Since 2018 I am programme director of the Bachelor Interdisciplinary social sciences at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) The UvA is a quite traditional and also strongly neo-liberal academic institution, with a small educational innovation hub. The Bachelor Interdisciplinary Social Sciences is part of this hub. The Bachelor has as overarching learning goal to prepare students to address complex societal challenges from a social science perspective. It has a student-population of around 800 students, roughly 30 young (mid 30st) tenured staff and 20 so called ‘junior teachers’: recent master graduates on 4 year temporary contracts who teach the seminars. As programme director I am responsible for the curriculum, educational quality and flourishing of the staff.

As associate professor I also direct research programmes. These all focus on urban sustainability transitions. My 6 year doctoral studies in the Southern poor settlements in Lima, Peru, where I conducted action research have formed me professionally. Core elements of the quest for environmental justice, co-creation, systems thinking, community and coalition building and participatory urban development and transdisciplinarity were already present there.

Since 2017 my research focus is on the urban sustainability transition in the Netherlands.

My most important role and challenge is to create room for students and staff to flourish. My ideal with the BA programme is to provide students an education that allows them to explore and find their purpose and societal vocation, the possibility to develop the qualities and skills they need to work on this vocation in a manner that corresponds to their own way of learning. This ideal is in stark contrast with the neoliberal efficiency and command-control philosophy of the university. Creating room for staff to flourish is especially a challenging task for the junior lecturers on the temporary contract.

It is my role to create room and holding space. I also have a role in co-creating the vision, mission and educational practices that support this vision and mission. Here my staff expects a leadership role from me, and needs that.

An equally important role I have as a mother, in creating a similar room for my two sons (16, 18) to find their purpose and vocation, and the next steps on their path to realize their potential.

I have 8 years more to go before my retirement. In these 8 years I hope that this different take on academic education, with a focus on enabling students to contribute to the world from a sense of purpose and vocation, will have become an intrinsic value and characteristic of the programme, alive in both students and staff. Strong enough to survive the managerial and budget storms that constantly hit us.

With my children growing up the role is more and more ‘letting them go, carried by my trust, and being there as resource and companionship when they need me’.

I am not sure whether I understand the word “arena’s” correctly … So two possible answers:
The community of practice Regenerative Education in the Netherlands, of which I am a co-founder, is a very important arena for professional and personal growth for me. As programme director, I have to navigate different levels in the university, This also provides me with very different challenges and thus different arena’s for professional and personal growth. A third arena is my family. Educating children requires constant self-education.

When I translate the question in ‘what do you want/need to develop in yourself to play the role you want to play at be at service of students and staff’ the answer is fourfold.
1. Learning to hold back. Having played many leadership roles for fourty years and having a quite dominant character (a full Aries, with Leo as ascendant) this is far from easy for me. Yet the more I hold back and make room for others to grow, the better it is for students, staff, and the future of the programme.
2. “Learning to dance with the resistance” : especially when I have to deal with ‘middle-aged men with power’ in the organization, I am helpless. I freeze and fight. And I have had quite some achievements with ‘fighting’, but I do not want to fight anymore. What I want to learn is a more playful manner, and by dancing with the resistance also let them experience what energy and joy it generates if you create room for flourishing.
3. I hope to develop imperturbability. The ‘freeze and fight’ modus is a result of the inner turbulence when I meet (unexpected) resistance. In safe situations I am strong in relating and holding space. I am known for being very good and caring with people. But I can only do this when I am anchored in myself. When ‘panicking’ I loose my anchoring and start to fight the situation and the person in front of me.
4. Patience and calm persistence
5. From my perspective as a mother I can only repeat the ‘letting go’ as the biggest challenge and call for personal growth for the years to come.

For me there is no difference between professional and personal growth. I need to grow personally to fulfill my aspired functioning professionally.

There is however a professional skill that I would like to develop: although I have 40 years of experience I still would like to broaden and deepen the arsenal of co-creation forms of work/techniques. I hope this TRP will inspire me to re-design existing forms to more regenerative forms.

Time, commitment, fun, hope, trust, energy, taking initiative… From my 18th until my 35th I have dedicated myself various youth movements, organized many youth camps, conferences etc, and from the same background and spirit worked with youth groups and neighborhoodleaders in the poor settlements in Lima, co-creating parks, schools and summerschools. These years have formed me. Both my BA directorhip and founding the Community of Practice of Regenerative education bring this idealistic, pioneering spirit back into my life, which is a great joy.

Although I have been raised with the practice of meditation, I am not good at it. I have however a strong reflexivity and will to work on myself from a positive spirit. Many consider me too self-critical, but I experience this differently. For me it is so OK and self-evident that there is ‘work to do’, inner schooling needed.

Most important thinkers in my life are Rudolf Steiner and his anthroposophy, and Paolo Freire. In a way they also stand for these two most (trans)formational currents in my life: Waldorf School, anthroposophical youth movement and youth camps on the one hand; and all Latin American influences in my biography. As anthroposophist I feel at home in the Andean cosmology, I recognize so much in the Buen Vivir philosophy.

Both Rudolf Steiner and Freire pre-suppose that each and every human being is born into the world with an innate desire to contribute to the world, and that the human biography should enable the unfolding of this (unconscious) vocation. Rudolf Steiner does this explicitly from the perspective of reincarnation, which for me is a given.
But as important as these giant thinkers are all the people I have taken initiative with, both close friends as sources of resistance. “I become I in the eyes of the other”. I need the eyes of the other to experience who I inwardly am. One of these colleagues/ friends I have worked with closely over the past 8 years is Mieke Lopes Cardozo.

Scientifically I am most inspired by resilience thinking, especially as developed in the resilience alliance, thinking in Social Ecological Systems and System Transition Thinking as developed by i.a. Rotmans, Geel, Grin and Kemp. The latter two are colleagues with whom I have the luck of working on urban sustainability transitions and multiple value creation since 2018.

I am raised as an anthroposophist, and this is still my main spiritual orientation. Therewith there is a spiritual being in each being, being a stone, a mountain, a tree, a wasp or a human being. As world compounded of spiritual beings, we develop in phases, with many threshold experiences and events. This development is not pre-determined: what we do or do not do in our lives has an impact on this development. On this path - as community of spiritual beings - we encounter many countervailing forces. That the evolutionary path is not pre-determined, implies that it also can go wrong...

There are several principles of antroposophy foundational in my life and cosmology of life. The self-evident orientation on the spiritual world (but firmly grounded in daily, practical life), relating to the other as a spiritual being in development from the perspective of reincarnation, as well as being raised in thinking in relationships and living systems (which I consider a tremendous gift) are probably the most important, as well as the positive attitude towards inner development at service of the world.

Despite this, antroposophy is very human-centric. With a strong focus on community building, social life, caring relations, and a very strong sense of responsibility for earth and cosmos, yet human-centric nevertheless. Buen vivir and Andean cosmologies have been important in letting me experience this in my view too antropocentric (and Eurocentric!)
characteristic of antroposophy.

My greatest joy in life however is when I find allies who work from different spiritual backgrounds, but do work from similar principles in the same direction, as I expect to encounter in this course.