LECTORAAT CHANGE MANAGEMENT – De Haagse Hogeschool

Last week I became a student again by starting my PhD at Leiden University. I feel incredibly lucky to have received the NWO Doctoral Grant for Teachers. It allows me to continue to teach as a lecturer at THUAS, with guidance and support from both institutions. And since my research deals with professional development of lecturers, it helps to be in such close contact with my colleagues and students.

Looking back, the journey that brought me here started long before I consciously realized it. Throughout my years as a student, from middle school all the way through my BA studies, I often had a vague but persistent feeling that something about education felt limiting and mechanical, although I did not yet have the language to explain why. It was only later, during my first weeks as a master’s student at the University of Edinburgh, that I slowly began to understand where those feelings were coming from.

As students normally do, I was gossiping with a classmate, who later became a very dear friend of mine, about our lecturers. To my surprise, my friend really liked one lecturer that I was not impressed by, at least not yet.

“But he hasn’t actually TAUGHT us anything,” I remember saying.

To which my friend responded: “But he is so cool! He challenges us to think critically.”

This exchange stayed with me ever since. I realized that I had been waiting to be given information and instructions in order to complete assignments and get a (hopefully good) grade, while dismissing the critical questions of this lecturer as mere ramblings. What shook me so much was that I had always thought of myself as a curious and critical person, yet in those first week in an unfamiliar educational environment I found myself resisting exactly the kind of critical engagement I claimed to value.

Until then, even though I was already a qualified teacher, I had mainly encountered what Paulo Freire later helped me understand as the “banking model” of education. Growing up and studying in North Macedonia, education largely meant absorbing and reproducing the “correct” answers as accurately as possible. The lessons learned along the way, the ‘hidden curriculum’, were that opinions about the “correct” answers or any such transgressions were not particularly welcomed or appreciated. And, to my disappointment, even today many educational environments still tend to reward compliance, certainty, and reproducing expected answers more than questioning, experimentation, or critical engagement with the world around us.

So when I arrived at the University of Edinburgh for an MSc in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), I carried all of those assumptions with me. But TESOL is deeply connected to questions of power, culture, language, and ideology. English is not simply a neutral communication tool. It is also tied to histories of colonialism and global inequality. Looking back, this is exactly what that lecturer was trying to make us confront. He challenged our assumptions, asked questions without straightforward answers, and interrupted discussions with uncomfortable observations. At the time, I found the absence of clear conclusions deeply frustrating.

Ironically, I now recognize that same frustration in many of my own students when they are asked to think critically or engage with assignments that do not have rigid structures and clearly defined “correct” answers. Many students initially experience that freedom not as liberating, but as deeply uncomfortable, even paralyzing.

Back then, as part of those very discussions and tensions in class, we were introduced to Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and ideas around critical pedagogy. This rather brief, but incredibly insightful text gave me language for things I had intuitively sensed for years but did not yet know how to articulate. Freire argued that education is never neutral and it either reproduces existing inequalities and power structures or helps people critically understand and challenge them. He rejected the idea of students as passive recipients of knowledge and instead saw education as a dialogical process rooted in people’s lived experiences. In this view, teachers are not simply authorities transferring knowledge, but participants in a shared learning process. This also meant that learning could no longer be understood as simply receiving clear answers from an authority figure. Dialogue, questioning, uncertainty, and reflection were not distractions from learning, but central to it.

Suddenly, many of my own reactions in those Edinburgh classrooms started making sense. My discomfort with uncertainty, my frustration when discussions did not lead to straightforward conclusions, and my instinct to search for the “right” answers rather than engage with complexity all reflected the kinds of educational environments I had been shaped by myself.

At the same time, this realization created a strange contradiction in me. On paper, I was doing very well academically. I had completed a BA and then an MSc in education. I was already a qualified teacher. Yet internally, I still did not feel prepared at all. And I think part of the reason was that once I began understanding education as something deeply relational, political, and human, teaching suddenly felt far more complex than simply mastering content or teaching methods. If classrooms are spaces where power, identity, inequality, lived experience, and human relationships are constantly present, then the responsibility of being a teacher becomes much bigger than delivering information correctly.

The responsibility of teaching felt and still feels enormous to me.

How could I stand in front of students and claim to guide their learning, their development, their understanding of the world, while knowing that classrooms are shaped by power, positionality, inequality, and lived experience in ways I did not fully know how to navigate? I was beginning to understand that teaching could never simply be reduced to methods, or classroom management expertise alone.

A few years later, I moved to the Netherlands and soon started working as a lecturer at The Hague University of Applied Sciences.

In many ways, this was a very different educational environment from what I had experienced before. The system itself is highly organized with module coordinators, module teams, standardized assessments, shared teaching materials, clear learning outcomes and a sense of shared responsibility. For a new teacher this structure was very comforting. With all the preparation and support available, I quickly became more confident in the practical side of teaching. I had no doubts about my abilities to structure lesson plans, facilitate workshops, manage classrooms, guide projects, and assess students consistently using grading rubrics.

And once the routines of teaching no longer consumed all my attention, the larger questions I had carried for years resurfaced more strongly. And they resurfaced within a highly diverse, international, and intercultural classroom environment.

How do I respond when a student quietly, but just audibly enough, makes a racist comment in a classroom full of diverse students? Especially as a young, white, Eastern European, female teacher?

Do I stop the lesson and address it openly? Do I have the right tools to navigate the discomfort, tension, or conflict that might unfold? Does the student even realize that the comment is racist, or are they speaking from social and cultural norms they themselves have never been encouraged to question? How do I acknowledge the harm such a comment may cause while still leaving room for learning, reflection, and dialogue? How much time can I realistically spend on it? What happens if I do not deliver the content on the slides? What if students complain? What happens to my course evaluations? These types of questions stay with me long after classroom incidents occur.

As teachers, we constantly have to navigate the tensions between the instrumental and the deeply relational, human demands of the profession. And the more I spoke with colleagues, the more I realized that nobody really had any clear answers or ‘magic solutions’ to balancing these demands well. In fact, many of these questions were rarely discussed in group conversations or trainings at all.

Should we avoid discussing diversity, equality, and inclusion because students “do not find it interesting”? Or is that itself a reflection of the limitations of the education they have received so far, and perhaps exactly why we should engage with these topics more deeply?

How do we prepare students not only for their future jobs, but for living in a world increasingly shaped by climate change, wars, geopolitical instability, polarization, and uncertainty? Surely education must be about more than producing efficient workers. After all, our own institutional motto speaks about changing the world. And changing the world requires more than technical competence. It requires critical thinking, dialogue, empathy, courage, imagination, and the ability to sit with discomfort.

These are the types of questions that weigh on me the most, and therefore these are the questions that matter to me the most. I still do not have easy answers, but 5 years later, I know I am far from alone in asking them. And ultimately, these questions are what led me to begin my PhD.

For the next five years, I will have the privilege of continuing these conversations together with lecturers and students, not from the position of someone who has figured education out, but as someone hopeful about what education could become.