For me the concept of the teacher educator as a agent of social change, implies that teacher educators should be focused on stimulating change and improvement in teacher education, schools and society. That focus should not only shape our teaching of student teachers, but also our research activities. This has implications for the research projects that we undertake. When research by teacher educators intends to contribute to change and improvement of practices in teacher education, schools and society, our research projects need to be understood as interventions. In the design of PhD or other research projects, not only academic requirements regarding validity should be taken into also account but also criteria that contribute to interventions and change in universities, schools and society.Effective change is a collective challenge, which requires likeminded colleagues.
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In the Netherlands, and in many other countries, teacher policy and teacher education are strongly focused on ensuring that teachers meet certain minimum standards. As all student teachers need to meet these standards, teacher education programmes might put the main emphasis on the ‘average’ student and pay little attention to students who can perform better, which would lead to a middle-ofthe-road perspective on teachers and teacher education curricula. However, there is a growing awareness within higher education of the diversity of students with respect to their abilities and ambitions. In the Netherlands, there are initiatives to develop excellence programmes and honours programmes that recognize and accept student diversity. Such programmes offer ‘excellent’ students new challenges in the development of their excellence. But as ‘excellence’ is not centrally defined, higher education institutes can define the concept independently. Here, we present two examples of teacher education institutes that have developed honours programmes that emphasize excellent student teachers. While traditionally honours programmes in universities are focused on stimulating outstanding research performance of excellent students, in both examples a different focus is taken. The honours programmes in these universities for applied sciences do not focus on academic performance, but focus more directly on the roles of outstanding teachers in schools. One of these institutes focuses on primary teacher roles, the other on secondary teacher roles. Both use research in the content of the honours programmes and in the evaluation of the programmes. Here, an analysis of the two programmes is related to developments in teacher policy and the teaching profession with respect to teacher excellence, e.g. the recent recommendation from the Netherlands Education Council to nominate the top 5% of teachers as ‘excellent teachers’ – a recommendation that was received with mixed feelings by teachers, teachers’ unions and school leaders
Research-based teacher education can be understood in different ways: as a call to understand teacher education institutions as research institutions, as the ambition to educate student teachers to have an inquiring attitude, as the basing of teacher education curricula on the latest research, or as a combination of all three.In this chapter we reflect on a method of connecting research, curriculum development and practice in teacher education, presenting a case study of a conversational community of teacher educators and researchers. The aim of the conversational community was to understand the process of curriculum design in teacher education as an inspiring and practical combination of design research, self-study, collaborative action research and curriculum study by teacher educators. This process was supported by a conversational framework in which curriculum development was understood as an ongoing dialogue between vision, intentions, design and practice in the teacher education curriculum. Using the conversational framework in this single case study of a conversational community, we have tried to connect teacher education research, curriculum development and practice in a meaningful way.
Developing and realizing an innovative concept for the Active Aging campus in two years, where students, teachers, companies, residents of surrounding Campus neighborhoods will be invited to do exercise, sports, play, meet and participate. This includes, on the one hand, providing input with regard to a mobility-friendly design from an infrastructural perspective and, on the other hand, organizing activities that contribute to Healthy Aeging of the Zernike site and the city of Groningen. It is not only about having an Active Aging campus with an iconic image, but also about the process. In the process of realization, students, teachers, researchers, companies and residents from surrounding districts will be explicitly involved. This includes hardware (physical environment / infrastructure), software (social environment) and orgware (interaction between the two).
A world where technology is ubiquitous and embedded in our daily lives is becoming increasingly likely. To prepare our students to live and work in such a future, we propose to turn Saxion’s Epy-Drost building into a living lab environment. This will entail setting up and drafting the proper infrastructure and agreements to collect people’s location and building data (e.g. temperature, humidity) in Epy-Drost, and making the data appropriately available to student and research projects within Saxion. With regards to this project’s effect on education, we envision the proposal of several derived student projects which will provide students the opportunity to work with huge amounts of data and state-of-the-art natural interaction interfaces. Through these projects, students will acquire skills and knowledge that are necessary in the current and future labor-market, as well as get experience in working with topics of great importance now and in the near future. This is not only aligned with the Creative Media and Game Technologies (CMGT) study program’s new vision and focus on interactive technology, but also with many other education programs within Saxion. In terms of research, the candidate Postdoc will study if and how the data, together with the building’s infrastructure, can be leveraged to promote healthy behavior through playful strategies. In other words, whether we can persuade people in the building to be more physically active and engage more in social interactions through data-based gamification and building actuation. This fits very well with the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research group’s agenda in Augmented Interaction, and CMGT’s User Experience line. Overall, this project will help spark and solidify lasting collaboration links between AmI and CMGT, give body to AmI’s new Augmented Interaction line, and increase Saxion’s level of education through the dissemination of knowledge between researchers, teachers and students.
