Based on 13 interviews with Eritrean status holders and professionals in Amsterdam this article explores how paying attention to media skills and media literacies may help gain a better understanding of what matters in exchanges between professionals and legal refugees in the mandatory Dutch integration process. Media literacy needs to be decolonised in order to do so. Starting as an inquiry into how professionals and their clients have different ideas of what constitutes “inclusive communication,” analysis of the interviews provides insight into how there is a need to (a) renegotiate citizenship away from the equation of neoliberal values with good citizenship and recognising needs and ambitions outside a neoliberal framework, (b) rethink components of formal and informal communication, and (c) reconceptualise media literacies beyond Western‐oriented definitions. We propose that professionals and status holders need to understand how and when they (can) trust media and sources; how what we might call “open‐mindedness to the media literacy of others” is a dialogic performative skill that is linked to contexts of time and place. It requires self‐reflective approach to integration, and the identities of being a professional and an Eritrean stakeholder. Co‐designing such media literacy training will bring reflexivity rather than the more generic term “competence” within the heart of both media literacy and inclusive communication.
This dissertation aims to strengthen socioscientific issues (SSI) education by focusing on the resources available to students. SSI education is a type of science and citizenship education that supports students’ informed and critical engagement with social issues that have scientific or technological dimensions. This dissertation explores students’ SSI-related resources relevant to their engagement with SSI, such as their attitudes and social resources. The dissertation consists of four papers. The first is a position paper that introduces the concept of socioscientific capital and argues why it is important to pay attention to students’ resources in SSI-based teaching. The other three papers involve empirical, quantitative studies. Two questionnaires were developed that were used to investigate student differences regarding engagement with SSI: the Pupils’ Attitudes towards Socioscientific Issues (PASSI) questionnaire and the Use of Sources of Knowledge (USK) questionnaire. The final study is an exploration of the effects of SSI-based teaching on students’ attitudes toward SSI, considering socioscientific capital.
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Reflecting on the link between religion and religious tradition(s) on the one hand and school and education on the other, and reflecting on the reasoning strategy to make sense of this link, people seem to tend strongly to think, argue and reflect in a deductive mode (this point is elaborated in par. 3). This part of the argument is followed by considering the religious claims people make concerning the impact of religion on the day-to-day educational practice, it is, empirically speaking. It is apparently wrong to take this deductive reasoning serious as a road to undisputable and unambiguous links between claims and practices (this point is elaborated in par. 4). Having identified deductive reasoning as wishful thinking or as a supposed but inadequate religious legitimatization of educational practices, which is demonstrated by the empirical educational praxis itself, the final part of the article deals with the question that arises again and anew, viz. how educational practices could be understood in their connection to religious beliefs (see par. 5). Here a paradigm-shift is needed.