Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute currently has 6 volunteers - from the USA, Canada, Germany, Japan and Poland. They teach at the Institute of MMI, FSP, FL, PBF, FMM, FEA. Despite the war in Ukraine, they work with inspiration, generously share their experience with graduate students, undergraduates, and researchers, and help them acquire new knowledge and languages. Why did they choose this path and what does working with Ukrainian students mean to them? One of them, Constanze Otterbach, a DAAD volunteer from Germany, who works at the Institute of MMI and the Faculty of Philosophy as a German teacher, tells her story to the readers of Kyiv Polytechnic.
📰
My path to Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute was not direct, but at the same time not too unexpected. I began to gain my first experience in teaching German back in 2016 at Ivan Franko University of Lviv. The faculty where I was working as an assistant at the time specializes mainly in translation. Even then, I really enjoyed working with Ukrainian students. I think I got almost as much out of working with them as they got out of me: it was then that I started learning Ukrainian and became more and more interested in the country's culture. The students and I not only read and translated authentic Ukrainian texts and songs, but also organized guided tours in German of beautiful old Lviv, where the students showed us their favorite places and told us about them. These and many other wonderful memories have stayed with me to this day and motivated me to return to work at a Ukrainian university a few years later, this time as a lecturer, as by then I had already gained a lot of other teaching experience, including in integration and professional language courses for Ukrainian refugees in Germany.
Now at KPI, I teach courses in country studies and German as part of the preparation for the TestDaf exam, which is required to study in Germany. It's not just about exam questions, but also about discovering and understanding the peculiarities of German culture, in particular, the German university system, as well as many other small features of my country. I also take several classes every week at the Faculty of Linguistics - reading and speaking courses - as a supplement to the main program of study.
Although I am personally more familiar with the content of my own field of study, I learn about new areas from engineering students, and I am always interested to hear what they have to say about their seminars. Of course, online teaching does not offer the same opportunities as offline, especially when it comes to project work, but at the same time, this format has other advantages, such as flexibility and the development of media skills, which are essential for every professional in our digital world.
Even if for many Ukrainian students, after successfully completing their bachelor's degree, further studies at a university in Germany are not possible for various reasons, I hope that the knowledge I try to impart in the courses can still be useful to them in their later life. As a philologist, I can only say that it is always important to learn other languages, as it broadens one's horizons, opens up new opportunities for contacts, promotes understanding of other people and cultures, and, of course, can play a crucial role in one's career. Last but not least, it can also be fun.
Therefore, I would like to help anyone who is interested in my native language to learn it and motivate them to keep going, because it is always worth learning a new language and having another skill, as well as having a counterprogram to other learning content.