Teaching Lab

Institutes for Advanced Study provide space for research. They can also generate new ideas for teaching, especially teaching research projects. KWI is always open to students, and researchers at KWI teach at the UA Ruhr universities and Folkwang University of the Arts. In tandem seminars with colleagues from other institutions, we also have offerings for students in the cultural sciences.

The teaching lab is linked to different working areas at KWI, for example, the Network Researching Artistic-Scientific Practice. Among other things, this group will be devoted to the development of model seminars in the field of creative writing that could be implemented in various higher education settings.

Visual Literacies is a model project oriented towards teaching in schools, both training the ability of students from different types of schools to read images, and producing digital and analogue teaching materials.

From the perspective of literary and cultural sociology, the experiences of students are valuable: they embody patterns of use and consumption and experience with popular forms and genres, as well as specialized expertise that can enrich our study of art and media systems. Science studies and science communication research must also include students: they demonstrate societal knowledge of the sciences; they show how core competencies and cultural techniques of reading and writing are changing, and with them academic practices; and they can give important feedback on formats of science communication because they have not yet internalized routines of academic communication to the point that alternative possibilities are difficult to convey.

Since 2021, KWI also holds a writing weekend twice per year, offering doctoral students in the Ruhr area as well as from other German universities the opportunity to devote three days to concentrated progress on their own projects. The writing workshop is aimed at students in the humanities and social sciences, facilitating intensive exchange on textual work for doctoral students who are not part of doctoral research groups, graduate schools, or special research centres: in casual conversation and tandem sessions in which excerpts from the dissertation are shared for discussion, as well as in thematic modules, for example on science communication, publication challenges, and research strategies. KWI’s writing weekends have proven themselves as a space for effective immersion, combining subject-specific and interdisciplinary exchange with mutual support on issues of work organisation, networking, and career planning. Those who are interested are warmly invited to take advantage of this offer and recommend it to others.