Visiting faculty testimonial: Maria-Elena Gronemeyer
Read about Professor Maria-Elena Gronemeyer's visiting scholar exchange from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile to Universität Hamburg in late June, 2016.
Report by Maria-Elena Gronemeyer, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, (UC).
"The value of such an exchange is to have the permanent opportunity to meet students and teachers and to know about their fields of study and teaching."
Mundus Journalism Visiting Professor at Universität Hamburg, June-July 2016
In my two-week visit to the Department of Communications at Universität Hamburg I met my host Monika Pater with whom I coordinated my activities in the university and was accompanied by her in most of them.
As the academic coordinator of the Mundus Journalism master programme at UC, it was important for me to have the opportunity to meet several times to exchange points of views on the development of the programme and to discuss ways to strengthen the academic relationships between the participating universities. We even had the time to discuss with Monika and Prof. Irene Neverla how to deal with the case of a specific Mundus Journalism student who was having academic and personal problems during her stay in UC.
We discussed the need for more focused work from visiting professors with the Mundus Journalism students and local professors involved in the Mundus Journalism programme. For this, we considered it important to promote fewer but longer stays from the visiting professors during lectures time. A concern was also to work on concreted initiatives to do collaborative international research.
In order to begin acting on this, I met professor Michael Brüggemann and we evaluated the possibility of working in a joined research project and I invited him to come to UC as a visiting professor in 2017 to personally meet students and researchers from our Communications Department. I also met professor Irene Neverla and we discussed the possibility for her to come to UC in 2017 too to meet students and professors during academic activities with masters’ and graduate students. In addition to these formally scheduled meetings, the value of such an exchange is to have the permanent opportunity to meet students and teachers and to know about their fields of study and teaching. This leads to mutual enrichment and permits the detection of possible scenarios for future joint work, which is one of the fundamental goals of the international study programmes.
Furthermore, during my stay in Universität Hamburg I had a chance to meet EM students and to know about their research projects in a Methods Workshop on data analysis and interpretation of results with respect to the hypothesis and research questions led by Monika Pater. I also was able to share my research project -Trends in news coverage of politics and government: an analysis of homogeneity and framing in the Chilean press - and to discuss it with graduate students and their professors during a Graduate School Media and Communication (GMaC) Colloquium led by Professor Uwe Hasebrink, and later with professors from the Communications Department in a seminar.