Wietske Kuijer is professor of responsive vocational and professional education at HAN University of Applied Sciences and a researcher at Radboud Health Academy. Her work addresses questions such as: How do you educate students for an emergent? How do you ensure that students can continue to respond to changing circumstances and continue to innovate even after they have graduated? And how do you do this in conjunction with professional practice and society, with professionals from other disciplines and the people for whom you are doing it?
Detachment
Kuijer: “The universities of applied sciences have a long tradition of working closely with the professional field for which they provide education and training. But in recent years, research universities have also increasingly come to believe that they have a role to play in society, and the best way to do this is to collaborate with social partners. Academics sometimes adopt a sense of detachment, specifically to emphasise their independence, and they mainly look to contribute to an scientific knowledge base by fundamental research. Nonetheless, there is a growing understanding that some issues are so complex that it is better to tackle them together with the professional field. And by doing so you can learn not only from each other, but also with each other.”
Interprofessional learning
Sectors like the energy transition and technology development are showing great interest in these new forms of interconnectedness in learning and development. Various terms are used to describe these collaborations, like quadruple helix, place-based partnerships or collaborative partnerships. Common characteristics can be identified in the explanations of these concepts. For example, stakeholders from several organisations in the region are involved and higher education is also represented with several sectors. It is all about co-design and co-production of knowledge in a complex environment. When we look at it from the perspective of education, relevant concepts are community engagement, community service learning and transdisciplinary learning.
Forms of learning with and in practice are also becoming increasingly common in social disciplines such as healthcare. “For instance, learning to work together interprofessionally is receiving more and more attention in that field. Patients often have to deal with various practitioners: doctors, nurses, pharmacists, social workers, physiotherapists and other therapists. And the idea is that together they don’t so much ‘take care of’ the patient but ‘ensure that’ the patient can progress. This is only possible if they work together with the patient and with each other, learn from each other, and thus also learn how to find the best solutions to new questions together. And that may mean a new, hitherto unknown solution.”
Testing and assessment
If today’s students are to continue to develop in practice, they need to be taught how to look beyond the boundaries of their own discipline while they are still students. Unfortunately, secondary and higher education are not yet adequately prepared for this, Kuijer notes. “Testing and assessment, for example, are stumbling blocks. They’re still mainly focused on whether the student has mastered the knowledge and skills that belong to their discipline. The complexity of the context is not generally considered, and surprises in the learning process are not appreciated.”
It would be more interesting if a project were assessed in terms of what it yields: not only for students, but also for other stakeholders and for society. “And preferably not only at the moment but also in six months’ time. But then how do you measure that? And what is a good result? Suppose a collaboration doesn’t lead to what you expected, but a stronger network has been created. Or imagine that no product has been developed, but everyone has learnt a lot about what doesn’t work. Is that enough? Or good? Do you have to measure it like that?”
Recommendations
When education and society collaborate in the ways described above, the process is always complex. You have to identify and connect partners with complementary knowledge, exploit the diversity of the network, handle tensions related to differences in the way organisations are managed and, last but not least, actually learn to collaborate with each other.
Kuijer and her colleagues conducted two studies that produced recommendations for education, research and social organisations that want to collaborate and learn about social issues.
“First, discover what the critical issues are in your sector or domain and make sure you define them clearly. This is the foundation of the collaboration from which you connect partners for knowledge sharing and development.”
“Second, look at your own organisational routines and dare to break them down. Testing and assessment is one such routine, but the way funding is arranged these days doesn’t help either. When you make a research proposal, you often have to decide in advance what you’re going to be doing in three years’ time. That doesn’t work with co-creation.”
“Third, you need knowledge brokers who work both in your own organisation and in the field. They need to be habitual associated in both areas to be able to really connect.”
“And finally, we need to move towards other forms of learning: from informative to collaborative and transformative learning. Make sure you reward unexpected outcomes.”
The good thing is that Kuijer sees more initiatives in which education and society are able to find each other. “But you see that everyone is mainly involved for their own reasons. Everyone has their own idea of why they think it’s important, and then they look for appropriate educational principles. That doesn’t have to be a problem as long as you know that first you have to find out what everyone’s own idea is. Only then can you make progress.”
Wietske Kuijer will speak about Learning about and working on societal questions together on Friday 25 March during Education Days 2022. That event is a collaboration between Radboud University, Radboud university medical center, HAN University of Applied Sciences and ROC Nijmegen. Register at https://www.ru.nl/lecturers/news/education-days-2022/.
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