After secondary school, Hessel Nieuwelink (1980) earned his Bachelor’s degree in Teaching Education in Civics at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS). He subsequently worked as a Civics teacher at various schools in Amsterdam for a number of years. In the meantime, he studied Political Science as well as Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He graduated from both Master's programmes cum laude and also obtained his first-level teaching qualification.

He wrote a Master's thesis about the effects of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on the lives of ordinary Rwandan people. He began working as a teacher trainer in Civics at the AUAS in 2006.

In 2016, Hessel Nieuwelink obtained a doctorate for his research on the perceptions of democracy among young people and their experiences of democracy in their day-to-day lives. As senior lecturer-researcher, he has conducted several studies since 2016 together with colleagues at the UvA, the SCO-Kohnstamm Institute, schools and social institutions. Among other things, this research involves assessing pedagogical and didactic strategies to tackle controversial subjects in class, the obstacles encountered by Amsterdam teachers in designing citizenship education as well as the characteristics of effective citizenship education.