Samenvatting

A five-year experiment of collaborative curriculum design teams including lecturers, students and researchers in Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in nine disciplines, has led to a deepened insight in its complexity. Three ambitions were central in the longitudinal project funded by the Ministry of Education: cross-stakeholder-collaboration, the integration of research in bachelor programs, and systematic curriculum design. Curriculum co-design of students, lecturers and researchers offers opportunities for more meaningful innovations, while adding to the complexity of the design process (Bovill, et. al., 2016 Cook-Sather, et al., 2014 Healey and Healey, 2018). Ideally, each team commits to making a difference and therefore creates a social learning space by mutually engaging uncertainty (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, 2020). But how to make such a collective effort? The further integration of research in professional bachelor programs aimed to better educate our students as future professionals in a hypercomplex world (Barnett, 2012). But realizing this integration is not straightforward at all (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017 Young & Muller, 2014). Existing conceptual frameworks, such as from Brew (2012) and Healey (2005) need to be collectively learned, interpreted and adapted, and often the current body of knowledge did not provide any direction for research integration (see also Griffioen, Groen, & Nak, 2019). Finally, to increase the quality of the curriculum design processes, teams were stimulated to apply the Curriculum Spiderweb by Van den Akker (2003), which showed to be a useful instrument, but its usage also showed the high complexity of curriculum design as such, let alone collectively. The combined complexity of the multifaceted processes of curriculum design, the co-creative setup, and the ambition to further integrate research into the curriculum has shown to be a challenging endeavor. Still, these challenges the SoTL community needs to get to grips with to increase the quality of higher education.