Prof. Heiner Boettger

When I graduated with a Master of Educational Neuroscience, I had already spent decades in education. Yet that degree marked the beginning of a new and transformative chapter in my academic life.

After completing my first doctorate in English Didactics, I worked as a teacher before moving into higher education, eventually becoming Professor of Didactics of the English Language and Literature at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany. Throughout my career, I have held international visiting appointments in the United States, Greece and Turkey, most recently at Stanford University in 2023.

Before enrolling at CQUniversity, I was already an established professor and researcher in English language education. However, I increasingly felt that traditional pedagogical frameworks were not sufficient to fully explain the complexity of language learning, especially phenomena such as speaking anxiety, resilience and cognitive overload in multilingual contexts. I was not seeking a career change, but intellectual expansion. Educational Neuroscience offered a way to connect language teaching with empirical brain research, and CQUniversity’s program provided the methodological depth and interdisciplinary perspective I was seeking while allowing me to continue my academic work in Germany.

The degree directly informed my second doctorate in educational psychology and reshaped my research focus, particularly in the area of English Language Speaking Anxiety and bilingual education. It also influenced my leadership practice and, perhaps unexpectedly, led me to teach subjects closely aligned with those I had once studied myself.

Today, I continue to teach, supervise doctoral candidates and conduct interdisciplinary research, including international collaborations. Most importantly, my time at CQUniversity reaffirmed something I tell my own students: learning does not end with seniority. Becoming a student again was both humbling and inspiring, and it continues to shape my work today.