Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Exchange between German and Southern Africa's Students within PEESA II

Abstract

The PEESA II project promotes the exchange between German and Southern Africa's students in order to increase the number of highly qualified experts in the field of renewable energies and the quality of curricula developed in the previous PEESA project. However, the students are from different cultures and with different educational backgrounds. The guiding research question is as follows: How to organize the exchange between German and Southern Africa's students who are from different cultures and with different educational backgrounds? The purpose of the work is to work out the organizational model of intercultural and interdisciplinary students' exchange underpinning analysis of the students' evaluation of their participation in an intercultural and interdisciplinary team. The research methodology comprises the study of the meaning of the key concepts of "culture", "intercultural" and "interdisciplinary". Moreover, the analysis demonstrates how the key concepts are related to the idea of renewable energies. Explorative study was carried out during the PEESA II Summer School in Vanderbijlpark, South Africa, in 2017. The empirical findings indicate that the students evaluation of their participation in an intercultural and interdisciplinary team is positive. Directions of further research are proposed. The novel contribution of the paper is the newly formulated hypothesis.