dr. Bettina van Hoven's Honours College Summer School Project

Throughout the years, I feel that the collaboration was incredibly enriching to all involved. It was definitely not always a comfortable space because we all encountered limitations in various ways related to stereotypes, assumptions and also different ways in which the city enabled or disabled our daily lives. The project allowed for creating a space where we could hear different voices in different ways (literally sometimes seeing the types of communication we used).

Can you introduce yourself shortly?

My name is Bettina van Hoven. I am a Cultural geographer and currently work mostly at the University College Groningen, and partly at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences. I am interested in everyday geographies, looking at what different places mean to different people, and what makes them feel they belong, or feel excluded. I enjoy working with participatory and creative methods, as well as collaborating with different kinds of people. I feel that when a project reveals something unexpected, or has a challenge, it also changes me, I like that.

Congratulations on receiving a NWO grant for your project that essentially started as the Honours College project. What was this project?

Thank you! Yes, this is actually very special. We started the project in 2015 as a Spatial Sciences Deepening Module for the Honours College. We collaborated with Andrea Stultiens and her students at the Art Academy Minerva, and clients Noorderbrug (now sHeerenloo), an organization that provides care and housing for people with acquired brain injuries, deafness with complex problems, and chronic neuromuscular diseases. The course which we called ‘Break Out’/ ‘Show Yourself’ challenged participants to break out of their habitual ways of being and doing in the context of an interdisciplinary project on in-and exclusion in urban spaces. In order to discover geographies of in-and exclusion by people with physical impairments, in the course, we took a participatory and community-based approach utilizing creative and visual methods. In addition, the project itself was meant to create space for meaningful encounters between the diverse groups involved.

How has this project been helpful to you, honours students, and the University of Groningen?

Throughout this project, students worked in teams of three, each with one art student and one client from Noorderbrug. Rather than addressing the issue at stake from a classroom-distance, students did so through experiential learning. Students were encouraged to explore the life world of Noorderbrug clients and to visit places of student interest together with their project partners. Many clients from Noorderbrug are unable to communicate well verbally or at all as a result of their physical impairment. Specifically, our co-researchers had mobility impairments which required them to use a rollator, a hand wheelchair or an electric wheelchair, and some additionally experienced muscle spasms which could either lock their limbs or cause uncontrolled movement, and speech impairments which required them to communicate using eye or tongue signals, a letter card or a speech computer.

An important part of the project was for students to learn how research can be made useful to the studied group and the wider community. In the case of this module, this was achieved predominantly by photographic exhibitions. In the course of the three years the course ran, we even presented at the Royal Geographic Society in London and later at the University of Maynooth during conferences. During the course, a strong commitment was developed between ourselves and the clients at Noorderbrug, to continue working together and challenge each other beyond the course. After the Deepening Module was taken over by another colleague offering a different topic, I continued the work in the form of research internships in various forms. Last year, the project was continued with the support of the Enhancing Undergraduate Research Funds from the University College Groningen, and it was nominated for the Ben Feringa Award.

Because our students worked with students from another educational institution, as well as a societal partner, they also learned about collaborating across these. While at the university, the syllabus provides a clear structure for a course, in such collaborations, things can get more messy and students have to figure out how they can move forward productively. As a teacher, many experiences the students shared in their reflection (which is where the quotes are from) were also experienced by ourselves. Developing new ways of looking at the world and thinking about ourselves as researchers was a unique opportunity. A downside of a project like this is that it is very time intensive and often, we don’t have so much time during our regular academic work. Much support is needed, especially in the form of people and their time. Altogether, the experiences and insights provided a great start for thinking about translating this into a larger, funded research project. We built on the realization that we need to continue the participatory, creative research as well as allowing for time to process insights into products for an academic and public audience.

You’ve been teaching at the Honours College for quite a while now. Can you tell us a bit about the course(s) you teach?

I used to teach the Deepening Module as well as the Summer School on Diversity and Inclusion in the urban Context to Vancouver. I already talked extensively about the Deepening Module. Regarding the Summer School, I can perhaps emphasize that it has been inspirational in other ways, too. A few highlights were the Streetfront project which emerged from a summer school that had to be held in Groningen because of travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. A group of students collaborated with a local high school in Vancouver’s East side and a book was created and published. It was distributed in Vancouver and beyond and even mentioned as an example by the teachers association in British Columbia. This project was nominated for the Ben Feringa Award. Another highlight was the collaboration with two other colleagues, Gwenda van de Vaart and Imogen Humphries, in the summer school. We tried to figure out how to bring the students closer to Vancouver without actually going there and used the method of Deep Mapping. It was a big success in that students created three dimensional layered maps to represent their own, equally ‘layered’ knowledge of the city. An interesting form of Blended Learning. The student work inspired us so much, we wrote an article about this (and hopefully, it will be published as well).

What kind of value do you see in the honours interdisciplinary Broadening Model? How have the Honours College and its honours students contributed to your project(s), thinking and research during these years?

