Learning Together
Quality education is crucial for our well-being and for the continuity of a strong, regional knowledge-based society. High-quality education seeks to contribute to equal opportunities by offering every student the best opportunity for personal development. Social equality can be achieved by attempts to bridge existing social discrepancies. Our Learning Together expertise group is committed to providing such high-quality education in the Utrecht region.
Our society is developing at a rapid pace. The climate crisis, digitalisation, the knowledge-based economy, increasing social diversity and polarization keep presenting us with new challenges. Educating people in and for this dynamic society requires dynamic education. That is why the Learning Together expertise group is committed to flexible education.
Pupils’ and students’ choices should not be limited by the organisational structure of the educational system. This is why we focus on people’s talents and their capacity for development. Our aim is to provide education that offers space for individuals to utilise their talents and (educational) background. We have therefore adopted continuous learning pathways which offer the most seamless transition possible between the various forms of education. By doing this we are able to lower the threshold for lifelong development goals.
Time and again, research has shown that professional competence is the most important factor in determining the quality of education. HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, together with its partners, will be investing even more in training and continuing education programmes for educational professionals. We train educational professionals who are able to align their professional subject-specific, didactic and pedagogical expertise with broader social issues, such as digital literacy and diversity, sustainability, justice, safety and health. We achieve this by continuously modernising our curricula in co-creation with the field of professional educational. At the start of the training, we offer students the opportunity to demonstrate their previously acquired skills by way of an assessment. Our guiding principle is that education should be able to respond intelligently to the experience, background and demand of the (prospective ) educational professional. In this way, we have designed our teacher training programmes to be attractive to a broader target group, which also helps to alleviate the shortage of teachers.
Three societal challenges
The Healthy Together expertise group mainly tackles three societal challenges:
This is education that is able to adapt to rapid social developments and that offers space for individuals to utilise their talents and (educational) background, thereby contributing to a more diverse and inclusive society.
By providing flexible training and by paying attention to the knowledge and skills that prospective teachers already possess, we hope to contribute to a growth in the number of educational professionals.
In co-creation with our partners in other central regions of the Netherlands, we are building a future-proof and cohesive educational infrastructure in the region of Utrecht. The aim is to create an integrated network of educational facilities, especially for vulnerable children or young people, for whom this is of the utmost importance.
