Veerman, the Movie
The Pioneering in Leadership Learning documentary is online for
everybody to see. It was a little more than a year ago that I
participated myself in this journey which left its marks on me. A
lot has happened since. The Learning Lab brought to life by Thieu
Besselink continued attracting more and more students. This
January, Besselink started the course with a third round of
pioneers. Looking back at my personal Learning Lab journey, there
are two lessons that stuck with me ever since. One is about myself
and what it means to be a leader. Another one is about what higher
education can be like, but almost never is.
Over four months I embarked on a journey with my fellow
students. The first half of the course was organized by Besselink.
We encountered a number of people that are pioneers in their
respective fields, who are working on the goal to shape society as
a whole. During the second half of the course we students took
over. We formulated learning goals by ourselves, split up in groups
and organized class sessions during which we would explore our
learning goals with fellow students.
Learning this way about what it means to be a pioneer and a
leader is hard. It does not follow the simple process of reading
what it is like to be a leader, but experiencing firsthand what
obstacles you face when you want to become one. It required opening
up to everybody in the group and facing whatever conflicts that
arose.
Through this, I learned how effective leaders cannot simply rely
on being chosen according to some artificial hierarchy. Instead,
they emerge out of the process a group goes through in order to
realize a common project. Leaders do not even have to stay leaders
throughout. As the common goal evolves over time, different group
members take on different roles in order to overcome challenges
along the way.
Shifting the Paradigm
Participating in the Learning Lab did not only teach me about
leadership. It also turned my idea upside down of what higher
education is about. It does not have to be about top-down teaching
where students are passively absorbing whatever knowledge is
presented to them on Powerpoint slides. It does not have to be
about students trying to memorize as many models as possible to be
tested via multiple choice questions on their final exam.
Right now, I am finishing my last semester of my Bachelor
studies in the United States - the mother country of
multiple-choice examinations. After one such exam a teacher
recently said that the last time he attempted asking students open
questions, he regretted it. They were simply writing down an
incoherent cluster of everything they memorized beforehand. One
might wonder how deep learning in such a way really goes. Last year
Van Rossum and Hamer explored this dilemma in The Meaning of
Learning and Knowing.
Higher education cannot be about students expanding their
memorizing abilities. Real learning occurs on a different level. It
occurs where individual students are challenged not only by the
teacher but challenge themselves and their peers. Learning goals
then are no longer taken for granted, but evolve over time as
students and teacher explore true understanding of the matter at
hand.
It will require shifting a paradigm of teaching that has existed
in higher education for several decades. But the outcome seems even
more promising: educating the young generation of today to become
the social entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
Tim-Patrick Limmer (Hofstra University, Universiteit van
Amsterdam)