De robot assistent is een nieuwe, veelbelovende technologie om docenten te ondersteunen en leerprestaties te verbeteren. Echter, een moreel kader voor een aanvaardbare inzet van zulke robots mist nog.Doel Het doel van dit project is, het creëren van een richtlijn, in samenwerking met stakeholders, voor het toepassen van robots in het basisonderwijs op een moreel verantwoorde manier. Resultaten Het hoofddoel van dit project is het creëren van een richtlijn voor het moreel verantwoord toepassen van sociale robots in het Nederlandse basisonderwijs. Deze richtlijn kan worden gebruikt door alle belangrijke belanghebbenden, zoals leraren, robotbedrijven en schoolbesturen, bij het nemen van beslissingen over het ontwerpen, bouwen en toepassen van sociale robots. Looptijd 01 november 2017 - 01 november 2021 Aanpak Dit project maakt gebruik van de Value Sensitive Design Methodology. Ten eerste voeren we een grootschalig systematisch literatuuronderzoek uit om de relevante morele waarden te identificeren. Daarna houden we focusgroepsessies met belanghebbenden om deze waarden verder te conceptualiseren. Op basis van de focusgroepsessies zullen we een enquête ontwikkelen om kwantitatieve gegevens over de stakeholderperspectieven te verkrijgen. Deze onderzoeken vormen de basis voor de richtlijnen. Extra informatie Stel je voor: een robot die de leerkracht helpt in de klas. Interview met Matthijs Smakman voor De Nationale Wetenschapsagenda (NWA) Relevantie Bijdrage aan de wetenschap Meerdere studies benadrukken de dringende behoefte aan ethische reflectie en richtlijnen voor robotleraren en theoretisch integratie van de tot dusver bekende, gefragmenteerde resultaten. Dit promotieonderzoek beoogt dit te doen door het ontwikkelen van een nieuwe moraaltheorie over de ethische opvattingen die verbonden zijn aan de implementatie van robotleraren, en test de theoretische aannames empirisch. De resultaten zullen worden verspreid op wetenschappelijke conferenties, debatten en in tijdschriftpublicaties. Bijdrage aan de samenleving De angst en implicaties van intelligente robots die banen overnemen, maakt deel uit van een internationaal debat (Brynjolfsson & McAfree, 2016) en zal een grote impact hebben op de taken van docenten. Robotleraren zijn een perfecte kandidaat om te helpen leraren in hun toenemende werkdruk. Er moet echter voorzichtig worden omgegaan met het introduceren van robotleraren in het klas. Dit doctoraatsonderzoek erkent de morele overwegingen en zorgt voor de nodige theoretische basis om een richtlijn te ontwikkelen voor de implementatie van robotleraren op een moreel gepaste manier. De resultaten wordt via websites, videoclips en maatschappelijke debatten aan het publiek getoond. Co-financiering Dit onderzoek is gefinancierd door NWO, Promotiebeurs voor Leraren, projectnumer: 023.00.066 Aanvullende documenten en doorverwijzingen Publicaties Smakman, M.H.J.; Konijn, E.A.; Vogt, P.; Pankowska, P. Attitudes towards Social Robots in Education: Enthusiast, Practical, Troubled, Sceptic, and Mindfully Positive. Robotics 2021, 10, 24. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics10010024 Smakman, M., Berket, J., Konijn, E. A. (2020, October). The Impact of Social Robots in Education: Moral Considerations of Dutch Educational Policymakers. In 2020 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 647-652). IEEE. Van Ewijk, G., Smakman, M., & Konijn, E. A. (2020, June). Teacher's perspectives on social robots in education: an exploratory case study. In Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference (pp. 273-280). Konijn, E.A., Smakman, M. & van den Berghe, R. (2020). Use of Robots in Education. In: van den Bulck, J., Sharrer, E., Ewoldsen, D. & Mares, M-L. (Eds). The International Encyclopedia of Media Psychology. Wiley Publisher Smakman, M., Jansen, B., Leunen, J., & Konijn, E. (2020) Acceptable Social Robots in Education: A Value Sensitive Parent Perspective. In INTED2020 Proceedings (pp 7946-7953). Smakman M., Konijn E.A. (2020) Robot Tutors: Welcome or Ethically Questionable?. In: Merdan M., Lepuschitz W., Koppensteiner G., Balogh R., Obdržálek D. (eds) Robotics in Education. RiE 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1023. Springer, Cham Goudzwaard, M., Smakman, M., & Konijn, E. A. (2019). Robots are Good for Profit: A Business Perspective on Robots in Education. 2019 Joint IEEE 9th International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL- EpiRob), 54–60. https://doi.org/10.1109/DEVLRN.2019.8850726 Video Stel je voor: een robot die de leerkracht helpt in de klas
