Pedagogy

As a teacher and educator, how do you approach pupils or clients in Amsterdam? How do you expand the capacity for these professionals to act towards parents and other stakeholders within the immediate environment of children and young people? What are the consequences for the degree programmes at the Faculty of Education? Our new research groups is addressing these questions.

Led by Professor Ruben Fukkink, the focus of the Pedagogy professorship is on the didactic aspects of both pedagogical and educational practice, particularly in urban regions. As emphasised in both the Amsterdam professional field and recent research, urban regions are a special environment with different requirements for current and prospective teachers and educators, who require not only competences for work-readiness but also ‘urban-readiness’. Urban regions characteristically have a widely diverse population, as well as abundant opportunity for interprofessional cooperation and connection between the various living environments.

Four core research themes are distinguished within the research group:

• coping with superdiversity among children and young people when learning and growing up (e.g. social interactions and differentiated pedagogy within heterogeneous groups);
• coping with superdiversity among parents in light of pedagogical partnership and family support (e.g. achieving parental involvement and pedagogical partnership among a widely diverse parent population);
• diversity in the professional environment – interprofessional cooperation between pedagogical professionals;
• diversity in the environment – connecting the first, second and third living environments within the community.