Students as Partners: Experiences of a ukrainian professor with collaborative writing and extra-curricular learning opportunities

I am Anna Gaidash, professor for German philology at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University, Ukraine. In March 2022, I fled to Leipzig due to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. Throughout my stay in Germany, I applied my teaching experience and skills in the framework of the Gastprofessor:innenprogramm Sachsen. Being a visiting professor at the Institute for Slavic Studies at Leipzig University for one year, I developed six seminars on Ukrainian literature in the English language, e.g., “Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Through the Lens of Women Writers,” “Ukrainian Literature in the Context of the World/Western Literature” or “Poetics of the Ukrainian Drama in the 20th Century”. Thereby, I received immense support from the faculty of the institute and its inspiring leader, Prof. Dr. Anna Artwinska. 

Bridges of understanding – new perspectives on both sides

My stay was fulfilling for both sides: the institute enhanced its Ukrainian component in the syllabus, and I gained international experience in lecturing and establishing academic connections between our two institutions. I was proud to lecture my native literature to the German students. When abroad, reading new fiction and rereading classic texts boosts the awareness of national identity. The German students were and still are excited about learning about Ukraine’s literature, history, and culture. Looking at Ukraine as a country defending democratic values against all odds, the discussions in the classroom were not only about literary works but also drove considerations of the staples of freedom and examination of imperialism and colonialism. 

It was inspiring to see how my students gained a broader understanding of the historical context and how it affects the current situation in Ukraine. Nathanael Wolff – a political activist studying history, cultural science, and Slavic studies at Leipzig University – participated in two of my seminars. He reflects on his learning experience in his portfolio project “Literature as a mirror of national identity: ‘Ukrainianess’ through the prism of Classical Ukrainian Literature”: “The seminar gave me an insight into how the emerging national identity of Ukrainians (...) was reflected in the classical texts of Ukrainian literature. This helped me to understand not only this literature but also the Ukrainian national identity itself. I am grateful to Prof. Gaidash for allowing me to gain this insight.”

Joint voyage of discovery: Intercultural research in Ukrainian literature at eye level

One of the successful results of my cooperation is a co-authored publication with another student – Monika Denk. She attended my seminar on classic Ukrainian literature and actively participated in the classroom discussions from the beginning. Her strong interest in Ukrainian fiction of the Fin de Siècle written by Ukrainian female writers of German origin became a starting point for further research. After a semester of fruitful encounters with the Ukrainian literature of the turn of the century, including new authors, literary trends, and analysis methods, Monika Denk began her scholarly research of the New Woman concept in the short prose of the groundbreaking Ukrainian writer Olga Kobylanka. On the other hand, I applied my expertise in American Studies to boost and somewhat complement her findings in the comparative reading of the analyzed concept in the short stories of Ukrainian and US-American women writers of the époque. 

What did our cooperation look like?

When Monika first became interested in the writings of the Ukrainian author, I shared some ideas with her, which she later developed into viable concepts for her course paper. My advisor role was mainly in further directing, encouraging, editing, and proofreading. Monika Denk did the research part for her course paper individually and gained essential research competencies, e.g., formulating a research question, interpreting literary texts, and drawing conclusions. 

Based on her course paper, I designed an article that strengthened and deepened the theoretical framework and fitted the results section to the academic journal’s requirements (condensing and abridging, sometimes extensively). While working together on the article, we analyzed the source texts from historical and cultural perspectives, considering the authors’ personalities. It mainly involved Q&A work in both ways, which can have an inspiring effect in that students’ questions and remarks compel teachers to research what has been accidentally overlooked. As a result of a year of consolidated efforts, we published a co-authored article in the Ukrainian open-access journal “Studia Philologica.” The article is an organic merge of our perspectives rather than single pieces of text prepared individually by each author.
 

Learnings from working with German students

I also had the opportunity to share knowledge about Ukrainian literature in numerous extra-curricular activities in which the students participated actively. One of the exciting examples was the  “Ukrainian Week 2023” – a series of events organized in the aftermath of the teaching year to consider its results. The week was devoted to exploring Ukrainian literature’s subversive power and the challenges of teaching during wartime. It was very interesting for me that some students shared their personal experiences of reading relevant texts in the Q&A section after the panel discussion on the transformation of gender roles in Ukrainian war literature. The students’ feedback regarding the event was considered for the upcoming “Ukrainian Week 2024” at Leipzig University Library, Albertina (November 18-22). 

The ties established between me and the students are based on partnership and work in both directions: questions, comments, and considerations of the young researchers helped me widen my current syllabi at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University. My next step is to develop a course on representations of Holodomor in US-American, Ukrainian, and German fiction literature. Looking back at my time at Leipzig University, I understood that German universities have become standard-bearers for their Ukrainian counterparts by sharing cutting-edge knowledge and research methodologies. On top of that, German students demonstrate genuine interest and enthusiasm in the learning process, which was revealing and encouraging for me, coming from a different academic environment with its own teaching and learning traditions.

Kontakt:
anna.gaidash2022@gmail.com
kathrin.franke@hd-sachsen.de