Leaders of Netherlands College Give and Receive Inspiration at GHELI

To culminate an action-packed visit to the U.S., leaders of the University College Roosevelt (UCR) in the Netherlands met with Incubator staff on October 13, 2017, to discuss teaching innovations across disciplines. During the tour of the Incubator’s creative spaces, Dean Bert van den Brink, president of the college, and Dr. Jorrit Snijder, UCR’s managing director, spoke passionately about the principles of liberal arts and global citizenship that underpin their institution’s educational philosophy. 

Dean van den Brink is the most recent successor to the founding director of University College Roosevelt, Hans Adriaansens, a highly regarded innovator in Dutch higher education. Adriaansens brought the model of American liberal arts education to the Netherlands, and was originally introduced to Harvard and the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning by former Harvard President Derek Bok himself. It was this nexus of interests that drew GHELI’s Senior Contributor, Terry Aladjem, to co-leading UCR’s summer program on Excellence in Teaching over the last several years with Virginia Maurer, formerly of the Bok Center.

The visitors were particularly interested in the emphasis on visual literacy throughout the Incubator that Faculty Director Sue J. Goldie has made central to its design and mission. In a roundtable discussion with members of GHELI’s pedagogy team – Nina Bhattacharya, Terry Aladjem, Susan Holman, and Farah Qureshi – van den Brink and Snijder remarked on the challenges of matching their culture of teaching and learning to advanced graduate studies and other fields. The visitors shared that they were “very interested” in bringing the Incubator’s innovations in visual literacy to UCR, where there are many parts of their curriculum that also touch on global health and student-centered learning.