Dear Prof. Naeve-Stoß, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. First of all, congratulations on your new position as the Vice Dean of the WiSo Faculty. Let's start with a few quick questions:
Coffee or tea? Coffee. Filter coffee or Latte macchiato? Latte Macciato. Nutella yes or no? Yes. Ordering in or cooking yourself? Ordering in. Summer or winter? Winter. Call or e-mail? E-Mail. Book or tablet? Book. Digital native or offline? Offline. Car or bike? Bike. Cologne or Düsseldorf? Cologne. Cologne or Hamburg? Hamburg.
1. You have held the professorship for business education at the University of Cologne since 2017. What distinguishes this work?
I am a business educator at the Institute for Vocational, Business and Social Education. And it is a great pleasure to work here because it is thematically exactly what I like to do: namely, to research and help shape vocational education and teachers. It's great that we have a degree programme here in which we are also providing strong training for the future, because our students will mainly teach at vocational colleges and thus become multipliers who in turn will accompany the youth of today and tomorrow in their development. And our team here is great: All in all, it gives me a lot of joy, and is enriching and very inspiring at all levels and with all the people that we are involved with, both at the institute and with the students.
2. What is it like to work at WiSo specifically as a woman?
It is an on the one hand and on the other hand. On the one hand, it is enriching because as a woman you can bring an important perspective to the faculty and are involved in many areas. That applies especially to the area of professors. You get a lot out of it, because as a woman you are in demand in all places and are involved. You get intensive insights and can learn, but it also means that you have to be available for a lot of things. And that is not always an advantage.
3. The title of your doctoral thesis from 2013 is „Study reform from a student perspective - individual case studies on the reconstruction of student perceptions, assessments and study strategies in the context of teacher training for vocational schools.“ Is the student perspective on the teacher training programme still a topic that excites you?
Yes, it is still a very current topic for me. I find exactly the students' perspective on the degree programmes overly important. We should try to tap into that perspective and understand it so that we can develop the degree programme further on that basis. That was precisely the time when there were major reforms, from diploma programmes to Bachelor's and Master's programmes. I did my doctorate in Hamburg. There we had this structural reform intensively combined with a further development of the content of the degree programme. And at that time we had the idea that what we developed there had to fit in with what students value and what they would also say they need from their own perception.
And we then found out that the perceptions of teachers and students do not necessarily coincide. In this respect, all kinds of innovations that we are now implementing in degree programmes, for example, that are connected with a good idea, can nevertheless, in inverted commas, "miss the mark" if they do not take into account the students' action strategies, goals and motives. That doesn't mean that you always have to adapt the study programme to the students, but for me it means understanding the students' perspective and then being able to enter into discourse about it and further develop the study programme on the basis of such insights. Basically, our students are the only ones who experience a degree programme in its entirety. I as a teacher only ever get to see individual modules.
4. You are also the editor of one of the most important business education journals (bwpat), what appeals to you about this job?
What excites me about this job is, on the one hand, the teamwork, because we are a wonderful team of vocational and business educators. This teamwork is awesome. On the other hand, it is interesting for me because we publish this purely online journal (since 2001) via Open Access. I think that's good because that was the idea behind the foundation, to publish online and accessible to all. We have been publishing articles for the science and practice of vocational education and training for over 20 years now. I am particularly fascinated by working with new formats. For example, I developed the format "bwp-Zwischentöne" with colleagues. Here we create videocasts and podcasts, invite guests and try to use as many media as possible. That gives me the opportunity to try things out and I enjoy that.
5. Was it a specific wish of yours to become an associate dean one day?
(laughs) No, that was not a specific wish of mine. I always wanted to go to university because I wanted to combine research and learning. In this respect, I wasn't necessarily aiming to become a professor, even though that's exactly what happened. But I chose the university above all because I want to work and shape this institution - in the areas of research, teaching and learning.
6. What exactly are your tasks?
A central area of responsibility, which is also particularly important to me, is the area of gender and diversity; especially to work on this sector at the faculty together with colleagues, to deal with central issues and to work on how we can develop further in this domain. That is a central thematic focus. In addition, the first vice deanship is a bit more open, because there are no other concrete functions associated with it, except that I represent the dean, of course. It is therefore a task that offers a great deal of creative openness and is very exciting, especially against this background.
7. What particularly inspires you outside of your profession besides your academic work?
Photography. Above all, it is the attempt to take different perspectives, i.e. to capture things in the world from other perspectives. And in this respect, you can sometimes find me lying on the ground. Or I climb up somewhere to capture something from above or lying down from below. I don't use any aids, because the actual change of perspective is important to me. You wouldn't have to lie down on the floor. But I think it's important that my eyes really take in the perspective I'm trying to capture. I actually photograph everything, but mostly nature and architecture, less people or interactions. This hobby is something that has really accompanied and fascinated me for a very long time.
8. The slogan of the WiSo faculty is Today's Ideas. Tomorrow's Impact. How do you see your future "impact" as Vice Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences?
Well, one impact I would like to see for the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences is that everyone experiences the Faculty as a place of open discourse, of problem solving and of working together on problems. In doing so, we should ask ourselves the question: What are future issues that we can tackle together - in research, in teaching and in discourse with society? The faculty should be a place of creativity and collaborative problem solving. That would be particularly important to me: to shape the whole without hierarchy at eye level, integrating, integrative. For my students in business education, I would like them to experience the phase at the University of Cologne as something in which they learn to reflect critically, in which they become people who are willing and able to shape things, so that they can later build a field of activity in which they reach people and accompany them on their development processes.
9. WiSo in three key words?
Discursive, lively and integrating. I don't know if WiSo is that yet, but it would be my image of the future and my wish.
10. Is there any piece of advice that you would like to give our readers?
To be open again and again - i.e. every day - to what one encounters; not to base what one encounters too much on one's own interpretation foils that one has developed, but to really encounter people and things with openness, to take them in, to see where "vibrations" arise, what resonates and to design together. And when designing, it would be important for me to have courage in the sense of dealing with mistakes in a positive and constructive way. I believe that if we don't make mistakes, it's a bad sign, because then no real learning process can take place. Mistakes show that we are trying something new, making an effort and developing further. Have the courage to do so!