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Education and Learning Sciences

Education and Learning Sciences Group

Sustainable development was already in the core of our mission. However due to ongoing global challenges we felt the need to rethink our mission. Our new mission is to understand and facilitate the unfolding of human potential in response to global challenges. This means that we want to understand and facilitate learners throughout their lives to contribute to worldwide challenges in a meaningful, responsible and critical manner. Hereby, we realize that sustainable development is more than just knowledge creation and innovation, it concerns the drive of individuals and groups. This drive is reflected in the so-called Inner Development Goals, which concern skills and qualities such as being, thinking, relating, collaborating and acting. In our research and education the development of these inner development goals will be put central to create impact for a more sustainable world. While rethinking our mission we invited our former colleague Hasse Cox to make drawings based on our thinking. This resulted in a nice illustration reflecting our mission in a comprehensive way.

Chairholder

prof.dr. PJ (Perry) den Brok
Professor/Chair

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Our research

Research of the Education and Learning Sciences Group

Via its research, the chair group Education and Learning Sciences (ELS) aims to understand the enhancing of human potential in responding to global challenges with respect to food, the environment and human well-being. As such, ELS research aims to provide added value with respect to learning and educating for responsibility, sustainability, and agency: supporting learning individuals and groups to take an active, emancipatory and engaged role in contributing to solving complex, societal problems, and doing so with attention for people, planet profit and prosperity. The university-wide focus of WUR on the domain of food and life sciences is unique in the Netherlands and provides ELS with a context that is particularly suitable for its mission. This context also creates unique conditions for focusing on learning without boundaries, learning that transcends single domains, cultures or institutional contexts. ELS wants to play a leading role with respect to its focus, both locally (at WUR), nationally as well as internationally. Rather than focusing on all possible learning outcomes of learners, ELS focuses in particular on those competencies and qualities that are relevant for responsibility, sustainability, and agency. One can think of competencies such as creativity, problem solving, acting ethically, taking a critical stance, entrepreneurship, interdisciplinarity and multicultural sensitivity, reflexivity; and of qualities such as empathy, caring and being mindful.

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Our education

We offer courses in various fields of education and learning.

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Publications

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