Goodbye and Hello from your Research Director
In the forthcoming months, the new Scientific Director of SHE, Pim Teunissen, will take over my tasks and responsibilities as Research Director. I have fulfilled this role with great dedication and pleasure for almost 12 years.
When I joined Maastricht University in 2009, the program ‘Research in Education’ and the activities of SHE were still part of the Educational Institute. Together with Cees van der Vleuten, Albert Scherpbier and many other colleagues, we started to make plans for the growth and further integration of research, education and valorisation activities in the field of health professions education. This was successfully realized in 2014, when SHE gained full recognition as one of the six official graduate schools in the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences at Maastricht University.
In this brief reflection I like to discuss, looking backward, three highlights in my period as Research Director: The vast growth of our PhD program, the Research Assessment 2012-2017, and our current research program Task Centred Learning in the Health Professions 2018-2023. The number of PhD students grew from about 25 in 2009 to almost 100 nowadays. Many things contributed to this growth and I will only mention a few of them. First of all, the PhD coordinator (first Anique de Bruin and later Janneke Frambach) played a key role in shaping the PhD program and organizing a wide array of activities for our PhD students. Second, the newly developed PhD Research Proposal Writing Course (first coordinated by Diana Dolmans and later by Pascal van Gerven) brought in many new PhD candidates and also helped to strengthen the PhD community. And last but not least, many PhD candidates organized themselves, contributed to the SHE activities in creative ways, and made the PhD program to what it is now.
A second highlight was our successful participation in the National Research Review of Pedagogical Sciences and Educational Sciences 2012-2017. In this research review, not only the SHE Research Program but also the Interuniversity Center of Educational Sciences (ICO), of which SHE is the coordinating partner and Diana Dolmans is the Scientific Director, were assessed. Both ICO and SHE were reviewed with highly positive results. The research quality and the relevance to society of the SHE Research Program were both assessed as ‘excellent’, which confirms the status of SHE as a world-leading institute in health professions education.
A third highlight is the creation of our current research program, Task Centred Learning in the Health Professions 2018-2023. The development of this program gave rise to lively discussions on the contents and themes of our future research and it started the initiation of a number of Special Interest Groups in which SHE staff as well as internal and external PhD candidates are active. Current SIGs are organizing activities around globalization of education, educational change and co-creation, interprofessional education & collaboration, workplace-based learning, and self-regulated learning & instructional design. Next year, SHE will organize a Midterm Review of the current research program for the period 2018-2020. This will also give our new scientific director, Pim Teunissen, an excellent opportunity to present his new research plans and strategies and to discuss these ideas within the SHE community and with the Midterm Review Committee.
A few days ago, I was watching a television show about the Tour de France (I am passionate about cycling) where the Dutch track cyclist and 5-time World Champion Theo Bos explained his philosophy of “ever change the winning team”. After each new World Championship, he deliberately changed his team because stagnation means decline. According to Theo Bos, changing the team brings in new ideas, new training methods and new goals, which are all necessary to continue improving. Over the past 12 years, we had quite some changes in the management team of SHE which worked out fine. Now, it is my time to say ‘goodbye’: I will leave the management team and I am confident that this change will have a positive impact on the further development of the PhD and research program of SHE. But I also say ‘hello’ because I am eager to contribute to these new developments in the forthcoming years, this time from a position on the side-lines.
Jeroen van Merrienboer
Thank you Jeroen for all your hard work and dedication and good luck on your upcoming work and continuing contributions