Integrating practical experience into teaching
We integrate clinical practice into our teaching in a variety of ways: we take on temporary teaching contracts, organise visits to clinical settings and deliver lectures as part of our courses. Our practice partners describe their experiences as follows, for example:
Monika Schmidt, Graduate in Social Pedagogy (university of applied sciences), Head of the residential unit at the Protestant Counselling Service for Women; lecturer at Munich University of Applied Sciences for more than 10 years; Deputy Chair of the Professional Association of Protestant Emergency Housing and Offender Support in Bavaria; systemic individual, couple and family therapist (DGSF):
I am delighted to pass on my specialist and methodological knowledge to future social workers, thereby preparing them for the challenges of their day-to-day work and the needs they will encounter. I share with students my decades of experience in the women’s-specific subject area of social work, combined with theoretical knowledge. At the same time, I serve as a role model as a practising social worker. Through the supervised internship, students gain an insight into the various areas of social work, can try things out for themselves and gain guidance for their future career choices.
My sponsoring organisation, the Evangelical Relief Organisation in Munich (Diakonie Munich and Upper Bavaria), also greatly values my work and the links I maintain with the academic world, which I carry out alongside my managerial role at the Evangelical Counselling Service for Women in the inpatient sector. This enables changes and needs arising in practice to be fed back to the university, and allows contacts to be established and maintained.
Contact: Monika Schmidt, Qualified Social Pedagogue (university of applied sciences)
Lena Schuster, municipal youth worker for the Munich district, open child and youth work, mobile youth work at the Munich-Land District Youth Association; has been awarded temporary teaching contracts at Munich University of Applied Sciences since March 2020:
In my temporary teaching contracts at the university, I have many enriching experiences from one semester to the next. Guiding students as they gain their first practical experience, helping them to develop practical skills and shape their professional identity is a very rewarding and fulfilling task.
Furthermore, the students’ diverse perspectives and questions enable me to develop personally, to question my own understanding of the profession and to reflect on my working methods. The interplay and complementarity of theory and practice is always rewarding for me as well, and I greatly appreciate the freedom I have to design my courses creatively.
Ever since I started working as a lecturer at the university, I have continually been drawing on new ideas in my professional practice. When faced with practical challenges and developments, I often reach out to colleagues at the university to exchange views and develop new strategies for action. Today’s complex, multi-faceted problems require co-creative collaboration between a wide variety of stakeholders.
Contact: Lena Schuster, Local Youth Worker
Local Youth Work | KJR München-Land (kjr-ml.de)