Special Teaching Award
for the Geography Student Council
The Prize Money Has Been Well Reinvested.
In the summer semester 2022, the Geography and Economic Geography student council organized a lecture series based on the film evenings concept that won the special teaching award. The lecture series was entitled “How do we want to live? Geographical perspectives on the future” and it dealt thematically with geographical perspectives on transformation. The individual events were characterized by presentations of various topics by experts and a subsequent critical and future-oriented discussion. The topics ranged from “Post-growth processes” with Prof. Dr. Christian Schulz (Université du Luxembourg) and “Adaptation strategies to climate change” with Prof. Dr. Tillmann Buttschardt (University of Münster) to specific topics such as “Housing” with Prof. Dr. Sebastian Schiffer (Goethe University Frankfurt a.M.). The aim was to take up current discussions and problems, but also perspectives, and to offer an extended range of courses on these.
In addition to the lecture series, the prize money will be used to finance a soil nature trail. The educational soil nature trail is intended to provide background knowledge and make this knowledge visible at specific locations in the Aachen forest. It is being produced in collaboration with the Chair of Physical Geography and Geoecology. The nature trail will be used for teaching purposes and it will also be available to interested parties outside the University – including schoolchildren.
The prize money will also be used to co-finance the “River Living Lab”. The River Living Lab aims to make the anthropogenic impact on rivers visible in the form of an app. Among other things, the Living Lab deals with material pollution of floodplains, fluvial sediment dynamics (erosion-transport-accumulation in spatial and temporal resolution) and the challenges posed by climate change. The app will be used to expand and improve the range of excursions in geography and for long-term monitoring of the rivers in Aachen’s urban area. Students should be able to research hydrological and hydrochemical issues independently using mobile devices. This offer can also be used by interested parties outside the University.