• dr. Gijs van Campenhout

• dr. Bouke van Gorp

• dr. Rena Zendedel

• dr. Roos de Jonge
• dr. A.H. (Anneke) van Houwelingen
• dr. Rianne van Lambalgen
• dr. ir. I. (Irma) Meijerman
• dr. Emilia Jarochowska

Students in multiple Master’s degree programmes at the Graduate School of Geosciences leave their international classroom to do fieldwork in Africa, Asia or Latin America. Well-developed intercultural competences are vital to successfully carry out such fieldwork and, later on in their professional careers, to work in an international environment. However, immersion in a different cultural setting does not itself assure intercultural learning: an active learning environment is needed to achieve this. The problem is that intercultural competences are not effectively addressed in the curricula: students do not know what to expect regarding intercultural differences in the field and, consequently, the learning of fieldwork is not optimized. Previous projects and literature call for an approach that confronts students before actually going on fieldwork with real-life situations that stimulate reflection and provoke discussion. The aim of this project is to enhance the intercultural competences of students through the use of a student-fed interactive app with cases that represent fieldwork situations, and the development of assignments that relate to these cases, to guide student reflection and discussion in the international classroom, before, during and after fieldwork. The novelty of this project is that it will be student-fed, viz. based on real-life cases provided by students who did fieldwork in previous years, representing situations that students will encounter in the field. Project outcomes will be enhanced intercultural competences and improved reflection skills of students, and insight into the value of a student-fed interactive learning app for the development of intercultural competences.

• dr. G. (Gemma) Corbalan Perez
• dr. Gery Nijenhuis