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Cooperative arrangements

We are making a name for ourselves within the university through interdepartmental cooperation and participation in committees and project groups, especially in organizational development and postsecondary didactics. In close cooperation with other departments, we are involved in teacher training, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Religion (ZIR), the Marburg Center for the Ancient World (MCAW), and the Center for Gender Studies and Feminist Futurology. We develop and supervise interdisciplinary courses and modules, and center and elaborate theological issues in research networks within religious, cultural and ethical contexts. Our teaching and advising also take into account the needs of students from other departments and cooperating universities.

We always conceive of our collaboration in the department as cooperation in the service of students so that their rightful interests constitute a critical benchmark for any institutionalized consensus.

With the quality of our theological work, we also safeguard the value of degrees awarded in the past. The professional experiences of alumnae and alumni provide us with ideas for research and teaching today. We measure our efforts in creating a lasting network of relationships between ourselves and Marburg graduates by their commitment to our department and to Marburg as a place of study.
We want students currently studying with us to be able to recommend the department, because instructors and administrators fulfill to the best of their abilities obligations of excellence to which they have publicly committed themselves; and as a part of this commitment, they are responsive both to opportunities for cooperation and to students’ critiques. In cooperation with the university’s student associations, they endeavor to preserve the attractiveness of the Old University as a place of learning at Marburg by maintaining its structure with an awareness both of its traditions and of its fitness for the future. Together, we try to ensure through joint efforts the recognized quality of our student advising and tutorial/mentoring support in postsecondary didactics and in research and teaching as well as in assimilating new skills requirements for professional fields in theology.
We want to make sure not only that we inform future students, potential transfer students, students on temporary leave, and graduates alike about our activities in a responsive way geared to the target group but also that we include them in communication processes — especially online — and are able to modify the goals and benchmarks for our current performance processes.
We are developing our publicly accountable theology as a church leadership skill. With our perspective that is oriented toward an ecumenically open worldwide Protestantism and focused on the European and German challenges of regional church organization, we carefully cultivate our cooperation arrangements, which have developed over time and are legally regulated, with the regional churches located in the state of Hesse. We provide theological advice and expertise above all through participation in church committees, and we take seriously the binding professional requirements of the pastorate and other church offices. We strive for cooperative projects where we jointly define the expected skills requirements for church leadership duties, and we undertake to factor these in appropriately in the further development of our research and teaching programs. The Institute for Church Construction and Contemporary Ecclesiastical Art is a binding expression of successful cooperation in this area.

We also treat the state and the economy as partners with which we want to cooperate in shaping the institutional framework conditions of our study programs, to the extent possible, in further developing our teaching and research profile for future-oriented projects. This will become visible in the emergent changes in the pan-European standardization of university education and in forthcoming changes to the training of religion educators.