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The education sector is facing major shortages: the numbers of students in teacher and education programmes have been lagging behind for years. Through a ‘Teacher Shortage Challenge’, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science hopes to bring about a change. and from believe they can overcome the shortage in language studies and won the challenge with their project TalenTjaar. Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��’s Faculty of Humanities is a partner and is collaborating on a pilot.

Substantive gap year

The TalenTjaar is a supervised substantive gap year, in which recently graduated students accompany a language teacher in secondary education. Besides gaining experience as a teaching assistant, young talents get the chance to learn a modern foreign language and travel to the country where the chosen language is spoken.

“Many of the havo/vwo final exam students don’t know what to study,” Bos explains. “They need more time and may still want to go abroad. And even if they do choose, the question is how well-considered their choice is: 11 to 15 per cent of first-year students drop out. With the TalenTjaar, direct contact is created with school-leavers, while they can experience if the teaching profession is right for them.”

shs and Faculty of Humanities

Bos organises the TalenTjaar from within , an organisation with the mission of ‘making a new generation fall in love with education’. shs already collaborates with Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��’s teacher training programme. For the TalenTjaar, the expertise of the Faculty of Humanities has been utilised and participants take a Humanities language course to reach a desired language level.

Direct contact is created with school-leavers, while they can experience whether the teaching profession is right for them.

“Iris van der Tuin, vice dean for bachelor education, and I know each other from Liberal Arts & Sciences,” Bos says. “At the beginning of this calendar year, she approached me to ask whether we from shs could think along about creative solutions to increase the influx of language courses and the educational minor.” Together with Dean Thomas Vaessens, Bos and Van der Tuin developed three proposals, including the TalenTjaar.

“It took some time to find out how we could finance the development of the TalenTjaar when the Teacher Shortage Challenge came along. We are now receiving over 50,000 euros from the ministry to run a pilot between February and July.” Utrecht Faculty of Humanities lecturers Doris Abitzsch (German) and Marco Bril (French) will also be involved in guiding students.

“It’s a very special project,” Van der Tuin feels. “Thomas Vaessens and I had several meetings with Sander Bos and shs last year, hoping that, in time, our language teaching programmes could benefit. Now we as faculty are the academic partner with which the pilot is shaped, but: all credits to these young innovative people.”