Four new Teaching Fellows appointed

Starting February the 1st, four new Teaching Fellows are appointed to the Centre for Academic: Irma Meijerman (Science), Veronique Schutjens (Geosciences), Vincent Crone (Humanities) and Leoniek Wijngaards-de Meij (Social and Behavioural Sciences). They will be devoted to a project that involves leadership in strategic institutional curriculum and/or policy development and will contribute to teacher development activities of the centre. At the end of their terms, successful Teaching Fellows can look forward to a teaching professorship. Below, the new Fellows share their plans to improve academic teaching.

Veronique Schutjens (Associate Professor of Economic Urban Transition):
'Busy schedules mean that students often don't get the chance to assimilate the experience of studying abroad in full, while others never have any international exposure at all. So we're losing out at two levels. I want to teach Bachelor's exchange students to reflect on the significance of their international experiences, both for them personally and in terms of their employability skills, as well as to embed those learning experiences and effects in our programmes so other students also benefit.'

Vincent Crone (Assistant Professor of Media and Performance Studies):
'Successful interdisciplinary, international, intercultural and blended education requires intensive collaboration and knowledge-sharing among teaching staff. My project aims to create a lecturer community within the Faculty of Humanities in order to pool the knowledge and experience of teaching as well as the use of educational innovation, in addition to offering supervision and training for lecturers.'

Irma Meijerman (Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences):
'I want to introduce lecturers to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) as an impetus to approach their own teaching methods and innovations, as well as student learning, as a form of "research". The principles of SoTL offer lots of potential for improving education, but also for enhancing the experience and joy of teaching for lecturers themselves. Building lecturer communities is central to my project. In addition, working with CAT (Centre for Academic Teaching) and the other Teaching Fellows should open up more great opportunities to foster lecturer development.'

Leoniek Wijngaards-de Meij (Associate Professor of Methodology & Statistics, Social and Behavioural Sciences):
'The best education takes place in settings where not everyone is alike. Differences in backgrounds and ways of looking at things can enrich education. I'm going to explore how we can improve teaching through a more diverse and inclusive culture. For instance, how can we attract more students from under-represented groups? I also want to collaborate with projects at other faculties and universities, because working together may enable us to accomplish even more.'

About the Teaching Fellowship programme
Candidates for Teaching Fellowships can be nominated from within and outside Utrecht University. The programme, which is organized from within the Centre of Academic Teaching, seeks to promote educational innovation, strengthen educational leadership, increase the number of professors with a teaching remit and thereby advance academic excellence at the UU. The Utrecht University is actively committed to rewarding good teaching and to offering career advancement opportunities for research and teaching excellence alike. With the new fellows, seven fellows in total follow the programme at this moment.