This chapter focuses on some of the opportunities and challenges of shifting power relations for musicians, through the particular lens of western classical musicians engaged in researching a participatory music practice in a hospital in the Netherlands. It provides some context to power relations in the field of professional music making. From such a holistic perspective, power relations that musicians experience are likely to shift as they move from the conventions of the concert stage to the context of a hospital ward. Power relations in the western classical music tradition, and professional education associated with it, are clearly strongly embedded within the cultural systems, albeit often at tacit levels and partly obscured by a dominating focus on “artistic quality”. The co-existence of such authorial and collaborative strategies to help steer through the power relations appears throughout the rest of the visit, to the point where it is hard to distinguish between them.
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According to Confucianism, guanxi as inter-familial relations, forms the important foundation in a social system that is built through mutual commitments, reciprocity and trust.
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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’.
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The aim of this paper is to present materials designed for adult numeracy training. In the successive Erasmus+ projects, "The Common European Numeracy Framework" (2018-2021) and "Numeracy in Practice" (2022-2024), professional development modules have been designed for teachers specialising in adult numeracy education. The primary objective of these modules is to enhance teacher awareness of the competencies required for teaching numeracy and to address the changing demands of numeracy in adults’ personal and professional lives.
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Due to fast and unpredictable developments, professional education is challenged with being responsive, which demands a rethinking of conventional curriculum development approaches. Yet, literature on curriculum development falls short in terms of recognising how to react rapidly and adequately to these new developments. This study focuses on curriculum development initiatives at the school level in a Dutch university of applied sciences. Open interviews were held with 29 curriculum developers to explore how they define and give substance to developing curricula for new, changing or unpredictable professions. These 29 participants were involved in seven curriculum development trajectories. Four themes were detected: (1) curriculum developers are in favour of open, flexible and authentic curricula; (2) the context in which the curriculum development takes place and the different roles and responsibilities of curriculum developers are challenging; (3) curriculum developers feel insufficiently equipped to carry out their tasks; and (4) involving stakeholders is necessary but results in a “viscous” social–political process. Responsive curriculum development requires a great deal of flexibility and adaptability from curriculum developers. Yet, in our study, “institutional concrete” is found to severely hinder responsive curriculum development processes. To be responsive, such processes need to be supported and institutional barriers need to be removed.
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The importance of professional skills in future engineering jobs is beyond discussion. Increasing numbers of universities have integrated training for such skills in their engineering curricula to prepare students to become highly qualified employees. HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht also implemented professional skills training in the IT Bachelor program to help our students develop towards successful and highly demanded IT engineers. However, these courses consistently score low in our student satisfaction surveys. To find the cause of this negative evaluation, we previously studied the motivation, attitude and anxiety of IT students towards learning soft, or professional, skills. This former quantitative study indicates that our IT students tend to have a positive motivation and attitude toward learning professional skills, while ’anxiety’ in learning professional skills increases from the first to the third year. In this qualitative study, we try to find causes for the increasing anxiety among IT students. We interviewed six third and fourth year IT students and after analysing these interviews we found that these students have experienced the need for professional skills during their internship. Besides, they emphasize the need of obtaining these skills for future employment. From the analysis of the interviews, it also appears that IT students rather felt difficulty in obtaining communication skills then anxiety. A possible cause for this difficulty mentioned by students was the character of students and the influence of the teacher. To overcome this difficulty obtaining communication skills, students suggested that training skills in an authentic engineering situation is more effective than doing exercises with simulated cases. However, the results of this study did not yield a conclusive insight in the cause of increased anxiety, hence further research is needed.
