Educational policies in the Netherlands reveal that the current mainstream participatory approach to citizenship education jeopardises students’ autonomy. Especially in Dutch post-secondary vocational education, citizenship education has been shown to be mainly aimed at socialization: initiating students into tradition, internalising rules, societal norms and values. This article reports on the findings of a research project, which is grounded in the assumption that integrating Bildung, citizenship education and critical thinking is a promising way to grapple with the perceived overemphasis on socialization strategies. We justify the interrelationship of critical thinking, Bildung, citizenship education, and professional training from two perspectives – historical and contemporary. It is only by combining these concepts, we contend, that educational professionals can create teaching materials more geared to developing autonomy, and prepare students in vocational training to navigate the political and societal dilemma’s on the work floor. Furthermore, we also clarify our perspective by offering three educational principles, used in our project to guide the design of teaching materials, that form a context for integrating citizenship, critical thinking, and Bildung in vocational education. A practical illustration is subsequently discussed.
Action research assumes the active engagement of the stakeholders, such as the community, in the research, and a multiple level process of reflection in order to evaluate and monitor the actions taken. This makes action research a suitable methodology to increase critical understanding of the participants. In this paper we describe the challenge of teaching action research within the context of an undergraduate community health psychology module. The module was designed using principles from transformative learning, critical pedagogy and action learning. The module took place over one semester; and 15 (13 females, 2 males) students took part in it. We discuss the background to the module development and the alignment of the learning objectives with the teaching and assessment methods, and reflect upon the students' experiences in the module and the learning outcomes. We conclude by addressing the major challenges involved in teaching action research to increase critical understanding: the ability to deep learning of undergraduate psychology students; our role and expectations as tutors on the course; and the current higher education system in which action science yet has to find a place.
In secondary school philosophy classes students learn to reason critically about social and scientific issues. This study examined the effects of a whole-class, teacher-led philosophy classroom dialogue intervention on students’ value-loaded critical thinking. Value-loaded critical thinking is logically consistent, self-reflective reasoning focused on making moral value-judgments about what is right to believe or do. In a quasi-experimental study (N = 437 students) with a pre-test post-test design, we investigated whether engaging in classroom dialogues in which the teachers implemented five design principles for promoting value-loaded critical thinking and transfer thereof, positively affected students’ (n = 150) value-loaded critical thinking in transfer tasks. The results were compared to two comparison conditions: students (n = 149) who participated in regular teacher-led philosophy classroom dialogues and students (n = 145) who followed a regular 10th-grade curriculum without philosophy classes. Results showed that students in the intervention condition outperformed students in both comparison conditions on referring to moral values. Regarding critical reasoning, we only found significant effects compared to the students who followed the regular 10th-grade curriculum. Findings indicate that a specifically designed dialogic intervention can enhance students’ capacities in value-loaded critical thinking.
The project Decolonising Education: from Teachers to Leading Learners (DETeLL) aims to develop a multi-site approach for interventions towards inclusion and decolonisation in order to change the hierarchical nature of higher education in the Netherlands. DETeLL identifies the model of the ‘traditional teacher’ as embodying the structural exclusions and discriminations built into the classroom and proposes the figure of a ‘Leading Learner’ as a first step towards a radical change in the educational system. In collaboration with the education departments in the Theatre and Dance Academy at ArtEZ, the post-doc will build up a research and teaching programme that engages with students and teachers in the faculty to create a prototype of an inclusive and diverse educational practice. RELEVANCE: Education should be the critical space in which changes occur in order to shape best possible futures. In DETeLL’s acceptation, decolonisation refers to a complete change in the way of thinking and behaving. It does not refer only to the urgency of dealing with historical colonial legacies embedded in society, but also to the subversion of the deeply oppressive colonial culture that (also unconsciously) regulates public and private living, whether this is related to gender, race, class or sexuality issues. RESULTS: 1) Create a theory and practice-based scientific base-line of decolonisation and art education; 2) Provide a definition of ‘Artist educator as Leading Learner’ following a practice- based methodology of intervention; 3) Design and Pilot a new teaching programme for theatre education at ArtEZ to be then upscaled to all educational departments in a follow-up project); 4) Produce a strong interdisciplinary and international output plan: 3 academic publications, 2 conferences, 4 expert group workshops. NETWORK: ArtEZ; University of Amsterdam (UvA); Ghent University; UCHRI; Hildesheim University; Cape Town University. The partners will serve as steering committee through planned expert group meetings.
The PhD research by Joris Weijdom studies the impact of collective embodied design techniques in collaborative mixed-reality environments (CMRE) in art- and engineering design practice and education. He aims to stimulate invention and innovation from an early stage of the collective design process.Joris combines theory and practice from the performing arts, human-computer interaction, and engineering to develop CMRE configurations, strategies for its creative implementation, and an embodied immersive learning pedagogy for students and professionals.This lecture was given at the Transmedia Arts seminar of the Mahindra Humanities Center of Harvard University. In this lecture, Joris Weijdom discusses critical concepts, such as embodiment, presence, and immersion, that concern mixed-reality design in the performing arts. He introduces examples from his practice and interdisciplinary projects of other artists.About the researchMultiple research areas now support the idea that embodiment is an underpinning of cognition, suggesting new discovery and learning approaches through full-body engagement with the virtual environment. Furthermore, improvisation and immediate reflection on the experience itself, common creative strategies in artist training and practice, are central when inventing something new. In this research, a new embodied design method, entitled Performative prototyping, has been developed to enable interdisciplinary collective design processes in CMRE’s and offers a vocabulary of multiple perspectives to reflect on its outcomes.Studies also find that engineering education values creativity in design processes, but often disregards the potential of full-body improvisation in generating and refining ideas. Conversely, artists lack the technical know-how to utilize mixed-reality technologies in their design process. This know-how from multiple disciplines is thus combined and explored in this research, connecting concepts and discourse from human-computer interaction and media- and performance studies.This research is a collaboration of the University of Twente, Utrecht University, and HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. This research is partly financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).Mixed-reality experiences merge real and virtual environments in which physical and digital spaces, objects, and actors co-exist and interact in real-time. Collaborative Mix-Reality Environments, or CMRE's, enable creative design- and learning processes through full-body interaction with spatial manifestations of mediated ideas and concepts, as live-puppeteered or automated real-time computer-generated content. It employs large-scale projection mapping techniques, motion-capture, augmented- and virtual reality technologies, and networked real-time 3D environments in various inter-connected configurations.This keynote was given at the IETM Plenary meeting in Amsterdam for more than 500 theatre and performing arts professionals. It addresses the following questions in a roller coaster ride of thought-provoking ideas and examples from the world of technology, media, and theatre:What do current developments like Mixed Reality, Transmedia, and The Internet of Things mean for telling stories and creating theatrical experiences? How do we design performances on multiple "stages" and relate to our audiences when they become co-creators?Contactjoris.weijdom@hku.nl / LinkedIn profileThis research is part of the professorship Performative Processes
