Society Based Education seeks active cooperation with companies, startups, knowledge institutes, networks and non-profit organizations in order to connect WUR students to relevant and meaningful social challenges. Society Based Education supports WUR teachers with creating university-society learning spaces, so that WUR students are introduced to their future knowledge domain, learn to apply their scientific knowledge in practice and they get the opportunity to engage and collaborate with other students and societal actors with various knowledge levels, cultures, disciplines and backgrounds.
Companies/Organisations
Are you an entrepreneur or an employee at a company, government, non-profit organisation or education or research institution and do you have an interesting case or problem which needs researching?
Society Based Education aims to help you find a solution by connecting you to the study programmes at WUR. For more information, click on the button below.
Info for companies/organisations
WUR teachers
Society Based Education supports and inspires WUR teachers to implement society in their education. Are you interested in implementing real-life learning in your course? Or do you have a question about this?
For many years now, we have been recruiting authentic assignments for various WU courses. For more information, click on the button below.
Info for WUR teachers
News
Action research: Development of an intervention tool for WUR teachers to integrate societal challenges into academic education
The research call City Deal Knowledge Making (CDKM) offers researchers working at the knowledge institutes participating in CDKM, the opportunity to conduct short-term research projects within the theme of rich learning environments; a learning environment in which students, researchers and societal parties work together on a social challenge.
The research proposal, submitted within this call, by Society Based Education has been approved and from October 2020 to November 2021 we will work on this research. In this research we want to bring WUR lecturers together to design innovative educational models for creating learning environments in which students, researchers and societal parties learn together. We have opted for an action research set-up, because this is a way to improve our own professional behavior.
The research consists of different phases. The first phase is to conduct interviews with WUR teachers to think together about the added value of participating in these types of learning environments and to find out more about the barriers that WUR teachers experience in creating university-society learning environments. In the second phase, we want to organize focus group meetings in which we will discuss thematic topics related to university-society learning environments together with WUR teachers. And finally, based on the interviews and the results of the focus group discussions, we want to design an intervention tool for WUR lecturers that supports the development of learning environments between university and society. Besides creating an intervention tool based on the insights from the interviews and focus group discussions, we want to develop a didactical model that explains a variety of university-society learning environments that can be applied at different times during an academic study program.
If you want to know more about this CDKM research you can contact Hanna Eppink (hanna.eppink@wur.nl)
