Goodbye to Prof. Natália Alves!

End of Guest Professorship of Prof. Natália Alves 

On 16 February 2024, the stay of the DAAD Visiting Professor Natália Alves (University of Lisbon, Portugal) at the Professorship for Adult and Continuing Education officially ended. The staff as well as the students would like to thank her for coming to Würzburg and sharing her outstanding knowledge and perspective on the field of adult and continuing education with us.  

After Prof. Natália Alves has already been a long-standing partner in our annual Adult Education Academy, we were even more pleased to welcome her this time for an even longer period. This gave us the opportunity to enter into an intensive dialogue with her on various subjects of adult and continuing education.  

We were very proud that Prof. Natália Alves has chosen the Professorship for a guest stay since she has a comprehensive expertise in various fields of adult and continuing education. Especially in her main fields of research, which are school to work transitions and IVET and CVET policies, forms of provision and practices as well as gender studies. Prof. Natália Alves has been teaching and researching in these fields of adult and continuing education at the University of Lisbon for many years and is an internationally highly recognised researcher. Her academic qualifications and professional expertise are reflected in her extensive and successful research and teaching experience, which is why we were delighted to have her at the Professorship for the last months to give students the opportunity to deepen their knowledge in the field of adult and continuing education while taking an international perspective. 

We were honored that she offered the three courses “Biography and Adult Learning”, “Adult Education, Gender and Intersectionality” and “Vocational Education and Training”, in which our Bachelor's and Master's students as well as our Erasmus students were able to benefit and learn a lot from her knowledge. She also organised a workshop on "Researching Gender in Adult Education", during which many on-campus and online participants were able to gain a different perspective on this important research topic. Most recently, she enriched us with a guest lecture on "Recent trends in continuing training in European companies". At the end of her guest professorship, Prof. Natália Alves once again moderated a comparison group as part of our annual Adult Education Academy. Prof Natália Alves led the students and practitioners of her group to carry out a country comparison on the topic of "Adult education policy and gender equality: women in STEM education". 

After this successful semester, we would like to express our sincere thanks to Prof. Natália Alves for sharing her wealth of knowledge with students and colleagues. The impact she has made gets evident when looking at the following quotes: 

“What I particularly liked about the course was the passion of the lecturer regarding the topic of the course and how it made me reflect about aspects in my life and how they are the result of socialization.” – a student  

“I had a chance to learn about a new method that I never learned like this before, to incorporate my previous knowledge and to work on myself, learn from my own experience and emotions” – a student 

“I really enjoyed the interaction created during each session. There was no possibility to be passive. The method used by our professor encouraged us to be active, reflexive and critical about what we were learning. Also, the opportunity to discover similarities and differences from country to country, thanks to the international classmates, was really interesting.” – a student  

Thank you, Prof. Natália Alves for sharing your expertise with us! 

Thanks also to DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) for supporting the visiting professorship during winter term 2023/24 with means of BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research).