Program > Guest speakers

Michael Byram - University of Durham, UK

Michael Byram is Professor Emeritus in the School of Education University of Durham, England. He studied ‘Modern and Medieval Languages’ at King’s College Cambridge and completed a PhD on Danish literature. He then taught French and German in secondary and adult education. From 1980 he worked at the University of Durham in teacher training, in doctoral student supervision – with many international students – and in research on languages and education. During this time he was involved in workshops and seminars at the European Centre for Modern Languages in Graz and from 2000 became adviser to the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. He has lectured in many countries and has honorary/visiting professorships in China as well as in the UK. He is currently Guest Professor at the University of Luxembourg. His most recent authored book is From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural Citizenship and he has co-edited, inter alia, the second edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning (with Adelheid Hu).

"Internationalism, Service Learning and Citizenship in Language Teaching - Concepts and Implementations"

The starting point will be to explain a view of language teaching as a subject with potential to help learners to be internationalist in their thinking and to become active citizens. Intercultural service learning offers a perspective which ensures a theoretically well-founded practice and we shall demonstrate this - and how it is linked to an internationalist idea - with an example from recent practice in a project-based course at the University of Munich.

Petra Rauschert – University of Munich

Petra Rauschert works as a lecturer in the field of TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) at the University of Munich (LMU), Germany. She studied Modern Languages and Literature at the LMU and the University of Naples, Italy. Before she was appointed to a post at the LMU in 2012, she taught English and German at secondary school level in Germany and Brainerd, USA. With a research focus on Intercultural Education she gained her PhD on “Intercultural Service Learning”, an approach that combines formal learning and community service. She has been practicing Service Learning for ten years, involving secondary school and university students in local and international projects.