The honours interdisciplinary Broadening Model has a huge value. Most, if not all, students have never collaborated with students from another degree programme who get different instruction, different types of articles (Sciences vs Social Sciences, for example) and different types of assignments. For some, it is like a whole different language and some find it difficult to see the equal value of these other types of knowledge production. As a teacher, it can be a challenge to find a way to cross these disciplinary boundaries and students have to be open to this as well. The Honours College creates a unique opportunity for students to practice such skills in a safe space.

For me, as a teacher, it helps me to look at what I think I know again with fresh eyes. It helps me to not always take things for granted, to think about how to explain things and how other people may understand things (or not). In particular, the Honours College courses have enabled me to experiment with teaching approaches and topics and utilize the experiences the students bring to class. Projects like the wheelchair project and the Streetfront project would not have been possible without the space the Honour College provides. The Honours College also conveys a sense of faith in the teachers and encourages them to push boundaries. It is mostly by facilitating and giving trust to teachers. There is no prescriptive context, method or syllabus. This enables fantastic freedom for teachers and students.

For example, in our summer school presentations in the Academy building, we sometimes ‘changed’ the interior by covering historic windows with huge flags from our research or adding a photo gallery on the wooden panels in the faculty rooms with otherwise white male older academics looking down on the student activities. We have felt that the Honours College facilitated our students thinking outside the box and allowing them to try out what this could look like during the Honours Festival.

What are your plans for the future? What are you currently working on as a researcher?

Some of these plans entail that I will work on the NWO project ‘Everyday Geographies of Being and Becoming Disabled’ in the next coming years. As a part of that, we will also revisit material produced in the Honours College ‘Break Out/Show yourself’ course and attempt to make this available to a broader audience. We also want to keep expanding by doing participatory research with people with (multiple) disabilities in that project. I am hoping to be able to involve students throughout the project as well.

Having said this, I also enjoy supervising PhD research. I am fortunate to have a bit of a kaleidoscopic group of PhD students with research topics ranging from human-bat relations to rural-urban migration by older adults in China. You might ask how they connect? Well, of course it is as I said above ‘everyday geographies, looking at what different places mean to different people, and what makes them feel they belong, or feel excluded’.

This summer school project 'Diversity, Encounter and Inclusion in the Urban Context' was published in this research article.

Looking back, there were a few interesting insights students gained.

For example, respecting personal boundaries within the creative and participatory research was a key in the ‘dialogic moments’ of ‘Break Out’/ ‘Show Yourself’. A university student talked about respecting personal boundaries: “I honestly found it difficult to talk to the residents of the Noorderbrug about their lives. What can I ask? What can I not ask?”. Besides creating trust, the dialogues and photos were also important for the progress of the project. An art student explained: “Conversations emerge on which we can build a project. A means to get to these conversations are the photos”.

With this project students experienced the complexity that goes with participatory, and interdisciplinary research. According to the students, new and other outcomes occur by co-production. A university student emphasised: “Within an interdisciplinary process, my expectation is now that not every person has the same attitude and way of working, which means that I now start an interdisciplinary process with a broader and more accessible attitude.”

Another university student saw a connection with future jobs because of the complexity and changeability within the project: “It was instructive for me to also go through a process that is not clearly defined. This is because it will probably also be the case in practice. Not everything is clear and pre-set there either.” And one of the art students elaborated: “It was good to learn how to work with different people. People who have completely different perspectives, but also people with a completely different daily life. You don’t often come across these people in your environment and you don’t often work with them, which is why this was a huge opportunity. This project has not only influenced my academic development, but perhaps even more so my development as a person”.

Another student stated: “Where I would have turned my back in the past, I now turn around. As a result, I find it easier to start a conversation with someone with a medical condition and the entire interaction is no longer confrontational”.

Another student stated: “ In the built environment, I have started to see barriers that I had not seen before. I have started to see symbols of inclusion and exclusion and I have started to take them into account myself. My attitude has been influenced both in the design of space during the Urbanism Atelier and in daily life (for example, parking my bike).

For eaxmple, when we worked with the Deep Maps, a student reflected: “At first it was a bit odd having to do actual crafting for a project rather than for instance having to write an essay about a topic. This required a different mindset and it required a lot of creativity. We were given far more freedom for the project than what I was used to.”

And another: “Working on a Deep Map was a completely novel experience for me. Coming from a science and engineering background, the information and methods we use are typically laid out in a very structured and exact way, with little room for creativity. The idea of using the Deep Map to describe half of a story, or half of many stories, to spark interest in the viewer and incentivize them to do research for themselves did not strike me as the most effective way of educating someone at first. While doing research for its contents, however, I already found myself digging into stories much more than necessary, proving its actual effectiveness for myself. Knowing about Deep Mapping, I would definitely use it again to present a similar information structure in the future.”

And finally: “This freedom enabled us to process everything we learned throughout the course and the summer school in our own way. Everyone had different parts of the course / summer school which stuck the most. [...] That is the reason why working on the Deep Map was very engaging overall. Everyone in the team could show what they ‘took away’ and what is most important for them to show.”