Presentations: Teaching students
| Time | Title | Description | Authors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09:30 - 09:50 | Motivational profiles among honours students | In our research we found that different motivational profiles exist among honours students, which we called ‘Overall High’, ‘Knowledge oriented’, and ‘Controlled’. The results show that students can simultaneously be motivated by both intrinsic and extrinsic motives. Moreover, student background variables predict profile membership. We like to use the opportunity to reflect with honors scholars and students on the potential implications for honours. | Elenor Kamans, Roorda, Langeloo, Vugteveen and Canrinus, Netherlands |
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09:50 - 10:10
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Taking perspective to support personal growth | Personal development is a defining feature of honours programs, often demanding pedagogical strategies that differ from those in mainstream education. We explored the role of perspective taking – the ability to empathize by understanding others’ thoughts, emotions, and motivations – as a key mechanism in fostering personal growth among honours students. Through qualitative analysis of focus group data, we identified four distinct modes that facilitate perspective change: 1) confrontation with different cultures or target groups, 2) confrontation with unknown domains or cognitive frameworks, 3) shifts in task or role, 4) self-insight. We will use these outcomes to highlight educational practices that can support personal development within honours settings and offers inspiration for regular curricula.. | Annegien Langeloo, Yvonne Zijlstra, Elanor Kamans, Hans Conijn, Netherlands |
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10:10 - 10:30 |
Gaming Literacy for Higher Education | As systemic challenges grow, design education must foster new literacies for situated, collaborative, and reflective thinking. Gaming literacy—engaging with systems through play and design—offers a powerful framework. This presentation showcases how students develop such literacy through hacking and redesigning games to model complex systems, showing how material engagement, metaphor, and spatial reasoning foster agency and systems thinking through embodied co-design | Sarit Sarit Youdelevich and Adeline Hvidsten, Norway |
Presentations: Organizing Education
| Time |
Title |
Description |
Authors |
|
10:45 - 11:05 |
Interdisciplinary Sparks: Student-Centered Learning at the School for Talents | School for Talents at the University of Stuttgart offers an interdisciplinary honors program co-designed with students, 10 faculties, and partners from industry and society. Participants explore an annual theme from multiple perspectives through workshops and excursions, which inspire group projects that strengthen collaboration, critical thinking, and communication. The program fosters student agency and empowers them to shape their educational environment, sparking institutional change. | Lisa Kohler and Julia Simon, Stuttgart, Germany |
|
11:05 - 11:25 |
A trans-national talentprogram |
We plan to develop a national talent program for teacher students from all six university colleges in Denmark. Transdisciplinarity strengthen the students’s collaborations on wicked problems and socio scientific issues in activities like case competitions and journal clubs, and courses in topics such as networking and project management. The presentation discusses ambitions and challenges in a national talent program. |
Nina Troelsgaard Jensen, Denmark |
|
11:25 - 11:45 |
Extra curriculum track to explore five Honours Programs goals | An extracurricular track of six sessions was designed for Honours students at Rotterdam Business School to explore the five HP goals. In collaboration with an art student, observation skills were integrated into the learning process. Activities included workshops where students pretended to be a tree to playing Fish Tank and engaging in Socratic dialogue. Pre- and post-session reflections suggest the track helped students develop key skills and attitudes aligned with the HP learning outcomes. | Isabel Solé Subirats and Vera Adriaanse, Netherlands |
Presentations: Supporting Inter- and Transdisciplinary Education
| Time | Title | Description | Authors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 13:30 - 13:50 |
Unlocking talent: The role of honours education in Dutch Vocational Education and Training |
Over the past decade, interest in honours programs has grown in the Netherlands and developed across the entire educational system—from primary education to university. In 2015, Vocational Education and Training (VET), also known as senior secondary vocational education, was the last sector to be encouraged by the government to develop honours education. Honours education is particularly relevant in this context, as the Dutch educational system often evaluates students based on their deficiencies rather than their strengths, with schools focusing on meeting diploma requirements instead of fostering broader talent development. Since access to VET requires a lower entry level than higher education—primarily in terms of cognitive demands—the development of honours education is both important and challenging in this sector. Such programmes enable VET students to demonstrate a wider range of talents connected to the skills they are building for their future careers. This presentation will provide insights into the characteristics, history, and benefits of honours education in Dutch VET. |
Leontien Kragten, Netherlands |
| 13:50 - 14:10 |
Taking stock: the implementation of transdisciplinary innovation labs across Europe |
Two years ago the ERASMUS+ funded STEAM+-consortium released the STEAM-TRAIL map as a project output. It provides an implementation roadmap for transdisciplinary innovation labs in higher education across Europe. The aim of the tool was to support higher education insitutions, teachers, policy makers and students seeking to foster (European) talent and competences in light of the 21st century’s challenges. The tool collects insights from different educational stakeholders and explains stepping stones to co-create transdisciplinary educational laboratories that contribute to and facilitate this goal.
In this presentation we wish to present our map and discuss with the audience the current state of transdisciplinary innovation labs in higher education. Given the diversity of nationalities and experiences of higher education at the conference we hope to spark interesting conversation between students, teachers, and policy makers about the current availability and possibility of implementing transdisciplinary innovation labs. How accessible are transdisciplinary innovation labs, what barriers to implementing transdisciplinary innovation labs persist, ... This presentation hopes to engage the public’s experiences and inspire further innovation in Europe to prepare the future generations for the future’s unknowns. |
Jan-Peter Sandler,
on behalf of the STEAM+ consortium, Belgium |
| 14:10 - 14:30 | Why-professional |
At the HU we have developed a new profile for these forward-thinking honours students, which we refer to as the "why-professional". We developed a new honours programme, Pioneers. Through this programme that started in 2023-2024, students explore their personal why and undertook impactful projects aligned with that why. |
Annelies Riteco, Jimme Vaneijk, Pleuntje Vandentweel and Kiara Luk, Netherlands |
| 14:30 - 14:45 |
Interdisciplinarity in higher education journals: A text embedding study. |
The world is facing increasingly complex challenges, such as climate change and global pandemics, which cannot be solved within the boundaries of a single discipline. Therefore, a focus on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary higher education is important. In this report, the two are treated together under the label interdisciplinary. This report applies deductive qualitative analysis using text embedding to examine the prevalence of interdisciplinarity in two leading journals in the field of higher education. These are Higher Education and Studies in Higher Education. This approach makes it possible to systematically analyze larger volumes of text, a task that often is time consuming and resource intensive. All published research articles were analyzed to find semantic patterns, identify representative articles for interdisciplinarity and measure trends over time (since 1970). By comparing interdisciplinarity with related concepts such as monodisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, the analysis reveals how central this has been in the discourse of higher education research in these journals. The findings suggest that perspectives on monodisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity remain dominant, while interdisciplinary approaches appear less frequent. The analysis also highlights periods during the past 50 years where articles semantically similar to interdisciplinary approaches appear more frequently. These findings reveal a gap between policy ambitions for interdisciplinarity and its limited presence in the discourse. This indicates challenges in academia’s ability to respond to complex societal demands. |
Andrine Torgersen Wara and Amanda Bowerman, University of Oslo, Norway |