University On-Site: Employability and the Surroundings

Even in universities with a distinctive level of internationalization, a lot of students come from the city or region where the university is located. Moreover, quite a lot of those students wish to stay in the region after their studies. For the employability of these graduates, the knowledge about and experience with the peculiarities of the regional labor market are crucial conditions. Greifswald University in Germany is an outstanding example of a university in a rural, peripheral region. In the project “University On-Site”, we combine academic teaching with rural development policy in peripheral regions. In service learning arrangements, students of political and educational sciences not only learn to know the policy field of rural development and teaching as social service, but are part of rural development measures in a rural municipality in the region. This project is a flagship project of the "Social Village Development" programme of Germanys Federal Office for Agriculture and Food. In my paper, I first present the project as an example of practice orientation in academic teaching. From this starting point, I discuss the importance of regional embeddedness of the university for teaching and learning. More general, I conclude with some proposals how to consider regional peculiarities of the university's environment in course planning.