A question for Katrin Karl

Research and teaching – how do you manage the balancing act?

Balancing research and teaching is challenging. A professor of Slavic linguistics explains what exciting things can come out of it and why she values the exchange with students.

Text: Katrin Karl / Photography: Dres Hubacher 2024/01/21

When the start of the semester and the SNSF deadlines coincide again, this balancing act can be very painful – compromises seem inevitable. How can questions about individual language variation in multilingualism be linked with Polish language history? This is how things were at the start of the semester: Alongside developing a concept for a research proposal, I was trying to prepare Polish language change processes for teaching, and saw hardly any synergies.
That is until, in a meeting, a student asked how change occurs in a language and who is responsible for it. And there was the connection: Variation in the individual also takes place in language history, and then suddenly parts of my proposal were already integrated into the lecture course and met with great interest. You should simply try to take a fresh look at the interrelationships more often – exchange with students is very helpful for this.

About the person

Katrin Karl

is Professor of Slavic Studies and heads the Institute of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She conducts research into multilingualism and language in the course of life and transfers aspects of this in particular into the interdisciplinary project UnVergessen.

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This article first appeared in uniFOKUS, the University of Bern print magazine. Four times a year, uniFOKUS focuses on one specialist area from different points of view. Current focus topic: Studies

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