Cooperation Germany-Israel (CoGI)

The German-Israeli university project is a university cooperation project in its 8th year, which serves the digitalization, internationalization and cultural sensitization of student teachers in teacher training. In the project, 80 student teachers from the University of Kassel, Germany and Talpiot Academic College, Kibbutzim College of Education and Arab College for Education, Israel work together in a virtual classroom in fixed groups over a semester. Kibbutzim College is the largest teacher training college and a driving force behind digitization in Israel.

The unique selling point of the project is the authentically motivated, interdisciplinary, international and intercultural collaboration of both students and teachers via a digital learning platform. The project brings together Jewish and Arab students and teachers in Israel as well as a diversified group of students and teachers at the University of Kassel, creating an important bridge between languages and cultures.

All teachers and the tutors supporting the project meet weekly online in a digital conference room via Unicko to discuss the project step by step, plan it, implement it in the platform and evaluate previous steps.

The selection of the group members is done systematically and purposefully under the aspect of bringing together diverse students who otherwise usually study separately at the universities or, if they are overlapping institutions, rarely form a joint scientific working group over a longer period of time. As a rule, 4 to 6 students work together in a media- and technology-supported learning environment and develop creative approaches to solutions to a real problem they have discovered themselves on the topic of "Educational Initiatives". The implementation takes place via a multilingual website jointly constructed by the group with numerous interactive elements.

Deliberately, a digital phase of several weeks takes place. During this time, a group cohesion with regard to one's own group is formed through the joint work. Only afterwards do the group members get to know each other directly in an online conference or, as was possible in the Sommersmeter 2018 through an excursion, in a face-to-face conference. Each group consists of Jewish and Arab students from Israel as well as German and international students from Kassel. In the student small groups, each university is represented by at least one person each (Jewish, Arab, German with and without a migration background, and international students). The multilingual student and faculty groups, composed across Hebrew, Arabic, German, and English, and in some cases Spanish, communicate via English as the lingua franca.