Grenzeloze InterEsse

Oratie in verkorte vorm uitgesproken door Prof.dr. Sanne Akkerman bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar Onderwijswetenschappen, in het bijzonder Hoger Onderwijs aan de Universiteit Leiden op vrijdag 6 oktober 2017.Teaching and Teacher Learning (ICLON

Unravelling why students do or do not stay committed to a programme when making a higher education choice

Over the past forty years, scholars have been studying students’ choice of higher education programmes to unravel the complexity of the choice process. Recent studies have shown that students may commit to a programme, i.e. they make a choice to enrol in that programme, when they find a programme that attunes well with their interests. Students may nonetheless decide to switch from one programme to another before final enrolment and research has not yet sufficiently explained why they do that. The present study therefore focused on the mechanisms underlying students changing their minds after they had previously committed to a higher education programme. Eighteen semi-structured interviews with Dutch pre-university students in their final year at school were held just before final enrolment: students retraced their higher education programme choice process over time with the help of a timeline and a storyline. Interviews were thematically analysed. We identified two mechanisms whereby students, sometimes quite suddenly, switched in their commitment from one programme to another and two mechanisms that could hold them back from committing to another programme despite having doubts. This paper provides detailed theoretical insight into how students make higher education programme choices over time and concludes with practical recommendations on how to support students.Teaching and Teacher Learning (ICLON

The challenge to professionals of using social media: teachers in England negotiating personal-professional identities

Social media are a group of technologies such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn which offer people chances to interact with one another in new ways. Teachers, like other members of society, do not all use social media. Some avoid, some experiment with and others embrace social media enthusiastically. As a means of communication available to everyone in modern society, social media is challenging teachers, as other professionals in society, to decide whether to engage with these tools and, if so, on what basis – as an individual (personally), or as a teacher (professionally). Although teachers are guided by schools and codes of practice, teachers as individuals are left to decide whether and how to explore social media for either their own or their students' learning. This paper analyses evidence from interviews with 12 teachers from England about their use of social media as to the challenges they experience in relation to using the media as professional teachers.. Teachers are in society’s spotlight in terms of examples of inappropriate use of social media but also under peer pressure to connect. This paper explores their agency in responding. The paper focuses on how teachers deal with tensions between their personal and professional use of social media. These tensions are not always perceived as negative and some teachers' accounts revealed a unity in their identities when using social media. The paper reflects on the implications of such teachers' identities in relation to the future of social media use in education

Strangers in dialogue. Academic collaboration across organizational boundaries

For academics, collaboration is an important way to look at and discuss particular themes that are of personal and community interests. Inter-organizational collaboration distinctively offers the possibility for academics to look beyond the familiar and the known, and as such to develop further one’s professional identity and produce rich and creative academic products. The central interest of this PhD study is how communicative processes proceed in inter-organizational project groups, in which academics from different socio-cultural contexts meet and aim to create something collaboratively. Our research question is how diversity comes to the fore in negotiation processes in inter-organizational academic collaboration. Understanding this process enables grasping the challenge of dealing with diversity and to suggest how to facilitate project groups in their boundary crossing endeavor. The research question is explored by studying two inter-organizational collaboration projects. In both cases we identified the socio-culturally informed, and personal viewpoints that play a role in the collaboration and explored in what way these came to the fore during the negotiation processes. Both project groups were followed two years by means of video-taping and observing project meetings, interviewing project members individually, and collecting e-mail communication and documentation. The study of the first project group involves a European collaboration project with 14 academics located in five different countries. What this case illustrates, is that the diverse points of view have to be made explicit in order to play a role in collaborative work. For group participants, this means that they have to consider the particularity of the other person’s arguments. This can be done by questioning what it ‘is’ we are relating to, and focusing on the other as stranger. The second case study involves a Dutch collaboration project of 16 academics from different research groups. In contrast with the case in the first study, this project group comes to define the diversity as they explicate the diverse voices they aimed to advance and integrate. Despite this explicitation of and shared responsibility for the diverse positions, this case shows that diversity requires a long-term dialogical process involving actively construing and shifting between various ways of looking and categorizing the diverse elements in the project activity. In a final study, we sketch some implications that can be drawn from the two case studies of project groups. We came to conclude that managing and making use of diversity subsist in overcoming imprisonment in meaning and in exploiting meaning potential. Managing and making use of diversity seems to subsist in engaging project groups in a continuous process of redefining. By means of such a process one can overcome the bounded nature of one perspective by means of another perspective, and establish flexibility to adapt to new situations. In this last study, we consider in what ways information and communication technology meant to support collaboration, can facilitate groups to redefine. Besides these studies, this thesis includes a conceptual review of group cognition and

Continuities and discontinuities in learning across school and out-of-school contexts

In response to various societal changes, schools are increasingly developing an outward orientation, seeking to connect to students' out-of-school participations. Simultaneously, educational research is starting to adopt a multisystemic approach to learning. Focusing on continuity and discontinuity in students' learning across school and out-of-school contexts, we synthesize 186 empirical studies. After conceptualizing school and out-of-school in relation to each other, we find that continuity can be the result of different educational intentions, but it also occurs as a given. Discontinuity is mainly found for non-mainstream students, with severe implications for students' learning and participation in school. Some studies show how different actors, including students, deliberately seek discontinuity, challenging the widespread preference for continuity. We discuss the (im)possibilities for schools in connecting to students' wider lives and advance the degrees of freedom afforded in school as an underlying condition for establishing continuity.Teaching and Teacher Learning (ICLON

Leren binnen en buiten de school: op zoek naar vrijheidsgraden

De veranderende maatschappij vraagt van scholen een heroriëntatie op hoe zij zich verhouden tot de buitenschoolse leefwereld. Leren vindt steeds meer ook buiten de school plaats. We weten echter nog nauwelijks hoe de relatie tussen het binnen en buitenschoolse leven er voor leerlingen uit ziet, wat deze relatie betekent voor hun leren en daarmee dus ook niet wat precies het effect is van nieuwe verbindingsinitiatieven. In een door NRO gefinancierde studie hebben we systematisch gezocht naar al het onderzoek naar de relatie tussen schools en buitenschools leren dat vooral de afgelopen tien jaren is verschenen. Hiervoor hebben we de resultaten van 186 studies op een rij gezet

Multi-level boundary crossing in a professional development school partnership

Teaching and Teacher Learning (ICLON

Re-theorizing the social individual student dialogically across and between boundaries of multiple communities

Both cognitive and socio-cultural traditions have traditionally theorized learning in terms of processes of progression within single communities. Since 1995, educational scholars have started to focus on learning as a horizontal process of boundary crossing between multiple communities. Problematic in this approach is that boundaries are often analytically laid out on system level, without explaining whether and how boundaries relate to discontinuities at the level of a learning process of an individual student. What is needed is theoretical elaboration on how an individual learner can be simultaneously part of one and another practice. By drawing on a dialogical approach to Self we intend to theorize learners as participants of practices and transcendent selves. Doing so, we point out that boundaries are dynamically evolving discontinuities that mediate or obstruct potential hybridizations of school and everyday life experiences in learning