Zoekresultaten

Crisis management and international mobility: what to do and how to do it?

The EAIE session will provide insights on different procedures in crisis management and international mobility. Different approaches to how to embed international crisis management within higher education will be discussed and the legal perspective in the form of Duty of Care will be reviewed. Also the connection between crisis management and international relations will be debated.

Collaborative approaches: studying horizontal and vertical working relations in schools and how they relate to collaborative-innovation practices

In Nordic countries, as well as in the Netherlands, schools have high school autonomy. In schools there are both horizontal and vertical working relations and all teachers and school principals within a school are expected to take responsibility for collaborative-innovation practices (CIP). In this paper, we describe a study investigating how both horizontal and vertical working relations relate to CIP. We used longitudinal questionnaire (2036 teachers, 157 schools) and interview data (53 teachers, 20 schools). These data were gathered in Dutch schools participating in the large-scale ‘LeerKRACHT’ program. The results show that teachers perceive horizontal and vertical factors to enhance CIP. Furthermore, especially school principals and coach-teachers seem to be able to strengthen horizontal and vertical factors which leads to more CIP. We discuss implications for research and schools in the Netherlands and beyond. Schools operate in demanding and rapidly changing environments. As a result, teachers and school principals are expected to continuously improve their school practices to maintain the quality of the education they provide. In literature on school development, change, and reform, there is an increasing emphasis on investigating how various educational interventions turn out. Some of these studies highlighted that interventions are sometimes an isolated activity of one teacher or a small group of teachers According to Vangrieken et al. in education, a strong-rooted culture of individualism, autonomy, and independence appears to be dominant. A ‘culture of collaboration’, however, has many advantages. This is also shown in research traditions of whole-school improvement. It can result in more ‘school democracy’ and more appropriate ideas and solutions for the challenges faced by schools. A growing number of schools have begun to initiate types of teacher collaboration, such as ‘professional learning communities’ and ‘data teams’. Such collaborations of teachers in schools can be called horizontal working relations. Researchers from Nordic countries for instance studied the horizontal forms of accountability and responsibility in schools. Consequently, international scholars have called for more ‘networked’ and ‘collaborative’ approaches. In the organizational literature, the notion of collaborative innovation is used for such approaches, which is characterized by both horizontal and vertical working relations. This notion fits within the broader field of school development research that approaches development as a collaborative process as well. Here both teachers’ working relations (horizontal) and working relations between teachers and school principals are studied (vertical). Studying both fits with the culture of The Netherlands and Nordic countries, which are found to be in the same cultural clusters, appreciating team-oriented and participative leadership, including horizontal and vertical working relations. However, in daily school practice it seems that breaking with the individualistic culture and changing to more collaborative-innovation practices is hard. We have an unique opportunity to study the relationship between horizontal and vertical working relations and the degree of collaborative-innovation practices (CIP). Since, in the Netherlands there is a large-scale program called LeerKRACHT that aims to stimulate CIP in schools (LeerKRACHT means “Learning force” and also “Teacher” in Dutch). The program expects from both teachers and school principals to collaborate and share resources, knowledge, and ideas and it thus asks for at least one manner of working together. The program is used by over a thousand schools in the Netherlands, and the data used in the current paper are gathered as part of a larger research project in which this program was evaluated. We study the degree of CIP in primary, secondary, and vocational schools with a mixed method approach both at the start and when working on collaborative-innovation practices in a structured way with the program ‘leerKRACHT’.

International Business Matters

Phd Thesis Higher professional education aims to prepare graduates for the complexity of professional practices. The development of conceptual understanding is important to deal adequately with this complexity, especially in an unstructured professional domain such as international business. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the concept conceptual understanding in this professional domain, how it can be measured, what it looks like, how it changes, and in what ways it differs between students. The dissertation comprises five empirical studies for which data collection took place at a university of applied sciences in the Netherlands.

International Relations

Interview in conference magazine

International collaboration as a patchwork quilt: experiences of developing collaborative practice and research in an international masters programme

The scope of policies within universities and professional practices is becoming increasingly global and more and more networks of professionals and researchers are conducting collaborative programmes and research projects. Translating these collaborations into flourishing practices is often more challenging than initially anticipated especially if there is an international dimension. In these circumstances participants often experience challenges triggered by power relations, differences in culture, contexts, and perspectives on practice and research. This paper is underpinned by an educational psychology perspective and falls within an interpretive paradigm. The metaphor of the patchwork quilt is used during learning and teaching seminars to explain collaborative practice and research because the steps involved serve as a useful visual aid for further comparison and reflection. Using data from four studies, we discuss the experiences of international participants conducting collaborative research over the course of an international Masters programme in Europe and the experiences of alumni of the programme attempting to conduct research after the completion of the Erasmus Mundus (EM) Masters Programme We argue that international collaborative practice and research take time, especially in the initial stages. They have the potential to support bridging and bonding universally and lead to enrichment and enhancement for the participants.

Keith Dinnie: bridging the gap between business and international relations