Adriaan is an English teacher at a secondary school in the Netherlands, and is tasked with leading the school’s pedagogical innovation team. The school has an interesting history as being one of the country’s most progressive and well-known schools in the 1900s, but struggling to find their direction in recent decades. Adriaan has secured a 5-year PhD grant to organize Change Labs to aid his school – in addition to his teaching job. For the past months, he has worked on a review of all the Change Labs conducted in primary and secondary education. He will ground the CL at his school in the insights from this review, with the first CL taking place after the summer. Herein, students of a single class will transform their classroom activity in collaboration with their teacher. Regarding his broader PhD project, Adriaan’s mission is to make CLs more accessible to the Dutch educational and academic fields, in order to create sustainable educational change efforts. In his presentation, Adriaan will share his plans for his upcoming CLs and highlight preliminary findings from his review study.
The central aim of Adriaan’s review of CLs in schools is to generate knowledge on how to support change efforts in a manner that leads to new sustaining practice in schools. To this end, his analysis is informed by questions such as: How are CLs at schools tailored to various objects, subjects, and contexts? and How does ownership of the change effort evolve over time and influence the process? In the presentation, Adriaan will connect his experiences with fluid roles of a teacher researcher in a school in the Netherlands to the complexities of interventionist politics he has observed in his literature review.