ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��

Dr. Jocelyn Ballantyne is one of ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� College Utrecht’s longest serving staff members, and has recently celebrated her 25th work anniversary at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��. During this time, Jocelyn has contributed significantly to the College and helped many students and colleagues along the way. Jocelyn currently serves as the Senior Tutor and acting Director of Education at UCU, and has brought to the table significant initiatives such as the Aruba Field Research Project. In recognition of this milestone we sat down to talk about the early days of UCU, how education can keep us energized and the opportunities and transformative experience the liberal arts and sciences can offer.

Jocelyn Ballantyne studied for her PhD in Linguistics at the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Texas at Austin and started working at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� in June 2000 as a post doc researcher. In 2002, at the end of her assignment at the Faculty of Humanities, she applied for a position at UCU as a tutor and as she says, the rest is history. At that point in time UCU was still a very young institution having been founded in 1998. On the state of the College at that time, Jocelyn says it was still very much a pioneering institution, in a very different higher education landscape.

“It was definitely a different vibe. At that time even though the Bologna process had started and there was an agreement in Europe to move towards a bachelor’s and master's model, that hadn't really happened yet. UCU was one of two or maybe three bachelor's programmes operating in the Netherlands.”

The students who chose to study at UCU were not only trying the Liberal Arts and Sciences approach, but also a whole new educational model, novel for the Netherlands in the late 90’s. By the time Jocelyn joined, UCU had been open for a few years and it seemed that this new experiment was working:

“There was still a lot of openness and a lot of uncertainty about the future of the institution and the future of the students who graduated from here, and yet, there were all of these students who signed up for it. There were not a lot of other broad bachelors, maybe one other university college and the Liberal Arts and Sciences department of the UU.”

In the early days the majority of UCU students were Dutch, especially considering the more generous study finance system that was in place. Jocelyn says that the majority of these students were very internationally oriented and there were some international and exchange students on campus to balance out the classroom populations.

“There was an ambition to have half of our students be international and know we've actually exceeded that in in that ambition.”

Jocelyn says in her first 10 years she worked at UCU there were so many standout moments, related to new experiences such as exposure to students from cultures and places she had not encountered before.

Thinking about the world and thinking about what I had learned in my discipline, it was fascinating to see and understand that some of the ideas in my field were just not nuanced enough.

“To be honest, working and teaching at UCU for me was such an enormous eye opener with regard to thinking about knowledge and about language. My background is linguistics and at that time there was this very strong idea within the field that when you got to be a certain age you couldn't really learn and become fluent in a foreign language. I kept meeting these students who came from different parts of the Netherlands and spoke English with a strong accent. However, after a year at UCU these students were speaking English very fluently and confidently, without much of an accent and expressing very complex ideas in their written work. Thinking about the world and thinking about what I had learned in my discipline, it was fascinating to see that and understand that some of the ideas in my field were just not nuanced enough.”

Jocelyn also says that in time honoured UCU tradition, many of the people whom she met as colleagues and tutees are people that she still remains in touch with. In fact, one of the tutorial students that Jocelyn had in her first group was Lotte Berk, who in turn completed her own PhD and came back to teach at UCU.

“I’ve been here long enough now that I’ve seen the whole cycle. Lotte is now older than I was when I started working here at UCU and she's further along in her career and life than I was then, and that's really cool to see. That’s just because I've had the good luck of being able to stay in the same job and same place and been able to take advantage of the opportunities that this particular environment offers.”

On the topic of how to keep energized and fresh over a longer period, Jocelyn thinks that education has an inherent advantage – that the cohort of students changes every few years.

“Of course the attitudes and approaches of an 18 year old now is very different to what they were 25 years ago, even though we can see some parallels. The world is different. Education has changed. I think it stayed fresh for me because of the dynamics of society, views on education and the changes in the world keep things interesting. I started teaching before I even went to Graduate School to get a PhD. One of the reasons I wanted to do a PhD was because I also wanted to be able to keep working on new ideas and do research. That has been harder to do at UCU because we don't have a lot of time for research. However, the fact that I'm teaching in an environment where we're helping and supporting students to carry out their own research means that this aspect is always part of the work that you're doing as a teacher; always staying updated and thinking about new ideas and changes in society, what they mean for your field and for how you teach your field. That’s what keeps the educational mission really interesting.”

I'm not big on giving advice. I'm big on asking questions.

On the subject of what she would recommend to young academics who are coming through the ranks and starting to teach and guide the next generation of students, Jocelyn humbly says despite being a tutor, she’s not big on giving advice. Instead Jocelyn encourage teachers to understand more about their own motivations and interests, continuing the exploration of academic curiosities that UCU students are encouraged to embrace.

“I'm big on asking questions. If someone just finished UCU and said they were interested in becoming an academic and maybe coming back to teach at UCU, I would say then you need to do research and get a PhD, but mostly I would be asking them questions. What kind of career are they really looking for? Why do they want that? Why do they want to be part of this community? I think the people who are happiest working here are the ones who feel like they can make use of the opportunities that are here, and they don't feel like they're missing out on the opportunities that are not here. I've made my peace with that a long time ago, because I really like all of these other things that I get here. Thinking back 23 years ago when I first started working at UCU, the sense of community that I got here that was really important. Even maybe four or five months after I started working at UCU, it really felt like a place where you could belong and that was really nice. In those really early days it was very closely knit because it was much fewer people than we have now in the staff.”

One of the long lasting projects that Jocelyn has helped to initiate has been the Aruba Field Research Project, together with the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Aruba. Jocelyn says that it was pure chance that she was able to get involved in this project, and it has turned out to be very transformative.

On the genesis of the project Jocelyn says: “The ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Aruba was one of the UCU exchange partners. At that time, students would come from the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Aruba to study here for a semester, but not many UCU students would go the opposite way as the curriculum over there was not in line with the kinds of fields that our students are studying. The Dean at the time, Rob van der Vaart asked myself and Rosemary Orr, who had just been appointed Honors Director, to put together a visit to the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Aruba to invigorate this exchange. We saw how much our students benefitted from having international students represented in the classroom, especially from countries that we might not have in the general population as much, and they need that at the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Aruba too. Rosemary and I being linguists, were interested in this multilingual society and ended up doing a site visit together with one of my tutorial students who was also interested in going. We were so inspired by the sustainability challenges in the broadest sense, the activities around the sustainable development goals on the island. We were so inspired by my colleague there, Eric Mijts and his ideas about how those challenges could be addressed, so with the help of our colleague Lonia Jakubowska who had just set up the UCU East Africa programme, we came up with this programme to enable students to do field research in Aruba on these sustainable development challenges. It's a formula that works really well for the the people who participate, and it has been a very exciting thing to be part of. This year was the 10th edition, however we skipped one year because of COVID, but in 2022 when the programme resumed we actually sent the largest group ever. Now we also are involving the Global Sustainability Science programme at the UU, which makes a lot of sense because of their focus on sustainability, and to help keep it vibrant and dynamic. We're also trying to collaborate with other broad bachelor programs at the UU so their students can also apply to take part.”

Reflecting on the transformative nature of this and other experiences at UCU, Jocelyn says: “I've learned so much about the world through these kinds of projects, and actually, these are exactly the kind of experiences that keep me feeling like I'm always learning and always growing even though I’m not a bachelor’s student in the 18 to 22 age bracket any more."