Team Living Pasts – Exploring Futures wins UU Team Award 2024

Picture: Wunderlust fotografie

During the OnderwijsFestival, the second yearly UU Team Award was awarded to an educational team. The UU Team Award is a special education award that was created as part of the TRIPLE model: recognising and rewarding teaching and teamwork. The Team Award is being awarded to not only reward a special initiative that has had a great impact on our education, but also to recognise the value of working together as a team, with different people with different backgrounds: together we are stronger.

This year’s UU Team Award was won by the team behind the Living Pasts – Exploring Futures course. In this course, students from various disciplines team up to dive into cultural and natural heritage, ecology, healthy urban living and develop community-engaged digital prototypes for target-groups in the city. Through hands-on work, students produce everything from blogs to visual novels, VR/AR applications, escape rooms and documentaries. The approach in this course fosters an imaginative and inclusive learning environment where everyone uniquely contributes to the larger whole.

Next step: towards the Dutch Education Award

This diverse and interdisciplinary team has worked tirelessly on their course, generating important impact for students and society, as well as creating knowledge. Students contribute to the course as co-creators. The team has pioneered in complex collaboration both within UU and with societal partners. The winning team may develop their proposal further and submit it for the Dutch Education Award on behalf of the UU. The Dutch Education Award is the highest award in senior secondary vocational education and higher education. The Award is awarded to education teams in appreciation of, and as a stimulus for, educational innovation and improvement in vocational and higher education (mbo, hbo and wo).

This diverse and interdisciplinary team has worked tirelessly on their course, generating important impact for students and society, as well as creating knowledge.

Two other teams were nominated for the UU Team Award of 2024:

The Bachelor Clinical Sciences (Zorg Gezondheid en Samenleving) is a new interdisciplinary Bachelor’s that prepares students for a clinical master’s in the field of (veterinary) medicine and health in an innovative way. The bachelor offers students a balanced curriculum based on innovative educational concepts and didactics, as well as a small scale program that allows for a more deliberate pace, a community of students and teachers and experiences in society.

The Methodology and Statistics team of the faculty of social sciences has been working for the past years to implement formative assessment within all bachelor’s courses of social sciences. This approach helps many students each year to process the learning materials, stimulates active learning and deeper learning, provides students with direct feedback and creates more time in class to dive in to the exercises.