Teaching – Arthropology

Teaching CV

Utrecht University – Cultural Anthropology Department – 2020-2023

(Honored with the Teacher of the Year 2023 Award)

Development: Visualizing Differences - Interdisciplinary Master Project (EN)

Coordination and Teaching: Academic Professional - Master (EN)

Lecture: Ethnographic Methods - Master, Premaster & BAchelor (EN)

SCIM Master Thesis Supervision (EN/NL)

SEminar Teacher: Sustainability and Social Contestation - Master (EN)

Seminar TEacher: Energy: Politics, Infrastructure and Change - Master (EN)

Seminar Teacher: Anthropology of Sustainability - Bachelor (EN)

Seminar Teacher: Nationalism and Ethnicity - Bachelor (NL)

Seminar Teacher: Academic Writing - Bachelor (NL)

Positionpaper Supervision - Premaster (EN/NL)

Professional Development Activitities

University Teaching Qualification (2023-2024)

Feedback Training: Supervising Ba- and Ma-theses (2023)

Training for Tutors: Skills for challenging conversations (2022)

Water can be warm, cold or even frozen, it can be salty, it can be clean, or it can be dirty. It can create life, but also destroy it. It is the essence of every living being on this planet. And to me, water is a great metaphor to describe who I am as a university teacher and how I envision education. After my University Teaching Qualification training tutor, came to observe my classroom during the Academic Professional workshop “Career Training” on the 02.06.2023, the first thing she told me during our feedback conversation was the following;

"Je was als een vis in het water."

A Dutch saying that can be translated to «Like a fish to water». The phrase often implies a sense of enjoyment and enthusiasm. It refers to someone doing something very naturally, as if it were an innate skill or ability. Using the metaphor of a fish and water to describe me as a teacher, directly links to my intrinsic motivation for and interest in the anthropological study of human-water relations, which made me become an anthropologist in the first place. I studied human-water relations for my master thesis research, and with the film that I produced afterwards, I was able to inspire many anthropology students throughout my years as a teacher. The study was based on the thought-experiment by the famous anthropologist Tim Ingold (2011), that states “What if instead of land-ing the sea, we try sea-ing the land?” Ingold asked this question to his students during one of his classes that he took outside to the beach. The underlying line of thought process to this question is,

what if we take the fluidity and constantly changing sea and not the fixed and stable ground of the land as our departing point in perceiving and learning about the world? What if we think in possibilities instead of fixed social and educational structures?

As the sea temperatures are rising due to global warming, the fish in the sea need to adapt. The same goes for education. I strongly believe that as a teacher, especially in higher education, we should learn from the past (educational models and theories), but more importantly, proactively engage with the future. Throughout this portfolio, I am going to elaborate why the above sentence was such a big compliment for me and how I believe the metaphor of water can help reflect upon and further develop education.