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The Educational Vision of Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� aims to support students “in three important fields”, namely qualification (‘kwalificatie’,) socialisation (’socialisatie’), and personal development (‘persoonsvorming’). These three dimensions are intertwined and, according to Gert Biesta, cannot really be separated. Yet in his view the last of these—what he terms ‘subjectification’—is nonetheless the most important. In this keynote, I will consider reasons why this might be the case. To do so, I will focus on the educational importance of making room for students’ sense-making, which requires their deep engagement with powerful knowledge. I will, as appropriate, illustrate points with reference to a capstone course on critical reflection that I teach.

Today’s youth are the first generation to grow up in a world where they are faced with tangible impacts of climate change. How can we understand the consequences of climate change for youth development and well-being? And how can we support youth’s potential to contribute to the transformative sustainable change that the world needs now? In this talk, I will present novel approaches to sustainability education that harness youth’s intrinsic motivation for societal contribution, and discuss its potential applications in higher education.

Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��’s New Teaching Model recently directed pedagogical attention to developing students’ graduate attributes such as self-reflexivity, autonomy and self-regulation. The idea is that students engage in continuous development and enculturation, whereby teachers accompany and inspire students towards these goals. This keynote will discuss this recent educational development in terms of how such enculturation towards normative goals may provide rather mixed, paradoxical and even contrasting results. It will do so by discussing the findings of my research on the process of student subjectification through teaching  cosmopolitanism in various undergraduate curricula. These outcomes will illustrate that the normative and idealistic dimensions of instilling particular graduate attributes, coupled with the sheer diversity of students’ backgrounds and experiences, by necessity lead to aporetic and unforeseen outcomes.