Where I work

Elise Glass, research assistant and PhD student of Prof. Dr. Eva Cendon, Chair of Adult and Continuing Education at the FernUniversität in Hagen.

Here I am a lecturer in the B.A. Educational Science in Module 3B “Planning and implementation of an educational project” and I supervise final theses. In addition, I am a member of the program commission of the BA Educational Science and of the rectorate committee for research and the promotion of young academics at the FernUniversität in Hagen.

Career

I came to the FernUni through a major project framing the The joint Federal Government-Länder Competition “Advancement through Education: Open Universities”. I was the project coordinator here and supported and consulted the funded projects. I was also part of the research team of the “German Digital Open University (GDOU)” project last year. Before that, I was a freelance researcher in the “Kompetenz 4.0” project and a lecturer at the JLU Gießen.

I was born in 1987 in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where I also went to elementary school. In 2007, I graduated with honors from the Sophie-Charlotte-Gymnasium in Berlin with a bilingual Abitur (German-English). From 2008 to 2017, I studied Educational Sciences (B.A./M.A.) at the Humboldt University in Berlin with a focus on Adult and Continuing Education. During my bachelor and master studies, I was granted a scholarship by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation which was followed followed by the Humboldt Research Track Scholarship. These scholarships as well as the involvement in many exciting projects as a student assistant and the support of various people have significantly helped me to continue and expand what I love to do most: research, read, write, discuss and teach.

This was important for me, because my son, whom I had right after graduating from high school, was joined by two pairs of twins during my bachelor studies. To sum up: I now have five (almost) teenagers at home.

So I am experienced with stress in some way. And yes, sometimes things turn out differently than you think. I had to put my first doctoral thesis on hold because I didn’t get a grant for it. And in the full-time project position I had afterwards, there was no time left to work on it. Then the doctoral position in the chair of Prof. Dr. Eva Cendon, who was also the superior in my recent project, was vacant. It was clear, I had to go for it. However, I needed a doctoral topic that was compatible with my new position. That’s where I am now – and I’m very grateful for it! So now I also commute every 2-3 weeks from Berlin to Hagen, which I also call an educational trip.

My references to my PhD topic

In contrast to the study group that I mostly supervise and that I am particularly interested in, I have (almost) been a classic student. Even if I soon had five children during my studies, I was still somehow fresh out of school. But a certain distance to the research topic can also be an advantage when doing research.

Already in my first semester, the idea of the Enlightenment struck sparks in me, and I am somehow still working on separating the concepts of education, learning, socialization and Bildung. The notion of Bildung is particularly important to me. And as I recently heard, this is a good point. On the one hand it exists only in German and on the other hand it is increasingly redefined also in areas outside of science (e.g. also as “Nordic Bildung”) because the territory is not defended enough – an interesting insight from a lecture at the Conference on Adult Education 2022 in Flensburg.

In my understanding there is a lot of Bildung in higher education – what it looks like and what makes it special, I would like to find out. Here I see clear references to epistemological discourses of professionalisation.

If you want to know everything in more detail, you can also have another look at my official profile of the Chair of Adult an Continuing Education. Furthermore, you can find my professional social media accounts linked at the bottom of the website.