This study aims to increase understanding of the values and outcomes of teacher action research in conservatoire education. Teacher action research has been found to stimulate both professional development and improvement of teaching practice. A multiple-case study design was employed to examine teachers' activities and their perceptions of the…

Higher education plays a pivotal role in preparing students for the dynamic and complex labour market. Helping students develop employability competences supports them in obtaining the necessary expertise and skills to facilitate their transition to the labour market and to address the requirements of their new jobs. Employability competences are…

In a world in need of profound change, the importance of "transformative education" is increasingly recognized. However, barriers abound in our Higher Education Institutions, including that educators often have little notion of "how" to make their teaching more transformative "in practice." This paper builds on our…

The importance of reflection during learning process is widely recognized. Drawing on the literature, this article presents a study where students were stimulated to reflect during experiential learning, in order to both re- and de- contextualize their knowledge. We describe how different levels of prompted reflection can be related to academic…

Professionals are increasingly involved in attempts to understand and address problems with wicked tendencies, which require crossing boundaries between disciplines, organisations and stakeholder perspectives. This multiple-case study investigated six higher professional education courses in order to develop better understanding of how teachers…

When analyzing student reflection assignments from a mandatory research methods course, the authors were struck by the tension between students' own approaches to learning and the challenges, uncertainties, and frustrations accompanying their efforts. Students' ideas about what constitutes learning, how learning is to be done, and how they…

Meaning-making and sense-making are generally assumed to be part of students' personal vocational knowledge development, since they contribute to both students' socialisation in a vocation and students' personalisation of concepts, values and beliefs regarding that vocation. However, how students in vocational education acquire meaning and make…

Having a well-founded insight into the characteristics of teachers inquiry-based attitude (IA) supports operationalising IA as a learning goal in teacher education (TE). The aim of this study is to refine the notion of IA from an ill-defined global concept into something with reliable and valid characteristics. To do so, data were gathered on…

This article describes experiences with a qualitative research project into teachers' learning from innovating their own educational practices. Decades of New Public Management (NPM) in the Netherlands, with its top-down and businesslike approach to areas of public interest, obscured the learning and innovating capacity of teachers, teams, and…

Theory on student learning provides that students are able to direct their learning when they have metacognitive knowledge about their own learning processes. In this article, a preliminary attempt to assess untrained high-school students’ metacognitive knowledge of learning processes as an ability through multiple-choice questions is reported. In…

The aim of this study is to contribute to the innovation of pre-vocational education, in particular, students' orientation at possible future occupations. From our theoretical understanding, vocational orientation that makes sense to students requires them to be part of a "community of learners for vocational orientation". In such a…

The action research project Sustainable Change in a Critical Learning Community was conducted in the Netherlands (2007-08) to improve quality in early childhood by enhancement of critical reflection at all levels in early childhood organisations: educators individually and collectively, pedagogical leaders and coaches, and (middle) management. The…

The authors describe research aimed at developing a more comprehensive framework for project-based learning in work contexts. This grows out of a cross-cultural reanalysis of data from two previous studies using two different frameworks: actor-centered learning network theory and a critical pragmatist lens on action reflection learning. Findings…

A team of secondary school language teachers and a teacher trainer developed a new method for Dutch writing instruction. The principles underlying the method were derived from insights regarding activating instruction and self-directed student learning. The development entailed two phases. In the first phase, the exploration of actual problems in…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…