Re-Imagining Community

We believe that the community building should put the main attention on staff and professional development – always including academic and non-academic staff. This is why we place specific emphasis on staff, since this is where identity and the feeling of belonging are fostered in a durable fashion.
The main activities are located in the field of staff capacity building, language policy, mobility and diversity. More precisely, we are focusing on four specific targets:

• Empowering academic and non-academic staff: non-academic staff (university services) as well as professors and researchers are considered as an underused leverage tool of the European mobility project and are therefore taken as the main starting point of our ERUA staff empowerment actions. We achieve this through activities such as an intercultural training module for non-academic staff in all partner universities and opportunities for exchange on the administration, the teaching, and the research level.
• We strive for an intelligent mix of different forms of virtual and physical mobility: We are devoting substantial resources to the promotion of “Internationalisation@home” by offering virtual teaching and learning experiences to our students and staff. At the same time, we focus on short-term study programmes at our universities in order to give opportunities for physical mobility to all groups of students and staff and to provide new types of mobility tailored to their respective needs.
• Sharing a common strategy on language policy: we are fostering the national languages of the consortium, our goal being a multilingual language policy reflecting the diversity of both our alliance and the student and staff body. This includes concrete measures such as online language training, language tandems, or on-site language courses to name but a few.
• Enhancing diversity: dealing with highly diverse student and staff bodies, we are focusing on standardizing support structures for all students and staff with special needs as well as persecuted researchers and refugee students