kilometres – that’s the distance between Bielefeld and the Swedish university town Gothenburg. For Saskia Niebuhr, it’s only 30 cm: the distance between her screen and her. That’s because the student participates in a seminar at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Hochschule Bielefeld – University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSBI), which allows for a purely virtual exchange of Swedish and German students. Together with her international fellow students, she discusses global challenges in social work. Nevertheless, crises like the Coronavirus pandemic are covered, too.

An all-inclusive virtual exchange programme: “This makes us pioneers at HSBI!”

It all started with the Coronavirus pandemic. In 2020, students from the Faculty of Social Sciences had intended to participate in an exchange with Sweden, but the pandemic-related travel restrictions upset their plans. Making virtue of a necessity, Prof. Dr. Anna Lena Rademaker switched the entire organisation to a digital format together with her Swedish colleagues.

In the beginning, only bachelor students from Bielefeld and Gothenburg took part in the seminar “Social Work in Times of Crisis.” In the winter semester of 2022, the Bulgarian capital’s Sofia University joined the two. “We intend the students to compare how other countries tackle social crises and which role social work plays in this,” says Rademaker, summarising the seminar’s objectives. Rademaker, who is responsible for the teaching collaboration on the German side, teaches at HSBI’s Faculty of Social Sciences.

Discussing global issues in small groups

So how does such a virtual exchange take place? Rademaker likes to start her sessions with some smalltalk in order to create some proximity despite the geographical distance, followed by classic input from the participating professors from Sweden, Bulgaria and Germany. Subsequently, the students work in groups. These groups are composed internationally and are already formed at the start of the semester. Thus, students from all three countries always work on issues from the seminar together. As a team, they compose a blog post over the course of the entire semester, which then makes up their assessment. The blog post can cover any of the issues dealt with in the seminar and is intended to enhance the students’ intercultural skills.

For their international blog post, Saskia Niebuhr’s team chose a highly political issue: “We are examining whether refugees from Ukraine and those from African countries are treated differently.” In doing so, she and her fellow students compare how long refugees have to wait for their work permits and whether they may choose their place of residence in the country they have fled to. “Comparing different countries’ methods is really interesting,” says Niebuhr, reflecting on the group work. “We found that Sweden and Bulgaria both pursue refugee policies that are completely different from that of Germany.” In their blog post, Niebuhr’s team also write about the preferential treatment that refugees from certain countries receive: “We observe that there are first-class and second-class refugees.”

Cultural change of perspective as an enrichment in an interconnected world

Asked why it makes sense to deal with health in social work in the form of a seminar, Professor Rademaker answers, “Poverty leads to illness, and illness leads to poverty! Those who are at a disadvantage socially are usually also at a disadvantage when it comes to health.” Thus, participation of socially disadvantaged or ill people has to be approached in an interdisciplinary way. And seeing as illness and social discrimination is a challenge not only Germany is dealing with, the seminar aims to draw comparisons between different countries: “Social work is always global,” says Rademaker. “Students in the seminar usually experience a Eureka moment when they realise that social workers from all countries face the same challenges.” The seminar aims to put professional approaches of social work to social crises into a global context. The students see the bigger picture of other countries’ theories, concepts and methods, reflecting on their own local practice and receiving valuable impulse for their later work routines.

International differences and language barriers lose their importance during professional discussions

An internationally designed course like this requires a lot of organisation, starting with finding a time slot for the seminar that fits into everyone’s schedule. Different lecture and examination periods of the participating universities and country-specific holidays had to be taken into account, too. “Although the cooperation in this seminar is limited to Europe, the organisation is very challenging,” says Professor Rademaker.

But even within the mutual lecture periods, there were scheduling difficulties: “In Sweden, it’s just not common to offer seminars on Friday afternoons or Saturdays. The weekend is off limits and not intended for studies,” says Rademaker, describing one of the cultural differences.

The social work students also had to get used to the course being taught in English. “The English language didn’t cause any problems for me, as I had already taken part in Professor Rademaker’s virtual exchange with the Canadian university,” says Niebuhr. “But in the exchange with Sweden, too, there was a mutual understanding that no one in the group would make fun of language errors.” Her fellow student Lea Brosowski adds: “An entire semester in English was a challenge, but a welcome one.”

Of course, there were some technical problems over the course of the semesters, but they could be solved. “Although we had some initial difficulties, we knew from the outset that this virtual teaching collaboration would not be a one-off experience,” says Professor Rademaker, thinking back to the beginning of the Swedish-German collaboration. The students’ great interest in this course format has proven her right: the seminar is currently taking place for the fourth consecutive semester.

Aside from the international networking opportunities, Professor Rademaker sees other advantages of the virtual exchange: “The online course makes it possible for students who cannot travel abroad for financial or family reasons to gain international experience, too.”

From virtual to hybrid: adding an excursion to Sweden to the programme

Due to the seminar’s popularity, Professor Rademaker and her Swedish and Bulgarian colleagues are currently organising an adjustment to it for the post-pandemic period: in the ongoing summer semester 2023, the seminar will be offered as a so-called Blended Intensive Programme (BIP) for the first time, which is a kind of hybrid exchange. This means that after a joint preparation period in the form of an online course, there will be an international excursion to Sweden. In late May 2023, a group of 20 Bulgarian and German students will travel north. For one week, the students from HSBI, Sofia University and the University of Gothenburg will hold discussions, visit social institutions and work together in international teams, now face to face rather than in front of their computer screens at home. (cwi)

For more photographic material, please contact presse@hsbi.de.