Nomination Best Research & Practice Project Award at the EAPRIL conference, Jyväskylä, Finland. Hybrid forms of learning environments in vocational education are central to the two projects of this application: a design-oriented, applied research project from the Centre for Expertise in Vocational Education (ecbo-project) and an educational innovation/practitioner-research project (hpboproject). A PhD-research project is closely related.
Innovation is crucial for higher education to ensure high-quality curricula that address the changing needs of students, labor markets, and society as a whole. Substantial amounts of resources and enthusiasm are devoted to innovations, but often they do not yield the desired changes. This may be due to unworkable goals, too much complexity, and a lack of resources to institutionalize the innovation. In many cases, innovations end up being less sustainable than expected or hoped for. In the long term, the disappointing revenues of innovations hamper the ability of higher education to remain future proof. Against the background of this need to increase the success of educational innovations, our colleague Klaartje van Genugten has explored the literature on innovations to reveal mechanisms that contribute to the sustainability of innovations. Her findings are synthesized in this report. They are particularly meaningful for directors of education programs, curriculum committees, educational consultants, and policy makers, who are generally in charge of defining the scope and set up of innovations. Her report offers a comprehensive view and provides food for thought on how we can strive for future-proof and sustainable innovations. I therefore recommend reading this report.
Maker education offers opportunities to stimulate the creativity of young people in various types of education. How to guide these learning processes, however, is an unexplored area for the supervisors (teachers and librarians). In the research-project presented, a professional learning community of librarians, teacher-researchers and maker educators investigates the pedagogy of ‘making’. The learning community consisted of twelve makerspace-coaches, three maker educators and three researchers. The interventions for enhancing creativity that were developed varied from redesign of the tasks to new forms of guiding students. It was noticed that the children came up with new ideas and were motivated to push out their frontiers. Furthermore, the coaches experienced that children’s creativity is not always visible in the final products of their making process, but rather in the process of making. The learning community turned out to be a fruitful approach for professionalization of makerspace-coaches.
MULTIFILE
