This article focuses on the controversies surrounding a statue in the Dutch city of Tilburg: the public representation of a nineteenth-century missionary and a kneeling African Surinamese person with leprosy. To understand the current tensions over the statue, the concept of historical consciousness as part of the Dutch changing historical culture…

Public research organizations respond to external pressures from national research evaluation systems, performance-based funding systems and university rankings by translating them into internal goals, rules and regulations and by developing organizational identities, profiles and missions. Organizational responses have primarily been studied at…

Although there are many methods available for assessing text comprehension, the cloze test is not widely acknowledged as one of them. Critiques on cloze testing center on its supposedly limited ability to measure comprehension beyond the sentence. However, these critiques do not hold for all types of cloze tests; the particular configuration of a…

The construct of critical cultural awareness (CCA) is often regarded as an element pertaining to intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997, 2021). In this model, CCA is defined as the ability to "evaluate, critically, and on the basis of a systematic process of reasoning, values in one's own culture and other cultures" (Byram,…

In multi- or intercultural educational contexts, folktales from around the world are often approached as representative of diverse cultures and used to transmit knowledge and understanding of the literary, social and cultural heritage of those cultures to children. In this article, I present contemporary critical literary, folklore and cultural…

In 1804, the first official spelling of Dutch was published as part of a national language policy that had been argued for since the middle of the eighteenth century, and in 1805, an official grammar was published. The orthography and the grammar constituted regulations for the written language ("schrijftaalregeling"), which were part of…

In this paper, we explore the divergent and convergent nature of design feedback and the various responses to this feedback from a group of 24 young novice designers (primary school children age 9-11) taking part in a co-design project. Earlier research emphasizes that feedback can encourage a designer to take divergent as well as convergent paths…

Searching for new methods to start a genuine dialogue in secondary school classrooms, bibliodrama as an active form of putting religious stories in action was used. The research focused on examining relationships between student learning activities and teacher behavior; six lessons were analyzed in a qualitative cross-case analysis. A dialogue in…

To understand the challenges and their causes in interactions between Western supervisors and international doctoral students, we conducted a self-study of our experiences as a Chinese international student and her Dutch supervisor during her doctoral research project. We found the supervisor and the student to differ in their expectations of the…