‘Collaboration with all the institutions in the region is the only way to make a real impact on education’
The Municipality of Leiden has awarded a grant to the Leiden Education Action Research Network (LEARN). Through this network, Leiden University will work together with vocational and higher professional education institutions to strengthen the connection between education research and day-to-day practice.
Roeland van de Rijst is Professor of Educational Sciences and Director of Research at the Graduate School of Teaching (ICLON).
Hi Roeland, congratulations on the award! Can you tell us a bit more about LEARN?
‘LEARN stands for the Leiden Education Action Research Network and is a long-term learning community that we’ll be developing over the next two years. The aim is to bring together the research experience and expertise of people working in vocational, higher professional and university education, so that we can systematically share and strengthen our knowledge about teaching and learning.
‘What makes this project innovative is the long-term nature of the collaboration. Academic theory and new insights into teaching and learning will be directly applied and tested in educational practice by the people involved. Collaboration on this scale, with such a strong focus on putting research directly into practice, hasn’t been done before.’
What do you want to achieve with the network?
‘Rather than creating something that ends after two years, we want to lay the foundations for a long-term, intensive partnership. At this stage, we can only look two years ahead because that’s the duration of the grant.
‘If we want to make a real impact on education, we need to strengthen this collaboration, and that means working with all the educational institutions in the region. Through LEARN, we want to support teaching staff in vocational, higher professional and university education by giving them direct access to academic insights and innovations.
‘Those insights can then be applied to societal challenges, for example in healthcare or security. That ties in directly with our strategic agenda: using innovation to create societal impact. We focus on important sectors for which we are all educating the professionals of the future.’
What has been achieved so far?
‘Some interesting collaborations have already been running for some time, including Learning with the City, where thesis projects were developed through a kind of thesis hub. Another is the network and activities that Leiden Education Fieldlab (LEF) has built up over the years. These initiatives are what brought us together in the first place, and LEARN has grown out of them.’
What does evidence-informed practice mean in your proposal, and why is it important?
‘It’s about the “A” for Action in LEARN: that direct link between day-to-day educational practice and the educational research that teaching staff carry out in their classrooms. Within the network, they’ll discuss their research designs and findings together.
‘This will allow us to explore the full range of teaching and learning experiences taking place in the classroom. Educational theories and academic insights will be applied directly to the student learning process. For example, teaching staff from specific disciplines might come together to look at how Gen AI can be used when designing assignments. They might also meet to discuss broader themes, such as interdisciplinary teaching or digitalisation. Essentially, we encourage teaching staff to take an exploratory approach through action research in their own teaching practice.’
How will you be pooling and strengthening resources?
‘Within LEARN, we’ll not only share educational expertise, but also look at how different learning pathways within the same subject areas connect. That will help us gain a much better understanding of each other's educational contexts and build connections rather than barriers. We want to bridge the gap between different educational levels and remove barriers that have traditionally stood in the way of closer collaboration.
The grant committee’s comments on LEARN
‘The committee is enthusiastic about the collaboration between vocational, higher professional and university education and the way it draws on the research expertise of each participating institution. The focus is not only on exchange but also on co-creating research. The committee sees this project as an opportunity to develop a strategic agenda for joint research through collaborative inquiry, one of the ambitions of the Leiden City of Knowledge partnership.’