Teaching in the school as a Pedagogical interspace

A school should be seen as a "pedagogical interspace", where there is room for diversity and difference. To this end, schools cultivate an environment where developing one's own perspective, reflection, and encountering other perspectives are central. The key question is what this requires of the teacher.

With this project, we aim to better understand how teachers experience moments in their daily work where the teaching they organize creates friction, due to tensions among students and in relation to their own beliefs. Based on this insight, we develop proposals for professional development.

Further develop the essay ‘TEACHING IN THE SCHOOL AS A ‘PEDAGOGICAL INTERSPACE’ for:

an article in a academic journal
a popularized publication in the form of a booklet published by Boom/Amsterdam
a theoretical foundation for the ‘HU-tussenruimte’ project group
useful (training) methods for professional development.

01 September 2025 - 31 December 2026

To gain insight into how the pedagogical interspace is experienced and shaped in educational practices, a qualitative research project is designed. The goal is to reconstruct rich case studies that are close to practice and provide insight into the normative, professional, and interpersonal dimensions of this gap.

Data collection

The data collection consists of three components in successive phases:

exploratory interviews with teaching teams from various educational practices across secondary education, vocational education, and higher professional education
collection of critical incidents
in-depth interviews