The Youth Education & Life Skills flower garden

“Let a thousand passion flowers grow!” – that is how Veronique Schutjens, professor at the Faculty of Geosciences, sums up the Youth Education & Life Skills community tactic. This community is part of Utrecht University’s strategic theme Dynamics of Youth.

Veronique Schutjens is one of Youth Education & Life Skills two community chairs; Professor of Educational Sciences and Head of the Department of Education Liesbeth Kester is the other. Schutjens and Kester make up the community team together with Pascale van Zantvliet, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Education, and student assistant Elena Rodriguez.

Learning processes

A small core team, but one with big plans. “We aim to build a research community with a focus on learning processes”, Schutjens explains. “In particular, this concerns the learning processes of children and young people between the ages of four and 24. That includes our own target audience: almost all university researchers have teaching tasks as well.” Her own area of interest covers the learning processes of students. However, the “flowers” in the Youth Education & Life Skills garden come in many more varieties and colours. “We conduct our research within the context of the learning processes that occur wherever learning takes place in a formal setting”, Van Zantvliet says. “This can be at school, but also in a museum or during an exhibition.”

Skills

What type of skills is this research community interested in? First, there are the life skills: critical thinking, problem-solving abilities and self-management. In short, the skills that allow young people to shape their own future. This is not to say that the Youth Education & Life Skills community overlooks the basic skills that young people acquire at school: arithmetic, writing and citizenship. Schutjens: “Naturally, these count as essential skills in a large part of the world. Acquiring these basic skills give you the confidence that is key to developing life skills. Why do some children find it easy to acquire these skills, while others struggle? What are the most important parameters and circumstances in this respect, and is there anything we can do to change them? Research into learning processes with regard to life skills can be about causes or determining factors, but also about their meaning or consequences for children, their peers and their families or about the context in which they occur.”

Research into learning processes with regard to life skills can be about causes or determining factors, but also about their meaning or consequences for children, their peers and their families or about the context in which they occur.

Taking a look beyond

Continuing with the garden metaphor, Kester, Schutjens and Van Zantvliet are currently planting seeds among colleagues who are keen on further research into the learning processes that matter for the various skills listed above. It goes without saying that cooperation across disciplines is essential. Schutjens: “UU and UMCU are home to a great many researchers with the will to tackle or solve the problems that surround learning processes, but they mostly stick to their own field. We’d like to set up meetings where these researchers can exchange ideas and plans. Many researchers are active in a discipline that has given them a genuine passion for children and young people and the way they learn. They’re very conscious of the need to look beyond their own field to gain the benefit of other perspectives and approaches. Those are the researchers that we want to appeal to and offer the opportunity to ‘put down roots’. That way, they can become the ‘climbers’ in our garden.”

Pillars

In order to find ways for Youth Education & Life Skills to achieve this, the members of the core team first had to get to know each other. Van Zantvliet: “What is it about this community that makes us happy, and what are our goals? To start, we prepared a mission statement and defined our four core values: co-creation, interdisciplinarity, co-ownership & autonomy, and playfulness & creativity. We aim to encourage already existing initiatives, while at the same time initiating other networks that will allow even more people to participate. Our content focus was inspired by conversations with the Dynamics of Youth hub coordinators and others, as well as by various knowledge agendas shaped from the bottom up – such as the one by the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO).” That is why this research community rests on two broad and two more narrowly defined pillars. Schutjens: “Alongside the pillar ‘equal opportunities in education’, we’ve adopted the theme ‘learning and teaching with a global perspective in mind’. We believe we should be looking beyond the Dutch borders. In fact, we have many research questions and themes in common with parties like the Global South. Moreover, intercultural sensitivity is an important life skill as well.” The third and fourth pillars have to do with specific life skills: “critical thinking and taking perspective” and “ownership of learning”, which is about self-regulated learning.

We aim to encourage already existing initiatives, while at the same time initiating other networks that will allow even more people to participate.

Research

The community team intends to spend the upcoming period on promoting research into the themes associated with these pillars. “We want to nourish researchers’ passion for life skills in education – in other words, giving them the chance to ‘let their passion flowers grow’. This can be in the form of new research, seed money, or the continuation of existing research where the researchers believe that it can and must be taken further in an interdisciplinary fashion”, Schutjens explains. “We can provide funding that will allow researchers to allocate resources to writing a well-argued research question in consultation with others, or to putting existing research projects on a more interdisciplinary footing.” Money is also available for the dissemination of results.

Kick-off event: Let a thousand flowers grow!

The kick-off event for the Youth Education & Life Skills community will take place on 12 April. With the core value of “playfulness” in mind, the event will offer opportunities to highlight research themes not covered by any of the four pillars above. Researchers from all faculties are cordially invited to attend. Naturally, civil-society organisations like the IMC Weekend School, Nuffic and the Netherlands Youth Institute will also be involved with a view to co-creation. Children and young people will have an important role in the community as well. The exact nature of that role is something the community team, children and young people will need to discover together. Van Zantvliet: “At the end of the day, we’re doing it all for them.”