Teaching Profile

Participation, reflection and shared responsibility are essential elements of Leuphana's teaching and learning culture. This culture and Leuphana's opportunities as a presence university open up spaces for encounter and dialogue. Dialogue – understood not only as a form of communication, but also as an attitude – serves as a starting point for joint development and shared awareness. In shaping these interactions, teachers and students share responsibility for the success of teaching and learning. Dialogue orientation as a field of interaction in educational development is intended to provide opportunities and impulses to initiate development and awareness.

Leuphana pursues a complex and broad understanding of digital teaching that goes beyond the classical understanding of e-learning. Digital teaching includes learning arrangements such as the provision of learning architecture and environment, learning materials and learning activities, as well as the processes of planning, implementing and evaluating teaching and learning, the production and distribution of multimedia content, and the support and facilitation of communication, cooperation and collaboration.

Digital technologies offer great opportunities to strengthen university teaching, but they can also be disruptive if universities do not critically examine the "new" possibilities and programmatically relate them to their qualification goals and mission statements. With this understanding of the digital challenge, Leuphana connects directly to its basic idea of a transformative university that actively shapes societal and university changes in order to turn disruption into transformation.

Diversity as a learning opportunity fosters the growth of knowledge and competence, it strengthens the personal development to which Leuphana as a humanistic university is committed in its mission statement, and through the training of diversity competence can promote the ability to solve social problems and the willingness to assume social responsibility in a pluralistic society, which Leuphana as a sustainable and action-oriented university strives to achieve.

A broad understanding of diversity is pursued in the development of teaching. Diversity in terms of personnel as well as differences in access and prerequisites for study and teaching are taken into account. Diversity has many facets and manifests itself in different ways; it encompasses differences as well as similarities.

The design of teaching requires special forms of learning to promote interaction between theory, academic and social practice. However, experiential learning means more than the collection of practical work experience. Rather, it places students at the centre of their own learning and transfer process through reflection on their individual experiences and personal development. Since learning processes take place not only in traditional courses, but also in many aspects of campus life, experiential teaching provides a framework in which teaching can be thought together with Leuphana's extracurricular offerings - from student counselling and the Social Change Hub to the Career Service and alumni networks.

Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are prominent concepts not only in research but also in teaching at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are at the heart of the university's strategy through its specific study model with its inherent interdisciplinary courses in the schools. This is based on the conviction that the established academic subjects (disciplines) require interdisciplinary supplementation in order to do justice to the complexity of academic topics and social challenges.