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The professional development of teacher educators is increasingly being recognised as a topic of paramount importance. This is partly caused by the stronger emphasis on improving the quality of teacher education programs and as a consequence on attention for the lifelong learning of those responsible for teaching the student teachers. But also teacher educators themselves show a greater interest in their own professional development, which is reflected in the rise of publications on this topic. A number of studies have been devoted to teacher educators' professional development, with the emphasis on induction of teacher educators. The attention for professional development beyond the induction stage is recently increasing but studies that allow international comparison of further professional development practices are rather scarce. The RDC Professional Development of Teacher Educators conducted an explorative study to deepen our understanding in this area. The main research theme of this study concerns teacher educators' professional development activities and how these contribute to the further development of their qualities and the kinds of factors (person-related and institute-related) that contribute, positively or negatively, to their professional development. Special attention is paid to exploring possible country-specific differences concerning professional development. The study focused on experienced teacher educators with at least 5 years and no more than 20 years experience as a teacher educator. In total 11 teacher educators stemming from different countries were included in the study. Participants were recruited from RDC members' personal networks. The interviewees work in six different countries, five are from Israel, one is from The Netherlands, one from Czech Republic, one from Australia, two from Slovenia and one from England. It was decided to opt for a highly structured interview guideline that ensures sufficient opportunities for comparison between the interviewees' answers. Existing research instruments were inspected and all RDC members were involved in the process of composing the interview guideline. Topics for its content were discussed during the RDC meetings at the 2009 ATEE Conference at Majorca, and later on members were invited to provide feedback by e-mail on the draft version. The first set of 11 interview reports will be discussed during the RDC meetings of the 2010 ATEE conference in Budapest. At this moment the analysis of the interview data takes place which is conducted by two researchers, and this will be followed by an interpretation of its outcomes by all authors involved in this paper. The analysis focuses on describing similarities and differences and on exploring the factors contributing to teacher educators' professional development. The presentation provide the main outcomes of the study and discussion on its implications for improving practice and further research.
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The artcle describes the outcomes of a pilot study on professional development of teachers. The project was initiated by the school management. Nine teachers volunteered to work on their professional development in a programme consisting of: meetings discussing on relevant teacher topics meetings discussing video fragments of own performances meetings exploring ways to coach each other and how to use videotapes for feedback peer-coaching-sessions in small groups. Within these groups three teachers took turns in different roles: trainee, coach and observer. Aims of the study are: to develop a coaching programme, to describe extensively the process and the outcomes in order to identify the main factors influencing the learning processes of teachers in peer coaching settings with video feedback.
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Teacher professional identity is conceptualized in this chapter as a complex configuration of personal and contextual factors. Professional identity is also seen as dynamic and subject to change. This coloring of the concept leads here to a specific elaboration of research with regard to (student) teachers’ identity formation. This research then focuses on (student) teachers working on issues arising from tensions between the personal and the contextual, the ways in which they position themselves toward relevant others, the impact of the micropolitical reality of the school on their functioning and well-being, and the role so-called “stories to live by” play in their work. The operationalization of the concept is illustrated by two studies in which the complexity and uniqueness of (the development of) professional identity have been investigated using narrative methods and techniques. This chapter also distinguishes between two different but related internal processes that are important in teacher education, namely professional learning internalizing knowledge and skills that are generally found to be relevant for the profession, i.e., teaching competence) and identity formation (a personal process of validating learning experiences in light of one’s “image-ofself-as-teacher,” that is, the teacher that one is and wants to become). It is argued that both processes can reinforce and enrich each other and, as such, will result in a more comprehensive and coherent framework for understanding teachers’ professional work and their development as teachers. An attempt is made to present both internal processes in an overarching model, referred to here as “framework of professional identity learning.” The chapter concludes with suggestions for (follow-up) research.
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The energy management systems industry in the built environment is currently an important topic. Buildings use about 40% of the total global energy worldwide. Therefore, the energy management system’s sector is one of the most influential sectors to realize changes and transformation of energy use. New data science technologies used in building energy management systems might not only bring many technical challenges, but also they raise significant educational challenges for professionals who work in the field of energy management systems. Learning and educational issues are mainly due to the transformation of professional practices and networks, emerging technologies, and a big shift in how people work, communicate, and share their knowledge across the professional and academic sectors. In this study, we have investigated three different companies active in the building services sector to identify the main motivation and barriers to knowledge adoption, transfer, and exchange between different professionals in the energy management sector and explore the technologies that have been used in this field using the boundary-crossing framework. The results of our study show the importance of understanding professional learning networks in the building services sector. Additionally, the role of learning culture, incentive structure, and technologies behind the educational system of each organization are explained. Boundary-crossing helps to analyze the barriers and challenges in the educational setting and how new educational technologies can be embedded. Based on our results, future studies with a bigger sample and deeper analysis of technologies are needed to have a better understanding of current educational problems.
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