Over the past decade, the maker movement and in its slipstream maker education have attained worldwide popularity among educators, politicians, and the media. Makers’ enthusiasm for creative design and construction, using old and new tools has proven contagious, and is worth exploration and critical reflection by the community of engineering and technology education (ETE). This chapter describes what has been said about “making” by philosophers and educators; what maker education is, and what is new and not so new about it; why it has gained momentum; what the evidence is about its effectiveness and its possible weaknesses; and how mainstream technology education may benefit from maker education. This chapter concludes with ideas for a research agenda.
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Aim of the proposal and urban challenge it addresses* (max 200)The aim of this proposal is to develop an educational program with the provisional name ‘Care and Law’. The aim of this multidisciplinary educational program is to increase the knowledge of future professionals working at the intersection of health, wellbeing and law in the urban environment of Amsterdam.In the Amsterdam metropolitan society, legal and healthcare professionals (including social workers) are increasingly confronted with issues at the intersection of (health)care and justice. Special areas of interest are the problems surrounding people suffering from a mental illness, youngsters that cause nuisances of themselves on the streets and homeless people. The approach to this kind of problems requires a multidisciplinary approach. This means that healthcare, social welfare and legal professionals have to work together, for instance to apply for involuntary care. However, these professionals all have their own perspective and responsibility in these situations which often results in tensions among the professionals and as a result a delayed provision of care (van den Hooff, 2015).External partner(s) (if applicable) Project description abstract (max 750 woorden)We like to develop a new educational program in which students from different faculties work together on real time cases. At this moment, students at the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences and Law and the Faculty of Health are primarily trained in a monodisciplinary manner. They may be better equipped for their future work, if they get interdisciplinary training and courses. They need to learn what is meant by ‘Transcending Responsibility’; which means to be open to the perspective of the others professionals and to create a new shared responsibility (van den Hooff, 2015).In this project, we like to work together with and learn from the expertise of other members of the consortium to enhance the quality of this educational project. The focus of the present project is to develop a new multidisciplinary educational program surrounding legal and care related themes. The idea is to familiarize students with the legal contexts in which they have to operate (for instance themes related to pressure and coercion) as well as the welfare and care context in which the client/patient is situated (the care from neighborhood teams, youth care teams or mental health care teams). In addition, student might jointly develop integrated approaches based on case studies from the professional field.We like to be inspired, informed about and discuss innovative approaches which make interdisciplinary educational programs possible. Maybe it is possible to develop an international educational program with members of the consortium.
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One of the aims of the TALENTS-project is to create (interdisciplinary) learning communities in which engineering professionals, students, teachers, and researchers can learn together and collaborate as equal partners, within the context of authentic challenges, starting from their individual learning goals. To what extent are partners willing to participate in this partnership and under which conditions do they consider it to have added value? We conducted individual interviews with engineering students (N=11), teachers (N=12) and professionals (N=10) about what they require to participate in the learning community, employing epistemic, spatial, instrumental, temporal, and social elements of learning environments. We also inquired which resources participants were willing to invest. Data were summarized on group level in a within-group matrix, following these elements. Next, we employed a cross-group analysis, focusing on commonalities and differences. The most striking results were found in the epistemic, social, and instrumental elements. Respondents have similar needs when it comes to improving dialogue to formulate a challenge. However, professionals prefer to have more influence on formulating this challenge and its output, whereas teachers wish to focus on students’ development. Students wish to co-create with partners and they place importance on matching students with a challenge that aligns with their educational background and personal interest. To create an environment based on equality, students need traditional roles of teachers, clients, and students to be less apparent. Ultimately, almost all respondents are willing to co-operate as equal partners in the learning community because they can see it leads to added value.
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Energy transition is key to achieving a sustainable future. In this transition, an often neglected pillar is raising awareness and educating youth on the benefits, complexities, and urgency of renewable energy supply and energy efficiency. The Master Energy for Society, and particularly the course “Society in Transition”, aims at providing a first overview on the urgency and complexities of the energy transition. However, educating on the energy transition brings challenges: it is a complex topic to understand for students, especially when they have diverse backgrounds. In the last years we have seen a growing interest in the use of gamification approaches in higher institutions. While most practices have been related to digital gaming approaches, there is a new trend: escape rooms. The intended output and proposed innovation is therefore the development and application of an escape room on energy transition to increase knowledge and raise motivation among our students by addressing both hard and soft skills in an innovative and original way. This project is interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary due to the complexity of the topic; it consists of three different stages, including evaluation, and requires the involvement of students and colleagues from the master program. We are confident that this proposed innovation can lead to an improvement, based on relevant literature and previous experiences in other institutions, and has the potential to be successfully implemented in other higher education institutions in The Netherlands.
The pace of technology advancements continues to accelerate, and impacts the nature of systems solutions along with significant effects on involved stakeholders and society. Design and engineering practices with tools and perspectives, need therefore to evolve in accordance to the developments that complex, sociotechnical innovation challenges pose. There is a need for engineers and designers that can utilize fitting methods and tools to fulfill the role of a changemaker. Recognized successful practices include interdisciplinary methods that allow for effective and better contextualized participatory design approaches. However, preliminary research identified challenges in understanding what makes a specific method effective and successfully contextualized in practice, and what key competences are needed for involved designers and engineers to understand and adopt these interdisciplinary methods. In this proposal, case study research is proposed with practitioners to gain insight into what are the key enabling factors for effective interdisciplinary participatory design methods and tools in the specific context of sociotechnical innovation. The involved companies are operating at the intersection between design, technology and societal impact, employing experts who can be considered changemakers, since they are in the lead of creative processes that bring together diverse groups of stakeholders in the process of sociotechnical innovation. A methodology will be developed to capture best practices and understand what makes the deployed methods effective. This methodology and a set of design guidelines for effective interdisciplinary participatory design will be delivered. In turn this will serve as a starting point for a larger design science research project, in which an educational toolkit for effective participatory design for socio-technical innovation will be designed.
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.
