Developing and growing together: How to intertwine students’ personal-professional development with study programmes

Karin Fikkers & Maaike Wouda

Developing as a person? Let’s do that together! Students need support in developing personal-professional skills such as resilience, personal leadership, and agency by themselves. Such development should be part of students’ education. Courses and study programmes should offer explicit attention and space for students to reflect on who they are as a person and as a professional.

This interactive brainstorm session aims to elicit ideas and experiences about where and how to intertwine personal-professional development in curricula. How can teachers support (perhaps even coach) their students in their personal-professional development? And how can both students and teachers benefit from this growth? 

Participants are welcome to share their input and benefit from others’ perspectives, ideas, and energy. We will end with practical tips for embedding personal-professional development in education. 

Biography

Karin Fikkers, assistant professor Language and Communication, and tutor coordinator at the Faculty of Humanities, and her colleague Maaike Wouda, who is a student advisor and wellbeing trainer within the same faculty, join forces from their different areas of expertise to create space for the development of personal-professional skills within curricula. Their mission is to create education that guides students in such a way that they learn to regulate themselves and experience space to develop themselves as professionals.