Padua, Erasmus Teaching Mobility — a short field report

After the first lessons of my Erasmus Teaching Mobility, I sit down for lunch on one of the shadowy benches in the Arabic-style garden of the FISPPA, the faculty of philosophy, sociology, pedagogy and applied psychology (psicologia applicata). A participant of my PhD workshop on practice theory highlights remarkable things about the city and the University of Padua, where I arrived only a few hours ago. On this Monday morning we have just had four hours (about 200 minutes) about practice theory discussing the problematizing differentiation between practice as routine and the possibility of creativity in practices. Five fresh PhD students and a doctoral student who was about to graduate filled the workshop with discussion and some very demanding thoughts. For the young PhDs the workshop was part of their introductory weeks in which they received inputs from different theoretical perspectives that they might be able to use for their dissertation. Most, but not all of them know Padua well, and there is really a lot to know about this Italian city:

Galilei has taught in Padua and Alex Harvey is said to have discovered the human circulatory system in the University’s anatomical theater. In fact, it is said that if there was a geographically fixed place of scientific discovery, of scientific progress, it would undoubtedly be a few kilometers to the left of Venice, in the beautiful city of Padua. That is why they particularly like the number 1222 in Padua, the year when the university was founded as the first public university in the world. This is pointed out quite often, because 1222 was just not enough to be the oldest university in general, which is in Bologna since 1088. Anyway, great for me that the University of Duisburg-Essen, where I work as a research assistant, has an Erasmus Teaching Mobility agreement with such a historic and huge (over 62,000 students) Italian educational institution. To have a better idea where to find the sociological department at the University of Padua, I made a photo:

After the lunch break, the very different PhDs, whose research ranges from urban ethnography in deprived Italian neighborhoods to the construction of shared memories of drowned refugees, take the next course, and I get to know the so-called “dottorandi”. This is a room full of tables and chairs, with a few desktop computers. It is made available to graduate students as a shared work place and has a small balcony. Although the dottorandi resembles a library reading room, the view from the balcony onto the garden (which also borders the university’s botanical garden) is impressively beautiful — and a great option for those who smoke among the doctoral candidates to spare walking downstairs in front of the Renaissance building. The building looks especially great from the outside. Behind the reddish colored walls in the picture below is the dottorandi. Still a little excited from the hours of English lecturing in front of critical peers, I take the most inconspicuous corner and practice my presentation on visual sociology, more precisely on the method of segment analysis. On Wednesday and Thursday, I will teach two sessions, each 4 hours, and I am quite insecure whether they will each be two-and-a-half hours of frontal lectures or not.

Despite my excitement, the dottorandi very quickly offers the opportunity to make acquaintance with staff of the University of Padua. A postgraduate student emphatically points out that he has earned his second master’s degree from the University of Oldenburg and is researching the transnational migration of Bangladeshi between Italy and the UK. He is a perfect match for my folder of the “Transnational Migration Summer School” that takes place at my University in Duisburg and I immediately hand the flyer out to him. Since he is looking for a place to do one of his two obligatory stays abroad: why not Duisburg?

Unsurprisingly, especially the time passes fast during such a stay. I stroll through the city on the warm late summer afternoons, looking at the Palazzo Bo, a building donated by the Venetians in the 15th century to the university. I find there both the famous pulpit of Galileo (an unimpressive and cheaply made wooden construction, allegedly financed by the students themselves for the rather short Galileo) as well as the strangely creepy anatomical theater, where often secretly and above all against the will of the mighty church corpses were autopsied in order to discover the secrets inside. Yet, from an art historical perspective especially the Giotto frescoes in the Arena Chapel near the train station are of great importance. In chronological order these paintings depict the biblical stories of Anna and Joachim (Maria’s parents) and Jesus himself. My favorite picture is at the very front on left. It is called “meeting at the golden gate” and old Joachim kisses his equally old wife Anna on a bridge after spending 40 days in the desert. Allegedly one of the first (or first?) love kisses of the modern age.

On Wednesday and Thursday, day three and four of my stay, I am giving my optional course within a seminar on visual sociology. My course deals with segment analysis, a method for hermeneutic analysis of visual material. On Wednesday we have a theory-based introduction with the title “Understanding Segment Analysis”. Followed by a more practical lecture named “Doing Segment Analysis” on the next day. With a small group of five master students and the head of the visual sociology course herself, working and discussing is great. Some of the participants especially like using the method in practice to get to know directly its strengths and weaknesses or difficulties arising from its use during the course. Only the unusual English working language is causing little problems for time to time. All in all, everything went well. I only missed going to Venice, there was just not the time for that and actually I wanted to spend the remaining moments of my stay rather in Padua, discovering each of the narrow alleys and its beautiful squares like the Prato della Valle.

From my experience, I would highly recommend doing a teaching mobility to everyone interested. I was able to make nice and perhaps someday useful contacts, to test and promote my teaching ability in English, and also to get to know a beautiful city. With some self-praise, I would also say that I was able to convey a little bit of excitement in my classes, so even an intellectual exchange took place that could be useful to my receiving institution and some of the students there. Anyone who thinks about doing a teaching mobility should, I think, deal with the priorities at the partner universities at an early stage and reflect them with their own core areas of teaching or research. It was also important for me to stay flexible and adapt to the ideas and suggestions from Padua’s university staff. Since my original plan to give a 16-hour seminar on hermeneutic image analysis was not possible, and it was not until further suggestions that the idea arose to offer a theory workshop for PhDs. Thus, having a few lesson options could be helpful. In my case it was good to have taken much time to prepare the lectures. After all, it remained unclear until the end, whether my teaching would be lectures or seminars. At any rate, it is unlikely that students will be able to prepare something, and for inexperienced teachers like me, several hours of lecturing in English is still quite a hurdle. But it is far less difficult than it sounds.

Thanks a lot to all involved staff at the University of Padua, especially Prof. Annalisa Frisina for all her great help, Fabio Bertoni, who welcomed me very warmly at the university itself, and Devi Sacchetto, who allowed me to give the PhD workshop on practice theory.