3 new projects off to start!

In November, our colleagues had the opportunity to apply for funding and support to help create activities that fit the scope of Youth Education and Life Skills. In our community, we focus on how education empowers young people and these projects will help get a better understanding of this. We are very happy to announce that the following three projects have been granted financial support and will be running between January 2024 and December 2024.

The three new projects that received funding are:

Assessment of Life Skills and Values in East Africa (ALiVE) collaboration with Utrecht University

By: Matthieu Brinkhuis (Science; Information and computing sciences) and Joost de Laat (Law, Economics and Governance; Utrecht University School of Economics)

Project Outline:

This project seeks to build a collaboration between Utrecht University and the ALiVE initiative, and provides many potential opportunities for collaboration.

The ALiVE initiative currently includes several strands of work, including the development of more assessment items of life skills and values, the (psychometric) evaluation of the quality of the assessment, the development of individual-level and group-level reporting, the ruling out of possible biases, the use of research findings to increase awareness on the worth of competencies, and capacity strengthening of the members.

The ALiVE team, led by Zizi Afrique Foundation (Kenya), Luigi Giussani Foundation (Uganda), Milele Zanzibar Foundation (Tanzania), and Uwezo (Uganda), has indicated that it would welcome collaboration with Utrecht University, and support making this possible.
The goal of this proposal is to explore and shape such a collaboration around life skills. Concretely, explore and shape collaboration through:

• Developing one or more external PhD opportunities at Utrecht University for ALiVE researchers from East Africa.
• Joint research around life skills and values assessment tools (both the design and co-creation of the tools themselves, as well as analysis of results).
• Peer learning and capacity strengthening of staff at Utrecht University and members of the ALiVE network, starting a joint community of practice around life skills. Our vision is that such a collaboration would involve participation of Utrecht University colleagues from a range of faculties and disciplines. In addition, this collaboration not only includes the ALiVE societal partners, but also current societal and research partners from Utrecht University.

Names societal partners:

Assessment of Life Skills and Values in East Africa (ALiVE), Zizi Afrique Foundation, Luigi Giussani Foundation, Milele Zanzibar Foundation, and Uwezo.

Equality of opportunity in the Dutch educational system: A research-policy network meeting

By: Pomme van de Weerd(Social and Behavioural Sciences; Education and Pedagogy) and Lotte Henrichs(Social and Behavioural Sciences; Education and Pedagogy)

Project Outline:

The goal of this project is to organize an event to bring together policy makers, researchers, and school leaders, around the question: What is the role of the educational system in reducing inequality of opportunity?

In the last few years, the Dutch educational system has featured prominently in Dutch public and political debate. The system’s early selection into highly differentiated and separated tracks has been shown to create and reproduce inequality. This system has strong reproductive effects: children of university educated parents have a higher chance of entering the prestigious academic tracks. Children with disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds and children with migration backgrounds are at a higher risk of being under-referred. Stratified educational systems such as the Dutch system furthermore cause learning results to diverge, i.e., children’s abilities differ more from each other at the end of their schooling than they did at the start. In the scholarly literature, this is also referred to as ‘opportunity debt’: as educational professionals we should be able to provide all children with equitable opportunities, but this is not what reality looks like.

The conversation about changing the school system has been gaining momentum since 2016, when the Inspectorate of Education signaled growing inequality of opportunity in education. In 2021, the Board of Education advised the government to have all children start secondary school in a shared program of three years instead of highly segregated tracks. Although changes have not yet been implemented, the conversation around the topic of the school system (especially tracking) and unequal opportunities is ongoing in policy. However, where educational practice nowadays is increasingly involved in educational research, there is barely exchange between educational policy and educational research. There is much research about the role of educational systems in creating or reducing equal opportunities, and if the educational system is to provide more equal opportunities, it is important that such exchange takes place. This project wil facilitate such exchange. Waterreus and Sipma2 offer three key ingredients for successful exchange of research and policy: the right timing, individualized or tailor-made knowledge exchange, and interaction. The proposed event fulfills these criteria as following. The timing for a meeting around the issue of the educational system and its role in reducing inequal opportunities is right. The conversation about changing the school system has been ongoing, but right now, with the recent elections and upcoming installation of a new government, a policy window is opening up for discussions of the future of education to have a lasting impact. The knowledge offered to policy makers will be tailor-made. The event is future-oriented, that is, the goal of the knowledge exchange is not merely to reflect on the way the current educational system creates inequality. More so, it should revolve around discussing potential avenues toward system changes that decrease inequality of opportunities. This way, we ensure that the meeting benefits policy makers in practical ways. Finally, the event will enable interaction to be established between policy makers, researchers, and school leaders. The knowledge exchange will be immediate and mutual. Ideally, this meeting will enable lasting connections to be established between the different parties present.

Diamonds on the soles of our Feet

By: Janwillem Liebrand (Geosciences; Human Geography and Spatial Planning)
Jaqui Goldin (University of the Western Cape, Faculty of Natural Science)

Project Outline:

Diamonds on the soles of our Feet (DSF) is a Citizen Science (CS) project implemented in the Limpopo Province, South Africa. We collect data for SDG 6.3.2 and promote water literacy inside and outside the classroom. As we cannot disentangle human morality from environmental morality, this is about justice for people and planet, addressing the persistence of ecological damage and negative impacts of climate that have arisen because of the disconnect between people and planet.

Seven schools have been selected because of their proximity to a river. Our engagement with citizen science acknowledges the transformative power of affect as a social and political project and the relevance of emotions to education, recognizing that it is neurobiologically impossible to take in science if you don’t care about it. Young learners connect to ‘their’ river and water literacy is brought into the classroom through poems, posters, dance, song. Also outside the classroom learners connect with water bodies. The key goal is to maximise the opportunity, through CS tools, to communicate science enhance socio-ecological learning within the schools. The science/art field is a powerful transdisciplinary tool for bringing science out of libraries and laboratories and making it accessible to all.

Names societal partners:
Carolina Suransky (Department of Education, Humanistic University Utrecht), Anna Berti Suman (litigation expert, art teacher, environmental NGO, Bologna), Izzy Bishop (University College London, teacher in ecology and physical geography) Luigi Ceccaroni (researcher ProBlue, Earthwatch Europe, working on water literacy)

Earlier Research Projects

Interested in projects that have received funding in earlier rounds? You can read more about our currently running projects here.