Both research on (engineering) education and education innovation are scattered at our university. With the IDEE program, research on engineering education is linked to the Teaching Academy. However, Phd candidates and postdocs are hosted at the faculty of the main projectlead. The projectlead is not necessarily conversant with educational research and the young researcher is not housed in a educational research group. Contributing to the fragmented way how educational research is conducted at our university, some small educational research projects are done at IDE, TBM, Architecture and AE. A consequence of this fragmented approach is that the available resources (educational research knowledge, books, journal clubs) are not effectively shared. Moreover, as educational research is different in many ways from engineering research, the PhD candidates and postdocs are not optimally supported in their research and early career development.
Next to research on education, also the teaching professionalization (both UTQ and SUTQ) are hosted by the teaching support and housed in the teaching lab. As yet, there is no connection to the teacher education program or with the Science & Engineering Education department. Again, the disconnect between the teaching professionalization and the teacher education program is a missed opportunity: modules, reflection forms and assessments are not shared and experiences and expertise are not exchanged.
Teaching innovations are mostly left to individuals, especially young academics or junior teachers. There is no central support for teachers to innovate their education, and there is no central approach to sharing and scaling up successful innovations. This is a missed opportunity as well, as it leads to a lot of duplicated efforts and missed opportunities for collaboration and scaling up. Moreover, writing for teaching grants like the comenius teacher grant, or the scholarly of teaching are hardly supported and therefore not very common granted.
My vision is that we should value and approach education in a similar way as we do our engineering research: collaboratively, well designed, interconnected, excellent, and thorough. A step forward in researching this goal is to better align our efforts in teaching and innovating education and educational research. The Teaching Academy, teaching support, the Science & Engineering Education group and the (S)UTQ could be more closely connected and cooperating together in a collaborative effort to make education at our university more effective and impactful.
In my position as assistant professor I have been able to make personal connection with the various actors - I know many people from the UTQ, SUTQ, teaching support and the support team from the Teaching Academy. I also know many teachers from different faculties interested or doing educational research and have worked with them on a regular basis. As an associate professor I would like to take a more leading role in connecting the various actors and initiatives, for example by organizing regular meetings, workshops and joint projects - e.g. continuing educational research beyond the IDEE program. My vision is to to position the Science & Engineering Education group in a more central role in education and educational research at our university as they have a long-standing expertise in education and educational research. However, the focus has been mostly on secondary school education and only in recent years on higher education. Expanding the focus to higher education is a natural step as e.g. design education is already part of the research portfolio.
A more central approach to educational research would allow us to better support the PhD candidates and postdocs in their research, would increase the visibility of the group and the teacher education program (ultimately leading to more secondary school teachers) internally, increase the research profile in engineering education and thereby also increase the quality of education, increase the network leading to e.g. collaboration ,centralization (of educational initiatives), and invited speakers.
This is not a small task, but I believe that it is necessary to achieve our goals in education and educational research. Moreover, I believe that it is a task that fits well with my skills and interests, and that I can make a significant contribution to. The latter already demonstrated by the involvement of various cross faculty education initiatives.