“Teachers and students really make an effort to get to know one another. This makes it easier to collaborate during projects and deploy each other’s qualities and interests.”

I mainly want to be there for my students. To have time for a chat. To sit down with them, or they with me. I would ideally like to be 100% accessible, but that is not always possible. I try to spend at least 4 out of 5 days among our students. Almost literally. There is a staffroom, but it is quite small. Even if we did have a bigger space, I wouldn’t like to isolate myself. You can always find me throughout the building.

Here at the Tilburg site, the atmosphere is very open and fun. Teachers and students really make an effort to get to know one another. This also makes it easier to collaborate during projects and deploy each other’s qualities and interests. What is also fun is our student-teacher tournament based around the game League of Legends. A student once told us his ranking in the game puts him in the top 0,8% of the world. One thing led to another and soon we will be playing with 5 teachers against 3 students. We don’t have a clue what the game is about and the students will probably show us every corner of the screen, but we are glad to make time for such things.

As a joke we sometimes say “Eindhoven is big and Tilburg is cosy”. We offer the same learning opportunities at both locations, but here in Tilburg we are a lot smaller. In Eindhoven there are 120 to 150 students in an open-plan workspace. Here, we only have 70 students. In Eindhoven, the labs have their own location, here they are in the middle of our workspaces, for practical reasons. This creates a very open and dynamic atmosphere. The fact that we are smaller obviously has its disadvantages. We deal with them in a very practical and creative way. But there Is also an important advantage: fewer students means that we as lecturers are able to provide more time to the individual student.

With less space and resources, we have to be more creative. In practice, this means we often form project groups with students from different ICT disciplines. But sometimes we also involve students from non-ICT programmes. For instance, students who study communication. This never fails to give projects a positive impulse. We often have students come here who used to follow another study programme but considered it too hectic or too big. Or who prefer not the be taught in English. With us it is all in Dutch.

Yes, wonderful, isn’t it? I never really applied for jobs. Although I did experience the interviews that go with it, of course. I have followed many different ICT courses, my last one was Organizational Psychology. I found that very interesting at the time. With Windows 3.1 in the nineties, the PC got a graphical upgrade. WYSWYG was introduced and suddenly psychology gained a role within software. I was intrigued and wanted to know more about it. I have always had a broad orientation and I am able to contribute all my knowledge and experience here. And, naturally, I have experienced many courses from close by. I ended up at Fontys and simply never left. I believe that really says something.

The fact that some students who had been written off by their environment, or who had been given a label, have still managed to succeed. Some people just need a bit more time, attention or encouragement. I am also a mentor and I really focus on that. I once spent one and a half hours in a car on a 60km/h road to accompany a student to an internship application. We hardly spoke, but the mere fact that I was there calmed the student significantly down. That’s what we like to call student-centered education. In practice, it means we are here for them. We consider that of great value here in Tilburg.

Make mistakes. And look back on them with humor and self-relativization. With us, you can pass a semester with errors, as long as you see what went wrong and how you can do better next time. Unfortunately, other types of education do not tolerate mistakes at all. There, the aim is to make as few as possible. We notice this especially when we receive students from other programmes. And that’s exactly why we say: make those mistakes here, for errors are the best way to learn.