Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Exchange between German and Southern Africa’s Students within PEESA II-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Exchange between German and Southern Africa’s Students within PEESA II

Published:2017-12-20 Issue:1 Volume:2 Page:175-182
ISSN:2391-8160
Container-title:Balkan Region Conference on Engineering and Business Education
language:en
Short-container-title:

Author:

Grünwald Norbert¹,Zaščerinska Jeļena²,Staak Anthony³,Munda Josiah⁴,Nesamvuni Edgar⁴,Chisale Paul⁵,Pfaffenberger Kay⁶,Pienaar Hendrik⁷

Affiliation:

1. Hochschule Wismar, Wismar , Germany

2. Centre for Education and Innovation Research, Riga , Latvia

3. Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town , South Africa

4. Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria , South Africa

5. Namibia University of Science and Technology, Windhoek , Namibia

6. Hochschule Flensburg, Flensburg , Germany

7. Vaal University of Technology, Vandebijlpark , South Africa

Abstract

Abstract The PEESA II project promotes the exchange between German and Southern Africa’s students in order to increase the number of highly qualified experts in the field of renewable energies and the quality of curricula developed in the previous PEESA project. However, the students are from different cultures and with different educational backgrounds. The guiding research question is as follows: How to organize the exchange between German and Southern Africa’s students who are from different cultures and with different educational backgrounds? The purpose of the work is to work out the organizational model of intercultural and interdisciplinary students’ exchange underpinning analysis of the students’ evaluation of their participation in an intercultural and interdisciplinary team. The research methodology comprises the study of the meaning of the key concepts of “culture”, “intercultural” and “interdisciplinary”. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates how the key concepts are related to the idea of renewable energies. Explorative study was carried out during the PEESA II Summer School in Vanderbijlpark, South Africa, in 2017. The empirical findings indicate that the students evaluation of their participation in an intercultural and interdisciplinary team is positive. Directions of further research are proposed. The novel contribution of the paper is the newly formulated hypothesis.

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

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