The Chinese delegation was welcomed by Vice President for International Relations, Ursula Reutner, who said she was looking forward to seeing the first tangible results of the agreement in the form of joint research projects, advanced training courses and the development of common standards for teacher education. Speaking after the Vice President, Professor Matthias Brandl, who is the academic spokesperson of the Teacher Education Centre (ZLF), also welcomed the guests and expressed the centre’s full support of the symposium as an important step towards internationalising teacher education.
Among other things, the conference aimed to further deepen the partners’ understanding of the school systems and teacher education in China and Germany. ‘In addition to promoting exchanges of university students and teaching staff, one central priority is to engage in comparative research in the field of teacher education’, said Professor Jutta Mägdefrau, who holds the Chair of Educational Science with a focus on Empirical Research on Teaching and Learning. Andreas Michler, Professor of History Education at the University of Passau, added that subject didactics play an important intermediary role between the fields of pedagogy and the subject disciplines, particularly with regard to teacher education research.
Subsequently, Professor Wu Weidong, Dr Shao Yanghong and Professor Zhang Kongyi from ZISU’s Teacher Education Centre gave extensive insights into both school systems and teacher education in Germany and China. The teacher education standards developed at the University of Passau were discussed, and Andreas Michler introduced the role of subject didactics. Professor Mägdefrau then reported on the preliminary survey on teaching quality, which had been carried out with German and Chinese teachers. Matthias Böhm, from the Chair of Educational Science with a focus on Empirical Research on Teaching and Learning, gave a presentation on how eye tracking technology could be used for education research, which met with great interest from the Chinese partners.
The symposium was rounded off by deliberations on the future roadmap for joint co-operation, moderated by Project Manager Janne Leino of Hanns Seidel Foundation, who intimated that the co-operation between Passau and Hangzhou constitutes a flagship project for the foundation which it fully intended to continue supporting in the future.