Educational innovations often tend to fail, mainly because teachers and school principals do not feel involved or are not allowed to have a say. Angela de Jong's dissertation shows the importance of school principals and teachers leading 'collaborative innovation' together. Collaborative innovation requires a collaborative, distributed approach involving both horizontal and vertical working relationships in a school. Her research shows that teams with more distributed leadership have a more collaborative 'spirit' to improve education. Team members move beyond formal (leadership) roles, and work more collectively on school-wide educational improvement from intrinsic motivation. De Jong further shows that school principals seek a balance in steering and providing space. She distinguished three leadership patterns: Team Player, Key Player, Facilitator. Team players in particular are important for more collaborative innovation in a school. They balance between providing professional space to teachers (who look beyond their own classroom) and steering for strategy, frameworks, boundaries, and vision. This research took place in schools working with the program of Foundation leerKRACHT, a program implemented by more than a thousand schools (primary, secondary, and vocational education). The study recommends, towards school principals and teachers, and also towards trainers, policymakers, and school board members, to reflect more explicitly on their roles in collaborative innovation and talk about those roles.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the importance for university teachers to have adequate pedagogical and technological competences to cope with the various possible educational scenarios (face-to-face, online, hybrid, etc.), making use of appropriate active learning methodologies and supporting technologies to foster a more effective learning environment. In this context, the InnovaT project has been an important initiative to support the development of pedagogical and technological competences of university teachers in Latin America through several trainings aiming to promote teacher innovation. These trainings combined synchronous online training through webinars and workshops with asynchronous online training through the MOOC “Innovative Teaching in Higher Education.” This MOOC was released twice. The first run took place right during the lockdown of 2020, when Latin American teachers needed urgent training to move to emergency remote teaching overnight. The second run took place in 2022 with the return to face-to-face teaching and the implementation of hybrid educational models. This article shares the results of the design of the MOOC considering the constraints derived from the lockdowns applied in each country, the lessons learned from the delivery of such a MOOC to Latin American university teachers, and the results of the two runs of the MOOC.
Community Engaged Scholarship (CES) aims to develop mutually beneficial relationships between educational and research institutions and communities. In this project, we understand CES as a commitment to engaging in projects which acknowledge power imbalances and give space to discuss aspects of diversity, decolonization and inclusion with students engaged within them. With many projects being organized in the community as part of Occupational Therapy education, it is important to reflect on the ethics within working with communities, and the role of educators in facilitating them.This workshop is hosted by a group which aims to develop a resource toolkit for occupational therapy educators engaging with communities in education. The toolkit aims to facilitate critical reflection prior to and during community projects on aspects related to organizational issues and theoretical perspectives, as well as critically examining the curriculum, including the hidden curriculum. The workshop will present the findings of a pedagogical project which examined current experiences of students and teachers who have been involved in community projects as part of occupational therapy education grounded in multiple international settings. Participants will engage with the findings, discussing them in a fishbowl format and their relation to potential future guidelines for an educators’ tool-kit.
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"Taste Europe on the Go!" is a cross-sectoral international project in which we include two universities of applied sciences from the Netherlands and Finland into the successful project of vocational business college and restaurant service college partners from Finland, Italy and Spain.The project aims at learning about entrepreneurship in an international context through setting up pop-up restaurants in the participating countries. Every six months, one of the participating countries welcomes other participants to host a pop-up restaurant together. In December 2019 it was BUas' turn. A total of 50 international students and staff members from different countries united their entrepreneurial and cooking skills to serve international dishes at the Belcrum Wintermarket (Breda) of 2019.Vocational education needs pedagogical innovations to increase student motivation to complete studies, graduate on time and gain lifelong learning skills so that their capability to get employed with up-to-date knowledge and skills be better. In this project we focus on learning entrepreneurial skills using an eLearning platform and strengthening key competences in Vocational Education Training (VET) curricula by learning entrepreneurship in new way.PartnersPerho Liiketalousopisto (Finland), Mercuria Kauppiaitten Kauppaoppilaitos (Finland), Col legi Badalonés (Spain), Istituto di Istruzione Superiore “De Amicis” (Italy), Estudis d’Hoteleria i Turisme CETT (Spain), IPSAR “Luigi Carnacina” (Italy), Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences (Finland) and Breda University of Applied Sciences
